Neither Belief nor Unbelief

The book re-examines the religious thought and receptions of the Syrian poet Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d.1057) and one of his best known works - Luzūm mā lā yalzam (The Self-Imposed Unnecessity), a collection of poems, which, although widely studied, needs a thorough re-evaluation regarding matters of (un)belief. Given the contradictory nature of al-Maʿarrī’s oeuvre and Luzūm in particular, there have been two major trends in assessing al-Maʿarrī’s religious thought in modern scholarship. One pres