Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri is one of the most fascinating examples of radical thought in medieval intellectual history. A Syrian poet and prose writer of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and a major figure in classical Arabic literature, he developed a body of thought that is extraordinarily difficult to fit into simple categories. His work invites comparisons — necessarily imperfect ones — with thinkers as different as Lucretius, Diogenes, and Schopenhauer.
Some of his intuitions also seem strikingly close to contemporary debates. They can be brought into dialogue with David Benatar’s antinatalism, Julio Cabrera’s negative ethics, David Pearce’s project to abolish suffering, and the suffering-focused ethics developed, among others, by Brian Tomasik and Magnus Vinding.
This is not, of course, to claim that al-Ma’arri subscribed to these modern philosophies, but rather to observe that he formulated remarkably similar problems many centuries earlier.
Skepticism and religion
Al-Ma’arri lived during the late Abbasid period and spent much of his life in Ma’arrat al-Nu’man, near Aleppo. He lost his sight in childhood and later adopted a markedly ascetic way of life. His major works include Luzūm mā lā yalzam, commonly known as the Luzūmiyyāt, and the extraordinary Risālat al-Ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness).
Any account of his relationship with religion requires some caution. His poetry contains fierce attacks on dogmatism, superstition, the uncritical acceptance of tradition, and the social use of religious belief. Yet reconstructing his personal convictions with certainty is difficult, and his work also contains elements that have allowed for less radical interpretations.
It may therefore be more accurate to describe him as a skeptic and freethinker, deeply suspicious of religious authority, than to place him without qualification into modern categories such as “atheist” or “deist.”
One of the most famous lines associated with his thought, transmitted in Reynold A. Nicholson’s translation, captures this attitude with remarkable bluntness:
“The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.”
It is a sentence that could circulate on a social network today with hardly anyone suspecting that it came from a poet born more than a thousand years ago.
An antinatalist intuition
Perhaps no aspect of al-Ma’arri seems as surprisingly modern as his attitude towards procreation.
The inscription associated with his tomb reads:
“This is my father’s crime against me, which I myself committed against none.”
The implication could hardly be darker: being brought into existence is represented as a harm that he chose not to pass on to another person.
It would be anachronistic simply to turn al-Ma’arri into an “antinatalist” in the contemporary philosophical sense. Yet the resemblance to the problem that David Benatar would systematically formulate almost a millennium later is striking: bringing someone into existence is not a morally neutral event, because it imposes upon them a life that will necessarily contain risks, loss, illness, frustration, and suffering.
The distance between the two historical contexts is enormous. The question, however, is disturbingly familiar: do we have the right to decide on someone else’s behalf that beginning to exist is worthwhile?
Animals and nonviolence
His position regarding animals is perhaps even more exceptional.
During the later years of his life, al-Ma’arri adopted a diet that we would now describe as vegan: he rejected not only meat but also products such as milk, eggs, and honey. More importantly, this abstention does not appear to have been merely dietary. His verses explicitly present the exploitation of animals as a moral issue.
In a classic English translation of his poetry, we find:
“Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up, and do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals.”
In the remainder of the poem, he extends the argument to milk intended for offspring, birds’ eggs, and honey produced by bees. The underlying idea is remarkably recognizable to a contemporary reader: human interest does not, by itself, provide sufficient justification for appropriating what other sentient beings produce.
Speaking of “veganism” in the eleventh century inevitably involves applying a modern category. But the ethical resemblance is considerably harder to dismiss as a mere dietary coincidence.
A thinker difficult to classify
There is also a certain historical irony in al-Ma’arri’s fate.
Far from being an insignificant figure, he occupies an important place in the Arabic literary tradition. Outside that tradition, however, he remains far less familiar than many European thinkers with whom meaningful philosophical comparisons can be made. Even today, his ideas retain a considerable capacity to disturb.
During the Syrian war, in 2013, members of the al-Nusra Front beheaded the statue of the poet in his hometown. The episode is especially significant precisely because it occurred almost a thousand years after his death: the intellectual conflicts represented by his figure were still producing material consequences in the present.
Al-Ma’arri, meanwhile, continues to survive in something considerably more difficult to destroy than a statue: his writings.
And those writings are finding new readers today among skeptics, antinatalists, animal advocates, and philosophers concerned with a question that runs through much of his work: what should we do about the existence of suffering?
What would al-Ma’arri think today?
There is one final question that I find particularly interesting.
If al-Ma’arri were alive today, I would like to know what he would think about the possibility of using science and genetic engineering not merely to cure particular diseases, but to intervene in the biological mechanisms that make suffering itself possible.
For most of human history, suffering could be interpreted, fought, accepted, or avoided whenever possible. But we had very little ability to alter the fundamental biological mechanisms that produce it.
That is beginning to change.
Thinkers such as David Pearce have taken this possibility to its most radical conclusion: using biotechnology, neuroscience, and genetic engineering to drastically reduce — and perhaps one day eliminate — forms of intense and involuntary suffering in sentient beings. It remains an enormously speculative project, facing formidable scientific, ecological, and ethical difficulties. But it no longer belongs exclusively to the realm of philosophical imagination.
And this is where al-Ma’arri becomes particularly interesting.
A thousand years ago, he could ask whether it was just to bring new beings into a world in which they would suffer, or whether it was just to make other animals suffer for our benefit.
We can begin to ask a different question:
What if, in addition to trying not to cause suffering, we could modify the biological conditions that make it possible?
