Al-Maʿarrī’s Esteem in the Islamic West: A Preliminary Overview

Abstract

The blind poet and iconoclast Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1058) is one of the most important figures in classical Arabic literature. He had an especially strong following in the Islamic west (Iberia and North Africa). But despite that following, and despite studies on the western response to other eastern Arabic poets, al-Maʿarrī’s legacy has thus far received inadequate attention in scholarship, a fact that obscures a major aspect of his reception. This article helps fill this knowledge gap by exploring al-Maʿarrī’s works that were popular in Iberia and North Africa, as well as responses to those works and the readers who did the responding. The results show rupture in some areas, as in the particular works singled out by Andalusī and Maghribī readers, and continuity in others, as in al-Maʿarrī’s overall reputation. The article concludes with a discussion about al-Maʿarrī’s importance to Arabic literary production in the Islamic west.Abbreviations: EI2 = Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill online, 2012); EI3 = Encyclopedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Evertt Rowson (Leiden: Brill, 2015-2018); BA = La Biblioteca de al-Andalus, ed. Jorge Lirola Delgado, José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, volumes I–VII (Almería: Fundación de Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes, 2004); TQ = Taʿrīf al-qudamāʾ bi-Abī l-ʿAlāʾ, ed. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn et al., (Cairo: Wizārat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUmūmiyyah, 1944, repr. 1965).

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