The Luzumiyat

<p>At the height of the Islamic Golden Age, in the first half of the 11th century, the Arab poet and freethinker <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/abu-al-ala-al-maarri">Abu al-ʻAlaʼ al-Maʻarri</a> touched off an entire literary scene around himself in his hometown of Maʻarra, Syria. With a religious skepticism bordering on atheism, al-Maʻarri attacked the established religious orthodoxy of his day, venturing to criticize Islamic, Christian, and Jewish doctrines alike. Calling himself “thrice-imprisoned” by his blindness, isolation, and physical embodiment, he argued for the ethical position of antinatalism and lived a life of asceticism (becoming in the process one of the first recorded individuals who intentionally lived what contemporary individuals might call a “vegan” lifestyle). These concepts all emerged in his poetry, part of which has survived in a collection known as the <i>Luzumiyat</i> or <i>Unnecessary Necessity</i>, a title referring to a challenging rhyme scheme that he invented and adopted for his quatrains.</p> <p>This Standard Ebooks edition of the <i>Luzumiyat</i> is based on <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ameen-rihani">Ameen Rihani’s</a> translation. Rihani, a notable Syrian-American poet and author in his own right, was one of the first major translators of al-Maʻarri into English. This translation is not a complete translation of the <i>Luzumiyat</i>, which even today is not generally available to the English-reading public, but is a selection of quatrains presented alongside some from an earlier poetry collection, the <i>Saqt az-Zand</i>.</p>