In the year 1021 CE, blind author and skeptic Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 1057 CE) wrote Risālat al-ṣāhil wa-l-shāḥij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule), a winding prose work populated by animal characters who talk about poetry, grammar, riddles, and Syrian society on the eve of the crusades. Traditionally forgotten as a source for al-Maʿarrī’s pacifism, and his vegan worldview, the Ṣāhil lets readers see his thinking on animals more than most other works. After a brief survey of animals in Islam, which shows a mainstream desire for balance between human and non-human needs, as well as exceptional cases that strongly uphold animals as subjects per se and which stand as key inter-texts for al-Maʿarrī, this paper considers how the Ṣāhil champions non-human creatures through images of animal cruelty deployed to shock readers into compassion, and through poetry and popular sayings (amthāl) recast in a zoocentric mold. It, therefore, advocates with more fervor than anthropocentric Islamic writings on animals, such as Kalīlah wa-Dimnah or the letters of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. However, this happens in a way that makes it hard to pin down the sources of al-Maʿarrī’s thought. Furthermore, al-Maʿarrī seems to contradict himself when, for example, he employs literal meaning when it comes to animal justice, even as he avoids literalism in other contexts. This calls his concern for animals into question in one sense, but in another, it affirms such concern insofar as his self-contradictions show an active mind working through animal ethics in real time.
Around the year 411/1021, blind author and controversial freethinker Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (449/1057) wrote Risālat al-ṣāhil wa-l-shāḥij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule), a meandering prose work populated by animal characters who talk about Syrian society on the eve of the crusades. The story exudes a brand of fictionality, namely creative literary exaggeration designed to call forth mental pictures, that sets it apart from other animal texts due to the overwhelming ambiguity it creates. The animal characters suffer existential anxiety when, for instance, they realize that concepts like genus (jins) and species (nawʿ) turn out to be fuzzier than they thought, thereby calling into question whether any species—be it biological or linguistic—is a stable class. Animal ontology gets further confused by just-so stories about hybrids and crossbreeds, and by terms for philosophical contingency that question whether talking animals even exist—this is not just a story that did not happen, but a story that cannot happen except in the imagination. On the other hand, those same philosophical terms may yet affirm that speaking animals could exist, and that they have value in themselves, by hinting at their place in a cosmic order that radiates the goodness of its Source.
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