The Diwan of Abu'l-Ala: Introduction to the Diwan

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This is the scholarly introduction and verse commentary to Henry Baerlein's 1909 English translation of selected poems by the medieval Syrian poet Abu'l-Ala al-Ma'arri (973–1057 CE), a figure the editor places in a lineage just before Omar Khayyam. Baerlein sketches Abu'l-Ala as a remarkable figure — blind, unconventional, skeptical of revealed religion yet sincerely devout, famous for his prodigious memory and his refusal of court laureateship in favor of serving as a village spokesman — while deferring a full biography to a promised future volume. The bulk of the text is an annotated commentary on individual quatrains, using each as a springboard for wide-ranging comparative digressions on Islamic prayer customs, animal sacrifice across cultures, astral worship in Plato, Aristotle, and Islamic rationalism, the Arab lute's journey into European music, and the cross-cultural motif of the soul as bird. Baerlein is candid about the difficulty of bridging Arab and European poetic sensibilities, explaining his deliberate choice to abandon rhyme and quantitative meter in favor of natural English cadence, and to reorder discursive lines into a more linear Western narrative shape. The introduction's distinctive quality is its restless erudition — it moves freely between Ibn Khallikan, Herodotus, Gregory of Tours, and Siberian burial practices — mirroring the very Arab "leap across the universe" style it both critiques and embraces.

The Diwan of Abu'l-Ala: Introduction to the Diwan

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