By Salma Harland

This essay is featured in MPT No.1 2022, The Fingers Of Our Soul: The Bodies Focus.
It accompanies an excerpt in translation from The Unnecessary Necessities, which is free to read in our online archive.

As human beings, we inhabit bodies and we sustain them through food consumption. What we eat to sustain our bodies usually takes on all sorts of meanings, as it becomes closely tied to our sense of identity and culture as well as to how others perceive us. Arguably, this was not much different for tenth-century Arabs who lived during the Middle Abbasid era. For example, al-Maʿarrī (c. 973–1057) was a blind Arab poet and philosopher who eventually adopted an ascetic lifestyle that incorporated a strictly vegan diet, the latter leading him to be regarded as a heretic by his Muslim contemporaries.

Abū al-ʿAlāʾ Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʿarrī, commonly known as al-Maʿarrī, was born in Maʿarat al-Nuʿman, a populous town in the Abbasid Emirate of Aleppo (modern-day Syria). At the age of four, he became blind after contracting smallpox, which left his face permanently scarred. ‘Of all colours, red is the only one I remember’, al-Maʿarrī says, ‘for I wore safflower-dyed garments during my illness. It was the last colour I saw’.¹ Al-Maʿarrī proved to be a gifted child early in his life. By the age of eleven or twelve, he had already mastered poetry before pursuing other fields of knowledge, including linguistics, history, and hermeneutics. In 1007, an eighteen-month visit to Baghdad proved decisive to the way al-Maʿarrī chose to lead most of his adult life. Where the Abbasid cultured elite flaunted their wealth by holding lavish banquets and wearing ornate clothes, al-Maʿarrī took pride in his modest, humble demeanour: ‘Where the benighted flaunt their best garments’, he says, ‘I am content with my common cotton rags’.² Blind, short in stature, and regarded as physically unattractive by his contemporaries,³ al-Maʿarrī was a highly controversial figure amidst the Abbasid elite and literary circles in Baghdad. Despite being a well-versed polymath, he still was not a typical well-rounded ‘refined man’ (ẓarīf).

After he returned to Aleppo, al-Maʿarrī lived a reclusive, ascetic life where he confined himself to his house for more than five decades. In reference to his blindness and self-imposed isolation, he came to be known by his self-made epithet ‘the Double Prisoner’ (rahīn al-maḥbasain). In one of his poems, he says, ‘Ask me not about new tidings, bad as they may be, | for I am herein confined to these three prisons of mine: | My blindness, my self-imposed isolation, | and my soul’s imprisonment in an ugly body’.⁴ Out of moral duty, al-Maʿarrī only wore simple garments and followed a strict diet in which he abstained from all kinds of meat, seafood, eggs, milk, and honey, only to list a few. In The Comprehensive Book of Lives and Deaths (Kitāb al-Wāfī bi-l-Wafiyyāt), Turkic author and historian Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (1296–1363) writes that ‘lentils were [al-Maʿarrī’s] dinner, figs his dessert, cotton his clothing. His bed was made of rough wool and he took papyrus for carpets’.⁵

What is now known and accepted as veganism was considered in al-Maʿarrī’s time an unnecessary or even an unacceptable form of asceticism (zuhd) that comes in conflict with the teachings of Islam, the latter of which actively encourages its followers to consume animal flesh and by-products; seafood; and honey:

O believers! Honour your obligations. All grazing livestock has been made lawful to you . . . Indeed, Allah commands what He wills.⁶

Lawful to you is game from the sea and its food as provision for you and the travellers ⁷

The bees . . . . [t]here emerges from their bellies a drink, varying in colours, in which there is healing for people⁸

Both Muhammad’s sayings (Ḥadīth) and biography (Sīrah) reiterate what appears in the Quran. Muhammad consumed the meat of sheep, goats, camels, cows, chicken, bustard birds, zebras, rabbits, and partridges, as well as seafood and milk. He also prescribed the consumption of honey as medicine on several occasions.⁹

All of this led many of al-Maʿarrī’s contemporaries not only to shun him, but also to go as far as to call him a heretic, an infidel, and a Brahmin. In The Orderly Book on the Histories of Nations and Kings, Arab jurist and historian Ibn al-Jawzī (1116–1201) writes:

[Al-Maʿarrī] did not consume meat, eggs, or milk for over forty-five years; he said harming animals is Haram¹⁰ and he only took plants for sustenance; he wore rough clothes and seemed to fast most of the time. . . . It seems that he might have been a Brahman, for Brahmans do not regard the act of killing animals as permissible, and they reject all the messengers. Men of Knowledge have said he was a heretic and an atheist, which clearly shows in his words and his verse, and that he contradicted the messengers, found fault with the [Abrahamic] religions, and doubted the [existence of] afterlife.¹¹

Almost a millennium later, al-Maʿarrī is still misunderstood and heavily criticised by many Arab and Muslim scholars, which brings to mind al-Maʿarrī’s own words when he says, ‘As if I am a word on the tip of Time’s tongue | laden with far-fetched meanings | That men repeat over and over again | in a vain attempt to understand it!’¹²

Yet, many of al-Maʿarrī’s works, both in verse and prose, have gracefully stood the test of time as some of the most influential in the entire Arabic canon, the most famous being The Tinder Spark (Saqṭ al-Zand), The Unnecessary Necessities (Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam), The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risālat al-Ghufrān), and Paragraphs and Periods (Al-Fuṣūl wa-l-Ghāyāt). The Tinder Spark is al-Maʿarrī’s first known book of poetry, amounting to over three thousand lines. It consists of seventy-four long poems in which he speaks of various notables of Aleppo and librarians of Baghdad as well as his views on life and contemporary politics. Al-Maʿarrī further establishes his controversial views on life and poetry in The Unnecessary Necessities, also known as The Necessities (Al-Luzūmiyyāt), comprising nearly 1,600 short poems – one of which I have translated for this piece. In this book, al-Maʿarrī alludes to numerous things he thought unnecessary for sustaining both life and poetry – hence the title – such as meat consumption and rhyme schemes, to list a few. The Epistle of Forgiveness came as a response to a leer sent to al-Maʿarrī by Arab grammarian and traditionalist Ibn al-Qāriḥ, who said that al-Maʿarrī was as much of a heretic as pre-Islamic poets. In response, al-Maʿarri wrote an intricate fable in rhymed prose in which he goes to Heaven only to find the pre-Islamic poets of Arabia. The Epistle, thus, has been linked to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, with some arguing that the former might have inspired Dante to write his magnum opus. Paragraphs and Periods is yet another work of al-Maʿarrī’s that was considered highly controversial by his contemporaries. In this collection of homilies in rhymed prose, which some (mis)took for a parody of the Quran, al-Maʿarri openly advocates anti-natalism and veganism, thus reiterating and complementing his The Unnecessary Necessities.

Thanks to inserting some orthodox passages in his work, al-Maʿarri successfully managed to evade prosecution, if not crude criticism and ridicule, dying at the old age of eighty-three. To this day, he remains an interesting enigma that still stirs argument and controversy, and whose surviving works superbly unravel the workings of a blind individual, offering unique insights into what it means to be embodied.

1 Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī, The Comprehensive Bookof Lives and Deaths(Kitāb al-Wāfī bi-l-Wafiyyāt), pp. 63–4, my translation.
2 Ibid, p.73, my translation.
3 In his poetry, al-Maʿarī’s spoke in detail of his contemporaries’ view both of his blindness and chickenpox-induced facial scars, where they often said his countenance was an eyesore not suited for elite circles. See The Tinder Spark (Saqṭ al-Zand) and The Necessities (Al-Luzūmiyyāt).
4 Al-Maʿarrī, The Necessities (Al-Luzūmiyyāt), p.213 , my translation.
5 Al-Ṣafadī, ibid, p.78, my translation.
6 The Quran, 5:1.
7 The Quran, 5:96.
8 The Quran, 16:68–9.
9 See Saḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, hadiths 5680–1,5684, and 5716 as well as Saḥīḥ Muslim, hadith 2217.
10 Haram, an Arabic term meaning ‘forbidden’ often used in Islamic contexts.
11 Ibnal-Jawzī,The Orderly Book on the Histories of Nations and Kings (Al-Muntaẓim fī Tārīkh al-ʾUmam wa-l-Mulūk), pp. 22-3, my translation.
12 Al-Maʿarrī, Saqṭ al-Zand,p.198, my translation.