Character guide

Abu al-ʻAlaʼ al-Maʻarri

major

Also known as Abu al-ʻAlaʼ, Abu al-ʻAla, Abu Muhammad Abdallah, Abu’l - Ala, Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn

Al-Maʻarri sits at the center of this collection as its presiding voice — a man whose closed eyes became, in Rihani's image, a doorway to the highest road, and whose verse moves through graveyards, caravans, and starfields with equal ease. He questions whether Mohammed or Messiah holds the whole truth, and answers his own doubt with a restless, unsentimental compassion for the walking dust of humankind. His freedom, won inside a 'thrice-imprisoned' body, sets the terms for every meditation that follows.

Professor D. S. Margoliouth

supporting

Also known as Prof. Margoliouth, Professor Margoliouth, Margoliouth

Margoliouth stands at the threshold of the book, the learned hand that carries al-Maʻarri's Arabic across into English and supplies the context a Western reader needs. His task is delicate: to honor a poet who mocks dogma without reducing him to a curiosity, and to measure the Luzumiyat against the rubaiyat tradition it so often echoes. His commentary shapes how the verses land — as philosophy, as elegy, as a challenge to belief — and gives the reader a companion through the darker passages.

Omar Khayyam

supporting

Also known as Khayyam, Omar, Omar the Tentmaker

Khayyam hovers over the Luzumiyat as a brother-in-doubt, invoked in Rihani's dedicatory poem where the Saki's antique cup passes from one poet's hand to the other. Where al-Maʻarri turns inward through blindness, Khayyam turns outward through the tavern and the starry tent, yet both arrive at the same question: what does the mystery uncover, if anything divine lies hid? Their pairing gives the collection its comparative spine, inviting the reader to hear two voices of medieval Islamic skepticism answering each other across centuries.

Professor Reynold A. Nicholson

minor

Also known as Professor Nicholson, Nicholson

A noted orientalist and translator whose works on Arabic poetry are referenced in the commentary.

Adh-Dhahabi

minor

A medieval historian and biographer cited for his accounts of al-Maʻarri's life.

Von Kremer

minor

A 19th-century scholar whose studies on Arabic literature are referenced in the introduction.

Allah

supporting

Allah is not a character in any narrative sense but a presence the poems continually turn toward and away from, as in the verse that asks how a God who made sun and moon could give all light to one. Al-Maʻarri's address is neither pious submission nor open blasphemy; it is the speech of a mind that refuses to stop asking. That unresolved posture — reverence and rebellion braided together — is what gives the collection its moral pressure and keeps the reader inside the question rather than at its edge.

Fate

supporting

Fate moves through the Luzumiyat as an almost physical antagonist — the moving hand that raises dunes from ancestors, the loom on which Zaqqum's fibre is woven into the tapestry of dreams. Al-Maʻarri does not submit to it; he indicts it, mocking the cycles that make joy and mourning one sound beneath a moaning sky. This quarrel with destiny is the engine of the middle cantos, where the poet's skepticism hardens into something like defiance, and where the reader first feels the full weight of his argument.

The Sultan

minor

A symbolic figure of worldly authority and power critiqued in the poems.

Rabbi

minor

A religious figure mentioned in al-Maʻarri's critiques of organized religion.

Jannat

minor

Also known as the Jannat

A poetic personification of paradise or a beautiful woman in al-Maʻarri's allegories.

Ahmad ibn Abdallah ibn Sulaiman ut-Tanukhi

minor

Also known as Ahmad

A contemporary and correspondent of al-Maʻarri, mentioned in biographical notes.

Heron-Allen

minor

A translator and scholar of Persian poetry, cited in comparative discussions.

Edward Fitzgerald

minor

Also known as Fitzgerald

The English translator of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, frequently compared to al-Maʻarri's work.