Abu al-'Ala` al-Ma'arri (Arabic 'bw l`l lm`ry Abu al-'Ala` al-Ma'arri, full name 'bw l`l 'Hmd bn `bd llh bn slymn ltnwkhy lm`ry Abu al-'Ala` Ahmad ibn 'Abd Allah ibn Sulaiman al-Tanuhi al-Ma'arri; December 973 - May 1057) was a blind Arab philosopher, poet, and writer. Al-Ma'arri held and expressed an irreligious world view which was met with controversy, but in spite of it, he is regarded as one of the greatest classical Arabic poets.

An early collection of his poems appeared as The Tinder Spark (Saqt al-zand; sqT lznd). The collection of poems included praise of notable people of Aleppo and the Hamdanid ruler Sa'd al-Dawla. It gained great popularity and established his reputation as a poet. A few poems in the collection were about armour.  A second, more original collection appeared under the title Unnecessary Necessity (Luzum ma lam yalzam lzwm m l ylzm 'w llzwmyt), also simply Luzumiyat or Necessities. The title refers to how al-Ma'arri saw the business of living and alludes to the unnecessary complexity of the rhyme scheme used.  His third famous work is a work of prose known as The Epistle of Forgiveness (Resalat Al-Ghufran rsl@ lGfrn). The work was written as a direct response to the Arabic poet Ibn al-Qarih, whom al-Ma'arri mocks for his religious views. In this work, the poet visits paradise and meets the Arab poets of the pagan period, contrary to Muslim doctrine which holds that only those who believe in God can find salvation. Because of the aspect of conversing with the deceased in paradise, the Resalat Al-Ghufran has been compared to the Divine Comedy of Dante which came hundreds of years after. The work has also been noted to be similar to Ibn Shuhayd's Risala al-tawabi' wa al-zawabi, though there is no evidence that al-Ma'arri was inspired by Ibn Shahayd nor is there any evidence that Dante was inspired by al-Ma'arri. Algeria reportedly banned The Epistle of Forgiveness from the International Book Fair held in Algiers in 2007.  Paragraphs and Periods (Al-Fusul wa al-ghayat) is a collection of homilies. The work has also been called a parody of the Quran.

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