Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya found little favour with his contemporaries, who seem to have regarded him as a miserly hypocrite. He died, an aged man, in the Caliphate of Ma’mún.561 Von Kremer thinks that he had a truer genius for poetry than Abú Nuwás, an opinion in which I am unable to concur. Both, however, as he points out, are distinctive types of their time. If Abú Nuwás presents an appalling picture of a corrupt and frivolous society devoted to pleasure, we learn from Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya something of the religious feelings and beliefs which pervaded the middle and lower classes, and which led them to take a more earnest and elevated view of life.

With the rapid decline and disintegration of the ‘Abbásid Empire which set in towards the middle of the ninth century, numerous petty dynasties arose, and the hitherto unrivalled splendour of Baghdád was challenged by more than one provincial court. These independent or semi-independent princes were sometimes zealous patrons of learning—it is well known, for example, that a national Persian literature first came into being under the auspices of the Sámánids in Khurásán and the Buwayhids in ‘Iráq—but as a rule the anxious task of maintaining, or the ambition of extending, their power left them small leisure to cultivate letters, even if they wished to do so. None combined the arts of war and peace more brilliantly than the Ḥamdánid Sayfu ’l-Dawla, who in 944 a.d. made himself master of Aleppo, and founded an independent kingdom in Northern Syria.

Sayfu ’l-Dawla's cousin, Abú Firás al-Ḥamdání, was a gallant soldier and a poet of some mark, who if space permitted would receive fuller notice here.563 He, however, though superior to the common herd of court poets, is overshadowed by one who with all his faults—and they are not inconsiderable—made an extraordinary impression upon his contemporaries, and by the commanding influence of his reputation decided what should henceforth be the standard of poetical taste in the Muḥammadan world.

Abu ’l-Ṭayyib Ahmad b. Ḥusayn, known to fame as al-Mutanabbí, was born and bred at Kúfa, where his father Mutanabbí (915-965 a.d.). is said to have been a water-carrier. Following the admirable custom by which young men of promise were sent abroad to complete their education, he studied at Damascus and visited other towns in Syria, but also passed much of his time among the Bedouins, to whom he owed the singular knowledge and mastery of Arabic displayed in his poems. Here he came forward as a prophet (from which circumstance he was afterwards entitled al-Mutanabbí, i.e., 'the pretender to prophecy'), and induced a great multitude to believe in him; but ere long he was captured by Lu’lu’, the governor of Ḥims (Emessa), and thrown into prison. After his release he wandered to and fro chanting the praises of all and sundry, until fortune guided him to the court of Sayfu ’l-Dawla at Aleppo. For nine years (948-957 a.d.) he stood high in the favour of that cultured prince, whose virtues he celebrated in a series of splendid eulogies, and with whom he lived as an intimate friend and comrade in arms. The liberality of Sayfu ’l-Dawla and the ingenious impudence of the poet are well brought out by the following anecdote:—

Mutanabbí was sincerely attached to his generous master, and this feeling inspired a purer and loftier strain than we find in the fulsome panegyrics which he afterwards addressed to the negro Káfúr. He seems to have been occasionally in disgrace, but Sayfu ’l-Dawla could deny nothing to a poet who paid him such magnificent compliments. Nor was he deterred by any false modesty from praising himself: he was fully conscious of his power and, like Arabian bards in general, he bragged about it. Although the verbal legerdemain which is so conspicuous in his poetry cannot be reproduced in another language, the lines translated below may be taken as a favourable and sufficiently characteristic specimen of his style.

Finally an estrangement arose between Mutanabbí and Sayfu ’l-Dawla, in consequence of which he fled to Egypt and attached himself to the Ikhshídite Káfúr. Disappointed in his new patron, a negro who had formerly been a slave, the poet set off for Baghdád, and afterwards visited the court of the Buwayhid ‘Aḍudu ’l-Dawla at Shíráz. While travelling through Babylonia he was attacked and slain by brigands in 965 a.d.

The popularity of Mutanabbí is shown by the numerous commentaries568 and critical treatises on his Díwán. By his countrymen he is generally regarded as one of the greatest of Arabian poets, while not a few would maintain that he ranks absolutely first. Abu ’l-‘Alá al-Ma‘arrí, himself an illustrious poet and man of letters, confessed that he had sometimes wished to alter a word here and there in Mutanabbí's verses, but had never been able to think of any improvement. "As to his poetry," says Ibn Khallikán, "it is perfection." European scholars, with the exception of Von Hammer,569 have been far from sharing this enthusiasm, as may be seen by referring to what has been said on the subject by Reiske,570 De Sacy,571 Bohlen,572 Brockelmann,573 and others. No doubt, according to our canons of taste, Mutanabbí stands immeasurably below the famous Pre-islamic bards, and in a later age must yield the palm to Abú Nuwás and Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya. Lovers of poetry, as the term is understood in Europe, cannot derive much æsthetic pleasure from his writings, but, on the contrary, will be disgusted by the beauties hardly less than by the faults which Arabian critics attribute to him. Admitting, however, that only a born Oriental is able to appreciate Mutanabbí at his full worth, let us try to realise the Oriental point of view and put aside, as far as possible, our preconceptions of what constitutes good poetry and good taste. Fortunately we possess abundant materials for such an attempt in the invaluable work of Tha‘álibí, which has been already mentioned.574 Tha‘álibí (961-1038 a.d.) was nearly contemporary with Mutanabbí. He began to write his Yatíma about thirty years after the poet's death, and while he bears witness to the unrivalled popularity of the Díwán amongst all classes of society, he observes that it was sharply criticised as well as rapturously admired. Tha‘álibí himself claims to hold the balance even. "Now," he says, "I will mention the faults and blemishes which critics have found in the poetry of Mutanabbí; for is there any one whose qualities give entire satisfaction?—

Then I will proceed to speak of his beauties and to set forth in due order the original and incomparable characteristics of his style.

It was deemed of capital importance that the opening couplet (maṭla‘) of a poem should be perfect in form and meaning, and that it should not contain anything likely to offend. Tha‘álibí brings forward many instances in which Mutanabbí has violated this rule by using words of bad omen, such as 'sickness' or 'death,' or technical terms of music and arithmetic which only perplex and irritate the hearer instead of winning his sympathy at the outset. He complains also that Mutanabbí's finest thoughts and images are too often followed by low and trivial ones: "he strings pearls and bricks together" (jama‘a bayna ’l-durrati wa-’l-ájurrati). "While he moulds the most splendid ornament, and threads the loveliest necklace, and weaves the most exquisite stuff of mingled hues, and paces superbly in a garden of roses, suddenly he will throw in a verse or two verses disfigured by far-fetched metaphors, or by obscure language and confused thought, or by extravagant affectation and excessive profundity, or by unbounded and absurd exaggeration, or by vulgar and commonplace diction, or by pedantry and grotesqueness resulting from the use of unfamiliar words." We need not follow Tha‘álibí in his illustration of these and other weaknesses with which he justly reproaches Mutanabbí, since we shall be able to form a better idea of the prevailing taste from those points which he singles out for special praise.

In the first place he calls attention to the poet's skill in handling the customary erotic prelude (nasíb), and particularly to his brilliant descriptions of Bedouin women, which were celebrated all over the East. As an example of this kind he quotes the following piece, which "is chanted in the salons on account of the extreme beauty of its diction, the choiceness of its sentiment, and the perfection of its art":—

The critic then enumerates various beautiful and original features of Mutanabbí's style, e.g.—

1. His consecutive arrangement of similes in brief symmetrical clauses, thus:—

2. The novelty of his comparisons and images, as when he indicates the rapidity with which he returned to his patron and the shortness of his absence in these lines:—

3. The laus duplex or 'two-sided panegyric' (al-madḥ al-muwajjah), which may be compared to a garment having two surfaces of different colours but of equal beauty, as in the following verse addressed to Sayfu ’l-Dawla:—

Here Sayfu ’l-Dawla is doubly eulogised by the mention of his triumphs over his enemies as well as of the joy which all his friends felt in the continuance of his life and fortune.

4. His manner of extolling his royal patron as though he were speaking to a friend and comrade, whereby he raises himself from the position of an ordinary encomiast to the same level with kings.

5. His division of ideas into parallel sentences:—

From this summary of Tha‘álibí's criticism the reader will easily perceive that the chief merits of poetry were then considered to lie in elegant expression, subtle combination of words, fanciful imagery, witty conceits, and a striking use of rhetorical figures. Such, indeed, are the views which prevail to this day throughout the whole Muḥammadan world, and it is unreasonable to denounce them as false simply because they do not square with ours. Who shall decide when nations disagree? If Englishmen rightly claim to be the best judges of Shakespeare, and Italians of Dante, the almost unanimous verdict of Mutanabbí's countrymen is surely not less authoritative—a verdict which places him at the head of all the poets born or made in Islam. And although the peculiar excellences indicated by Tha‘álibí do not appeal to us, there are few poets that leave so distinct an impression of greatness. One might call Mutanabbí the Victor Hugo of the East, for he has the grand style whether he soars to sublimity or sinks to fustian. In the masculine vigour of his verse, in the sweep and splendour of his rhetoric, in the luxuriance and reckless audacity of his imagination we recognise qualities which inspired the oft-quoted lines of the elegist:—

One feature of Mutanabbí's poetry that is praised by Tha‘álibí should not be left unnoticed, namely, his fondness for sententious moralising on topics connected with human life; wherefore Reiske has compared him to Euripides. He is allowed to be a master of that proverbial philosophy in which Orientals delight and which is characteristic of the modern school beginning with Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya, though some of the ancients had already cultivated it with success (cf. the verses of Zuhayr, p. 118 supra). The following examples are among those cited by Bohlen (op. cit., p. 86 sqq.):—

The sceptical and pessimistic tendencies of an age of social decay and political anarchy are unmistakably revealed in the Abu ’l-‘Alá al-Ma‘arrí (973-1057 a.d.). writings of the poet, philosopher, and man of letters, Abu ‘l-‘Alá al-Ma‘arrí, who was born in 973 a.d. at Ma‘arratu ’l-Nu‘mán, a Syrian town situated about twenty miles south of Aleppo on the caravan road to Damascus. While yet a child he had an attack of small-pox, resulting in partial and eventually in complete blindness, but this calamity, fatal as it might seem to literary ambition, was repaired if not entirely made good by his stupendous powers of memory. After being educated at home under the eye of his father, a man of some culture and a meritorious poet, he proceeded to Aleppo, which was still a flourishing centre of the humanities, though it could no longer boast such a brilliant array of poets and scholars as were attracted thither in the palmy days of Sayfu ’l-Dawla. Probably Abu ’l-‘Alá did not enter upon the career of a professional encomiast, to which he seems at first to have inclined: he declares in the preface to his Saqṭu ’l-Zand that he never eulogised any one with the hope of gaining a reward, but only for the sake of practising his skill. On the termination of his 'Wanderjahre' he returned in 993 a.d. to Ma‘arra, where he spent the next fifteen years of his life, with no income beyond a small pension of thirty dínárs (which he shared with a servant), lecturing on Arabic poetry, antiquities, and philology, the subjects to which his youthful studies had been chiefly devoted. During this period his reputation was steadily increasing, and at last, to adapt what Boswell wrote of Dr. Johnson on a similar occasion, "he thought of trying his fortune in Baghdád, the great field of genius and exertion, where talents of every kind had the fullest scope and the highest encouragement." Professor Margoliouth in the Introduction to his edition of Abu ’l-‘Alá's His visit to Baghdád. correspondence supplies many interesting particulars of the literary society at Baghdád in which the poet moved. "As in ancient Rome, so in the great Muḥammadan cities public recitation was the mode whereby men of letters made their talents known to their contemporaries. From very early times it had been customary to employ the mosques for this purpose; and in Abu ’l-‘Alá's time poems were recited in the mosque of al-Manṣúr in Baghdád. Better accommodation was, however, provided by the Mæcenates who took a pride in collecting savants and littérateurs in their houses."580 Such a Mæcenas was the Sharíf al-Raḍí, himself a celebrated poet, who founded the Academy called by his name in imitation, probably, of that founded some years before by Abú Nasr Sábúr b. Ardashír, Vizier to the Buwayhid prince, Bahá’u ’l-Dawla. Here Abu ’l-‘Alá met a number of distinguished writers and scholars who welcomed him as one of themselves. The capital of Islam, thronged with travellers and merchants from all parts of the East, harbouring followers of every creed and sect—Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, Ṣábians and Ṣúfís, Materialists and Rationalists—must have seemed to the provincial almost like a new world. It is certain that Abu ’l-‘Alá, a curious observer who set no bounds to his thirst for knowledge, would make the best use of such an opportunity. The religious and philosophical ideas with which he was now first thrown into contact gradually took root and ripened. His stay in Baghdád, though it lasted only a year and a half (1009-1010 a.d.), decided the whole bent of his mind for the future.

Whether his return to Ma‘arra was hastened, as he says, by want of means and the illness of his mother, whom he tenderly loved, or by an indignity which he suffered at the hands of an influential patron,581 immediately on his arrival he shut himself in his house, adopted a vegetarian diet and other ascetic practices, and passed the rest of his long life in comparative seclusion:—

We can only conjecture the motives which brought about this sudden change of habits and disposition. No doubt his mother's death affected him deeply, and he may have been disappointed by his failure to obtain a permanent footing in the capital. It is not surprising that the blind and lonely man, looking back on his faded youth, should have felt weary of the world and its ways, and found in melancholy contemplation of earthly vanities ever fresh matter for the application and development of these philosophical ideas which, as we have seen, were probably suggested to him by his recent experiences. While in the collection of early poems, entitled Saqṭu ’l-Zand or 'The Spark of the Fire-stick' and mainly composed before his visit to Baghdád, he still treads the customary path of his predecessors,583 his poems written after that time and generally known as the Luzúmiyyát584 arrest attention by their boldness and originality as well as by the sombre and earnest tone which pervades them. This, indeed, is not the view of most Oriental critics, who dislike the poet's irreverence and fail to appreciate the fact that he stood considerably in advance of his age; but in Europe he has received full justice and perhaps higher praise than he deserves. Reiske describes him as 'Arabice callentissimum, vasti, subtilis, sublimis et audacis ingenii';585 Von Hammer, who ranks him as a poet with Abú Tammám, Buḥturí, and Mutanabbí, also mentions him honourably as a philosopher;586 and finally Von Kremer, who made an exhaustive study of the Luzúmiyyát and examined their contents in a masterly essay,587 discovered in Abu ’l-‘Alá, one of the greatest moralists of all time whose profound genius anticipated much that is commonly attributed to the so-called modern spirit of enlightenment. Here Von Kremer's enthusiasm may have carried him too far; for the poet, as Professor Margoliouth says, was unconscious of the value of his suggestions, unable to follow them out, and unable to adhere to them consistently. Although he builded better than he knew, the constructive side of his philosophy was overshadowed by the negative and destructive side, so that his pure and lofty morality leaves but a faint impression which soon dies away in louder, continually recurring voices of doubt and despair.

Abu ’l-‘Alá is a firm monotheist, but his belief in God amounted, as it would seem, to little beyond a conviction that all things are governed by inexorable Fate, whose mysteries none may fathom and from whose omnipotence there is no escape. He denies the Resurrection of the dead, e.g.:—

Since Death is the ultimate goal of mankind, the sage will pray to be delivered as speedily as possible from the miseries of life and refuse to inflict upon others what, by no fault of his own, he is doomed to suffer:—

There are many passages to the same effect, showing that Abu ’l-‘Alá regarded procreation as a sin and universal annihilation as the best hope for humanity. He acted in accordance with his opinions, for he never married, and he is said to have desired that the following verse should be inscribed on his grave:—

Hating the present life and weary of its burdens, yet seeing no happier prospect than that of return to non-existence, Abu ’l-‘Alá can scarcely have disguised from himself what he might shrink openly to avow—that he was at heart, not indeed an atheist, but wholly incredulous of any Divine revelation. Religion, as he conceives it, is a product of the human mind, in which men believe through force of habit and education, never stopping to consider whether it is true.

Religion, then, is "a fable invented by the ancients," worthless except to those unscrupulous persons who prey upon human folly and superstition. Islam is neither better nor worse than any other creed:—

Not only does the poet emphatically reject the proud claim of Islam to possess a monopoly of truth, but he attacks most of its dogmas in detail. As to the Koran, Abu ’l-‘Alá could not altogether refrain from doubting if it was really the Word of God, but he thought so well of the style that he accepted the challenge flung down by Muḥammad and produced a rival work (al-Fuṣúl wa-’l-Gháyát), which appears to have been a somewhat frivolous parody of the sacred volume, though in the author's judgment its inferiority was simply due to the fact that it was not yet polished by the tongues of four centuries of readers. Another work which must have sorely offended orthodox Muḥammadans is the Risálatu ’l-Ghufrán (Epistle of Forgiveness).594 Here the Paradise of the Faithful becomes a glorified salon tenanted by various heathen poets who have been forgiven—hence the title—and received among the Blest. This idea is carried out with much ingenuity and in a spirit of audacious burlesque that reminds us of Lucian. The poets are presented in a series of imaginary conversations with a certain Shaykh ‘Alí b. Manṣúr, to whom the work is addressed, reciting and explaining their verses, quarrelling with one another, and generally behaving as literary Bohemians. The second part contains a number of anecdotes relating to the zindíqs or freethinkers of Islam interspersed with quotations from their poetry and reflections on the nature of their belief, which Abu ’l-‘Alá condemns while expressing a pious hope that they are not so black as they paint themselves. At this time it may have suited him—he was over sixty—to assume the attitude of charitable orthodoxy. Like so many wise men of the East, he practised dissimulation as a fine art—

In the Luzúmiyyát, however, he often unmasks. Thus he describes as idolatrous relics the two Pillars of the Ka‘ba and the Black Stone, venerated by every Moslem, and calls the Pilgrimage itself 'a heathen's journey' (riḥlatu jáhiliyyⁱⁿ). The following sentiments do him honour, but they would have been rank heresy at Mecca:—

It is needless to give further instances of the poet's contempt for the Muḥammadan articles of faith. Considering that he assailed persons as well as principles, and lashed with bitter invective the powerful class of the ‘Ulamá, the clerical and legal representatives of Islam, we may wonder that the accusation of heresy brought against him was never pushed home and had no serious consequences. The question was warmly argued on both sides, and though Abu ’l-‘Alá was pronounced by the majority to be a freethinker and materialist, he did not lack defenders who quoted chapter and verse to prove that he was nothing of the kind. It must be remembered that his works contain no philosophical system; that his opinions have to be gathered from the ideas which he scatters incoherently, and for the most part in guarded language, through a long succession of rhymes; and that this task, already arduous enough, is complicated by the not infrequent occurrence of sentiments which are blamelessly orthodox and entirely contradictory to the rest. A brilliant writer, familiar with Eastern ways of thinking, has observed that in general the conscience of an Asiatic is composed of the following ingredients: (1) an almost bare religious designation; (2) a more or less lively belief in certain doctrines of the creed which he professes; (3) a resolute opposition to many of its doctrines, even if they should be the most essential; (4) a fund of ideas relating to completely alien theories, which occupies more or less room; (5) a constant tendency to get rid of these ideas and theories and to replace the old by new.597 Such phenomena will account for a great deal of logical inconsistency, but we should beware of invoking them too confidently in this case. Abu ’l-‘Alá with his keen intellect and unfanatical temperament was not the man to let himself be mystified. Still lamer is the explanation offered by some Muḥammadan critics, that his thoughts were decided by the necessities of the difficult metre in which he wrote. It is conceivable that he may sometimes have doubted his own doubts and given Islam the benefit, but Von Kremer's conclusion is probably near the truth, namely, that where the poet speaks as a good Moslem, his phrases if they are not purely conventional are introduced of set purpose to foil his pious antagonists or to throw them off the scent. Although he was not without religion in the larger sense of the word, unprejudiced students of the later poems must recognise that from the orthodox standpoint he was justly branded as an infidel. The following translations will serve to illustrate the negative side of his philosophy:—