"Thrice-imprisoned," thou wert e'en as mighty, In the boundless kingdom of the mind, As the whirlwind that compels the ocean, As the thunder that compels the wind.
"Thrice-imprisoned," thou wert freer truly Than the liegeless Arab on his mare,-- Freer than the bearers of the sceptre,-- Freer than the winged lords of the air.
"Thrice-imprisoned," thou hast sung of freedom As but a few of all her heroes can; Thou hast undermined the triple prison Of the mind and heart and soul of man.
In thy fountained peristyles of Reason Glows the light and flame of desert noons; And in the cloister of thy pensive Fancy Wisdom burns the spikenard of her moons.
When Christendom was groping amid the superstitions of the Dark Ages, and the Norsemen were ravaging the western part of Europe, and the princes of Islam were cutting each other's throats in the name of Allah and his Prophet, Abu'l-Ala'l-Ma'arri was waging his bloodless war against the follies and evils of his age. He attacked the superstitions and false traditions of law and religion, proclaiming the supremacy of the mind; he hurled his trenchant invectives at the tyranny, the bigotry, and the quackery of his times, asserting the supremacy of the soul; he held the standard of reason high above that of authority, fighting to the end the battle of the human intellect. An intransigeant with the exquisite mind of a sage and scholar, his weapons were never idle. But he was, above all, a poet; for when he stood before the eternal mystery of Life and Death, he sheathed his sword and murmured a prayer.
Abu'l-Ala'l-Ma'arri, [1] the Lucretius of Islam, the Voltaire of the East, was born in the spring of the year 973 A.D., in the obscure village of Ma'arrah, [2] which is about eighteen hours' journey south of Halab (Aleppo). And instead of Ahmad ibn Abdallah ibn Sulaiman ut-Tanukhi (of the tribe of Tanukh), he was called Abu'l-Ala (the Father of the Sublime), by which patronymic of distinction he is popularly known throughout the Arabic speaking world.
When a boy, Abu'l-Ala was instructed by his father; and subsequently he was sent to Halab, where he pursued his studies under the tutelage of the grammarian Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn us-Sad. His literary proclivity was evinced in his boyhood, and he wrote verse, we are told, before he was ten. Of these juvenile pieces, however, nothing was preserved.