All the World Is Awry

R. Kevin Lacey

Description

Free-thinking poet, grammarian, social critic, and satirist, Abū al-‛Alā' al-Ma‛arrī (973–1057 CE) remains one of the more celebrated and intriguing personalities in the history of Arab Islamic civilization. Although the controversies surrounding his skepticism, cynicism, and anticlericalism have never been completely resolved, his more disquieting writings are commonly available in the Arab world, cited in standard histories of Arabic literature, and the subject of scholarly studies.

Al-Ma‛arrī is universally recognized as a giant among the litterateurs of Islam, deservedly famous for the role that he played in the development of Arabic verse as a more serious vehicle of religious-political thought and social criticism. The centrality attributed to al-Ma‛arrī as innovator has been linked to a strain of inquiry that has been particularly paramount to Westerners: To what extent did al-Ma‛arrī and other unconventional thinkers stray from the course of mainstream Islamic thought?

In this book, R. Kevin Lacey places al-Ma‛arrī within the broader context of Arab Islamic political and intellectual history up to the mid-eleventh century and identifies the coherencies and incoherencies within his overall thought in an effort to determine the extent to which he deviated from his inherited faith. Al-Ma‛arrī and his like were hardly representative, and their imprint on their co-religionists may be questionable, but they must be taken into consideration in order to do full justice to the intellectual history of Islam.
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration

Part I

1. The Man: A Bibliographical Sketch of Abū al-‛Alā' al-Ma‛arrī

2. The Milieu

Part II

3. The Medium: Reading and Interpreting Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam in Light of Its Literary Character

4. The Message

Notes
Principle Works Cited or Consulted
Index

Sujets

• Islam
• Middle East
• History of the Middle East

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479460
• Langue: English

Extrait

All the World Is Awry
All the World Is Awry
Al-Ma‛arrī and the Luzūmiyyāt , Revisited
R. KEVIN LACEY
Cover art: Original watercolor painting of al-Ma‛arrī, by Melissa Coury. Used with permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lacey, R. Kevin, author
Title: All the world is awry / Al-Ma‛arrī and the Luzūmiyyāt, revisited
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479453 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479460 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438479446 (paperback)
Library of Congress Control Number 2020937125
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
PART ONE
One The Man: A Bibliographical Sketch of Abū al-‛Alā’ al-Ma‛arrī
Two The Milieu
PART TWO
Three The Medium: Reading and Interpreting Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam in Light of Its Literary Character
Four The Message
Notes
Principle Works Cited or Consulted
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to a multitude of colleagues and former instructors of good will for helping me find the inspiration and resolve to have this project see the light of day. They are too numerous to name here, but I trust they are gracious enough not to be disquieted by this. In any event, the anonymity will serve to underscore that any infelicities or shortcomings are entirely my own. For extra special camaraderie in recent years, I owe an extra special word of thanks to Ralph and Melissa Coury. Ralph’s scholarship has been extraordinarily helpful and influential. Melissa’s insights have been valuable, and her art an inspiration. She provided the cover artwork. For their patience and understanding, my immediate family—wife, Gladys Maria Varona, and daughters, Alina and Alexa—as well as extended family deserve a heartfelt thank you.
Michael Abdelmessih helped in typing portions of the Arabic. Dr. Tayseer Gomaa helped with proofreading the Arabic, checking all citations, and in many instances drawing attention to enhanced understandings. Members of the Acquisitions Department of SUNY Press, especially directors James Peltz and Donna Dixon and editor Amanda Lanne-Camilli, SUNY Press promotional manager Kate R. Seyburyamo, and senior production editor Eileen Nizer have all been exceedingly patient and attentive in overseeing the final stages of production.
An earlier version of chapter 4, part 4 was published in The Muslim World (January–April 1995).
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
For the most part, the system I followed is that used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies ( IJMES ). The most notable exceptions are (1) ة is represented by “ah” and not “a”; and (2) the elision of vowels preceding the hamzah (ء) that requires elision (همزة الوصل) is not represented with’ and the dropping of the following vowel. Thus, something like فصول والغايات , for example, will be transliterated as al-Fuṣūl wa al-Ghāyāt and not al-Fuṣūl wa’l-Ghāyāt . To give another example, في الشعر becomes fī al-shi‛r and not fi’l-shi‛r . Exceptions are made, however, in the case of citing authors whose approach to transliteration represents the elision preceding همزة الوصل with character’ and the dropping of the following vowel.
In some cases—for example, some technical terms or names of people, places, or book titles—both the Arabic and the English-language transliterations are given, essentially for the sake of assuring clarification.
Book or journal titles in transliterated Arabic follow the more conventional approach in English with respect to capitalization. Thus, all major words in a title are capitalized. Nouns (proper or otherwise) commonly found in English-language sources with standard English-language dictionary renderings (e.g., Baghdad, Mecca, Medina, Iraq) are left in those renderings (meaning first and foremost that they are without diacritics).
With only one or two exceptions, the names of Arabic authors that in English-language sources are commonly known in their Anglicized forms are kept in the Anglicized forms.
PART 1
CHAPTER ONE

The Man
A Bibliographical Sketch of Abū al-‛Alā’ al-Ma‛arrī 1
Abū al-‛Alā’ al-Ma‛arrī/أبو العلاء المعري was born in 973 Common Era (363 Islamic Era) in the small Syrian town of Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān (معرة النعمان), from which is derived his laqab (لقب) or agnomen . The town is situated in northern Syria about 20 miles south of the city of Aleppo. It lies in a semiarid region that is devoid of running water, although with the aid of cisterns and wells the population has long been able to sustain a fairly bountiful agriculture consisting of vineyards, orchards (olives, pistachios, almonds), and fields of wheat and barley. Writing in the fifth century of the Islamic Era, the Persian poet, philosopher, and traveler Nāṣir-i Khusraw (ناصر خسرو), passing through Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān on a trip the principal destinations of which were Mecca and Cairo, could write of having seen the town’s productive agriculture as well as flourishing bazaars:
وبزارهاي او بسيار معمور ديدم … وكشاورزي ايشان همه گندمست وبسياراست ودرخت
انجير وزيتون وبشته وبادام وانگور فراوان است. 2
In the seventh century of the Islamic Era (hereafter IE), the Andalusian traveler and geographer Ibn Jubayr speaks of the town having arable land (سواد) devoted entirely to olive, fig, and pistachio trees, adding that he regarded Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān as “one of God’s most fertile and productive lands” (وهي من أخصب بلاد الله وأكثرها أرزاقاً). “It is a small, lovely city most of whose trees are pistachio and fig” (المعرة مدينة صغيرة أكثر شجرها التين والفستق), wrote the eighth-century (IE) Moroccan geographer Ibn Baṭṭūṭah/ابن بطوطة upon his visit. 3
Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān lies at strategic crossroads running both north and south and east and west. To the south lie the cities of Ḥamāh ‫(‬حماة‫)‬, Ḥimṣ ‫(‬حمص‫)‬, and, finally, Damascus. The road north leads to Antakya (Antioch) and İskenderun in present-day Turkey (الإسكندرونة and أنطاكية respectively in the Arabic). To the west lies Latakia ‫(‬اللاذقية‫)‬ on the Mediterranean, and to the east, the upper reaches of the Euphrates, which allow for riparian access to the heartlands of Iraq, including most notably Baghdad. In al-Ma‛arrī’s time, the area stretching on the south-to-north axis from Ḥamāh through Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān and on to Aleppo was regarded as the locus for the frontier metropolitan strongholds ‫(‬العواصم‫)‬, the first line of defense against Byzantine Christian irredentism directed against Syria both as a valuable possession in and of itself and as an avenue of access to even more valuable territories of the Islamic commonwealth to the south (e.g., Palestine and Egypt). These frontier strongholds were also stepping stones for counteroffensives by organized Muslim armed forces. At the same time, in what amounted to a tripartite geopolitical dismemberment of Syria by rivals, the expansionist Ismā‛īlī Shī‛ī (Fāṭimid persuasion) imām-caliphs in Cairo, and the semiautonomous Ḥamdānid/حمداني princes (who were Shī‛ites but non-Fāṭimid, i.e., probably Ithnā‛asharī) centered in Aleppo, were active in promoting and protecting their own dynastic interests in the area. For the Fāṭimid imām-caliphs, this meant especially the attempt to establish suzerainty over Damascus if not areas to the north as well; for the Ḥāmdānids, this meant control of Aleppo if not as well Ḥamāh and Ḥimṣ and by extension Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān (administratively regarded as falling under the suzerainty of Ḥimṣ or Ḥamāh the latter of which in turn was subject to the oversight of Aleppo). 4 Added to this mix of rivalries were (1) the growing political ambitions of the Banū Kilāb/بنو كلاب, Arab bedouins who had migrated to northern Syria from the Najd in the Arabian peninsula (eventually to establish their own dynasty centered in Aleppo), and (2) the ambitions of one or another slave page ‫(‬غلام‫)‬ or slave soldier ‫(‬مملوك‫)‬ and the troops at their disposal, who were of diverse ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Turkish, Kurdish, and Daylamī) with decidedly fluid loyalties.
All of these factors gave Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān in the tenth and eleventh centuries of the Common Era a geopolitical importance most disproportionate to the town’s size, an importance that was arguably its most remarkable feature. It lay in the way of the approach to Aleppo by invading forces moving on the city from south to north and in the way of the approach to Damascus by invading forces moving on the city from north to south. Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān was close enough to Aleppo to be considered key to its defense. Several armed expeditions of the period, whether on behalf of a major or minor dynasty or a strongman with his own narrower interests at heart, laid siege to the town with the aim of taking it over permanently or occupying it merely as a temporary base from which to regroup in the midst of wider conflicts. (Specific examples of both cases, as well as the larger, more comprehensive political picture of which they were a part, will be given in chapter 2 of this study.)
In verses in his dīwān (collection) of poetry entitled Saqṭ al-Zand (سقط الزند) ( The Spark of the Fire Drill ), probably inspired while away from Ma‛arrat al-Nu‛mān during his trip to Baghdad (undertaken in his late twenties), al-Ma‛arrī co