The Epistle of Forgiveness. Abu l-'Ala al-Ma'arri

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СКАЧАТЬ There is a problem with this interpretation, because al-Maʿarrī is speaking of his own heart in this preamble, not that of Ibn al-Qāriḥ;³⁰ but in any case the ambiguous and punning diction seems to suggest that the fulsome praise is not to be taken at face value: al-Maʿarrī’s epistle is steeped in sardonic irony, even though it is not always clear when he is being ironic.

      When Abū l-ʿAlāʾ extols the qualities of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter, his irony takes a different direction. He imagines that this letter will help the writer to secure God’s favor and forgiveness. Taking the theme of forgiveness as his starting point and as a leitmotiv for his text, he then embarks on a lengthy and extraordinary flight of fancy, which takes all of Part One of his Epistle. He imagines that on the Day of Resurrection, at the end of the world, Ibn al-Qāriḥ is revived like all mortal beings. He is admitted to Paradise, but not without difficulty. He has to cope, even at the Last Day, with what one could call the hardships of bureaucracy: one cannot be admitted without a document stating one’s true repentance of sins. Unfortunately, the Sheikh (as Ibn al-Qāriḥ is often called) has lost this crucial document amidst the hustle and bustle and he must find someone to testify for him. When at last he has taken this hurdle and someone has duly attested that Ibn al-Qāriḥ showed true repentance in the nick of time, he still needs the intercession of the Prophet and the help of the latter’s daughter and son. Having arrived in Paradise, after crossing the narrow Bridging Path in a rather undignified manner, riding piggyback on a helpful girl, he decides to go on an excursion. He meets with poets and grammarians—he is, after all, himself a grammarian with a great knowledge of poetry—and asks them how they have been able to attain eternal bliss. Some poets died before the coming of Islam; others composed verses of a dubious, irreligious nature, and one may wonder why they have been forgiven. The conversations are often about points of morphology, syntax, lexicography, and matters of versification, such as irregularities of meter and rhyme; in general, the Sheikh’s interest is keener than that of the poets themselves, many of whom have forgotten, on account of the terrors of the Last Day, what they produced in the “Fleeting World.”

      The blessings and pleasures of Paradise are also described: the quality of the wine, at last permitted, and hangover-free; the food (a banquet is depicted), and the heavenly singing of beautiful damsels. Ibn al-Qāriḥ meets some ravishing girls who tell him that they were ugly but pious on earth and have been rewarded. Not all paradisial females had a worldly pre-existence: other black-eyed beauties emerge from fruits that can be plucked from a tree; Ibn al-Qāriḥ acquires his personal houri in this manner. Before settling with her he leaves for another excursion. He visits the part of Heaven reserved for the jinn or demons (for some of them are believing Muslims). There he meets the extraordinary demon called Abū Hadrash, who boasts in long poems of his devious exploits, but who has been forgiven because of his repentance. Then the Sheikh heads for the spot where there is (as the Qurʾan states) a kind of peephole, through which one can look into Hell and gloat. Our Sheikh converses with poets who have been consigned to Hell for various reasons; he pesters them with queries about their poetry, but mostly meets with a less than enthusiastic response. He also talks to the Devil, who in turn asks him some perplexing questions about Paradise. On his way back the Sheikh visits yet another region: the relatively dusky and lowly Paradise of the rajaz poets, rajaz being an old and rather simple meter that is deemed inferior. Finally he rests, seated on a couch, carried by damsels and immortal youths, surrounded by fruit trees, the fruits of which move toward his mouth of their own accord.

      This concludes Part One of the Epistle of Forgiveness. The author admits that he has been rather prolix and says, “Now we shall turn to a reply to the letter.” This he does in Part Two, which is a point-by-point discussion of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle. The bulk of this part is devoted to the various heretics and schismatics mentioned by Ibn al-Qāriḥ, after which al-Maʿarrī turns to the Sheikh’s “repentance” and other matters. He concludes by apologizing for the delay in replying. This second part will appear in a second volume in the Library of Arabic Literature. The first part can be read on its own; indeed, most existing translations do not even contain the second part.

Yet the two parts hang together. Al-Maʿarrī’s irony is present on a deeper level. There are strong indications³¹ that the true purpose of his Epistle is to enjoin Ibn al-Qāriḥ to repent of his insolent and ungrateful behavior toward a former patron, of his self-confessed self-indulging in the past, of his hypocrisy in his own Epistle, of his sometimes tactless and self-righteous condemnation of poets and heretics, and of being generally obsessed with himself. The fictional Ibn al-Qāriḥ, in al-Ghufrān, only acquires forgiveness and reaches Paradise with much difficulty; it turns out that he only truly repented of his sins at the last moment: it may still happen in reality, implies al-Maʿarrī, if God wills. He also implies, therefore, that in his view Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s own letter does not amount to true repentance. He mocks Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s obsession with himself and his own profession (grammar and poetry) by imagining him in Paradise as being interested only in poets and philologists; even when he meets others, such as Adam, Abū Hadrash the jinn, or the devil, the conversation is mostly about poetry. Part One is therefore an elaborate and extremely lengthy introduction to the proper reply to the original letter. In Part Two several points reappear, such as the importance of true repentance. The fictional Ibn al-Qāriḥ had seen the poet Bashshār in Hell, but al-Maʿarrī says in Part Two that he will not categorically say that Bashshār’s destination will be Hell; God is merciful and kind.

While Risālat al-Ghufrān did not receive as much attention from pre-modern authors as his al-Fuṣūl wa-l-ghāyāt or the poems of Luzūm mā lā yalzam, it met with some mixed criticism. A note by al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) encapsulates it all: “It contains Mazdakism (mazdakah) and irreverence (istikhfāf); there is much erudition (adab) in it.”³² Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s imagined experiences in Heaven (with glimpses of Hell) as told by al-Maʿarrī form an interesting kind of fiction. Overt fiction was often frowned upon in pre-modern Arab literary culture; hence, for instance, the condemnation of fairytales and fantastic stories such as are found in The Thousand and One Nights. But al-Maʿarrī did not pretend that his fantasies about his correspondent actually happened: the events are set in the future and the Arabic present tense (which can refer to the future, for events that will or merely might happen) is used consistently, rather than the perfect tense normally employed in narrative texts. If he cannot be accused of writing fictions or lies, one might think that his apparently irreverent descriptions of Paradise border on the blasphemous. There can, in fact, be no doubt that he is mocking popular and pious beliefs about the hereafter; after all, he himself frequently questioned the reality of bodily resurrection, one of the central dogmas of orthodox Islam. Yet he does not introduce anything in his descriptions of Paradise and Hell that has not been, or could not be, imagined or written by pious Muslims. As is well known, Qurʾanic descriptions of the Last Day and the Last Things (Heaven and Hell) are vivid and full of concrete images; popular pious literature greatly expanded and elaborated the Qurʾanic images, turning Paradise into a Land of Cockayne, where birds fly around asking to be consumed, not unlike the peacock and the goose in the Epistle of Forgiveness that are instantly marinated or roasted as desired, and are then revived again. The Qurʾan (56:20–21), after all, promises the believers “whatever fruit they choose and whatever fowl they desire.”

Eschatological tourism is known from several literatures, notably through Dante’s Divine Comedy. That the latter was inspired partly by al-Maʿarrī was a hypothesis put forward by several scholars, notably Miguel Asín Palacios, and eagerly embraced, naturally, by some Arab scholars such as Kāmil Kaylānī, whose abridged edition of Risālat al-Ghufrān also contains a summary of Dante in Arabic, and who provides Part One of al-Ghufrān with the subtitle Kūmīdiyā ilāhiyyah masraḥuhā l-jannah wa-l-nār, “A Divine Comedy, Staged in Paradise and Hell.”³³ One Arab writer even argued that Dante, having stolen al-Maʿarrī’s ideas, produced a greatly inferior work, in which he should have made al-Maʿarrī his guide rather than Virgil.³⁴ The hypothesis that Dante was influenced by al-Maʿarrī has now been largely abandoned; if there is an Islamic root to Dante’s Commedia, СКАЧАТЬ