For thirty years he remained a vegetarian, living the life of an ascetic.14 This mode of living led his enemies to accuse him of renouncing Islam and embracing Brahminism, one of the tenets of which forbids the slaughter of animals. The accusation was rather sustained by the dispassionate attitude he held towards it, and, furthermore, by his vehement denunciation of the barbarous practice of killing animals for food or for sport.
Most of the censors of Abu al-ʻAlaʼ were either spurred to their task by bigotry or animated by jealousy and ignorance. They held him up to ridicule and opprobrium, and such epithets as heretic, atheist, renegade, etc., were freely applied. But he was supremely indifferent to them all,15 and never would he cross swords with any particular individual; he attacked the false doctrines they were teaching, turning a deaf ear to the virulent vituperations they hurled upon him. I fail to find in the three volumes of his poems, even in the Letters, one acrimonious line savoring of personality.
Ibn-Khillikan, the Plutarch of Arabia, who is cautious and guarded in his statements, speaking of Abu al-ʻAlaʼ, truly says:
“His asceticism, his deep sense of right and wrong, his powerful intellect, his prodigious memory, and his wide range of learning, are alike acknowledged by both friend and foe.”
His pessimism was natural, in part hereditary. The man was nothing if not genuine and sincere. Ruthlessly he said what he thought and felt. He had no secrets to hide from the world, no thoughts which he dared not express. His soul was as open as Nature; his mind was the polished mirror of his age.16 It may be that had he not been blind-stricken and had not smallpox disfigured his features, he might have found a palliative in human society. His pessimism might not have been cured, but it might have been rendered at least enticing. Good-fellowship might have robbed it of its sting. Nor is his strong aversion to marriage, in view of these facts, surprising.
He lived to know that “his fame spread from the sequestered village of Maʻarra to the utmost confines of the Arabic speaking world.” In the spring of 1055 AD he died, and was buried in a garden surrounding his home. Adh-Dhahabi states that there were present at his grave eighty poets, and that the Koran was read there two hundred times in a fortnight. Eighty poets in the small town of Maʻarra sounds incredible. But we must bear in mind that almost everyone who studies the Arabic grammar has also to study prosody and versification and thus become at least a rhymster. Even today, the death of a noted person among the Arabs, is always an occasion for the display of much eloquence and tears, both in prose and verse.
Abu al-ʻAlaʼ, beside being a poet and scholar of the first rank, was also one of the foremost thinkers of his age. Very little is said of his teachings, his characteristics, his many-sided intellect, in the biographies I have read. The fact that he was a liberal thinker, a trenchant writer—free, candid, downright, independent, skeptical withal—answers for the neglect on the part of Mohammedan doctors, who, when they do discuss him, try to conceal from the world what his poems unquestionably reveal. I am speaking, of course, of the neglect after his death. For during his lifetime he was much honored, as I have shown, and many distinguished travellers came especially to Maʻarra to see him. He was also often called upon to act as intercessor with the Emirs for the natives of his village.17
The larger collection of his poems, the Luzumiyat,18 was published in Cairo, in two volumes, by Azeez Zind, from an original MS. written in the twelfth century, under Abu al-ʻAla’s own title Luzum ma la Yalzam, or the Necessity of What Is Unnecessary. This title refers to the special system of rhyming which the poet adopted. And the poems, published in desultory fashion, were written, it seems, at different periods of his life, and are arranged according to his particular alphabetical system of rhyming. They bear no titles except, “And he also says, rhyming with so-and-so,” whatever the consonant and vowel may be. In his Preface to the Luzumiyat he says:
“It happened that I composed these poems during the past years, and in them I have always aimed at the truth. They are certainly free from the blandishments of exaggeration. And while some of them are written in glorification of God, who is above such glory, others are, as it were, a reminder to those who forget, a pinch to those who sleep, and a warning to the children of the earth against the wiles of the great world, where human rights and human gratitude are often strangled by the same hand of Fate.”
As for the translation of these chosen quatrains, let me say at the outset that it is almost impossible to adhere to the letter thereof and convey the meaning without being insipid, dull, and at times even ridiculous. There being no affinity between the Arabic and the English, their standards of art and beauty widely differ, and in the process of transformation the outer garment at times must necessarily be doffed. I have always adhered to the spirit, however, preserving the native imagery where it was not too clannish or grotesque. I have added nothing that was foreign to the ruling idea, nor have I omitted anything that
