in anyone’s company, saying, “The blind man’s eating is ʿawra (an indecency that ought to be concealed).”
He was, as people relate, exceptionally sharp-witted; yet the many tales and fabricated legends passed around in his name are baseless. One of them claims that he slipped a dirham beneath his bed and then declared, “Either the sky has lowered by a dirham’s breadth or the earth has risen by the same”—that is, he sensed that his couch now stood the thickness of a coin above the ground. (1) This story has no foundation; it is a sheer lie.
They likewise recount that on one of his journeys he came to a certain spot and lowered his head. When asked about it he said, “Is there not a tree here?” They answered no, but on looking closer they found the stump of a tree that had once stood there long ago—he had passed under its branches on a previous visit to that very place before it was cut down. Those who had been with him on that earlier occasion had told him to duck when walking beneath it, and now, the second time he passed, he instinctively bent his head lest something strike him. This anecdote too is unsound; it is fabrication, as are all similar outright lies.
He was intelligent, but he was not pure. He produced many works, most of them verse, and some of his poetry openly bespeaks zandaqa (heresy) and a loosening of religious restraint. Some people attempt to excuse him, saying, “He uttered such lines only in jest and play; inwardly he was a Muslim—he voiced those words merely with his tongue.”
Ibn ʿAqīl said: “What could possibly drive a man living in the Abode of Islam to say things for which people brand him an unbeliever? The hypocrites—despite their paltry learning, intellect, and religion—were more astute than he: they kept their vile beliefs hidden in this world, whereas he flaunted the very disbelief that enabled people to assail him and call him a heretic. Allah knows that what lay within him matched what was outward.”
Ibn al-Jawzī (2) said: “I have seen a book of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ entitled ‘Al-Fuṣūl wa’l-Ghāyāt fī Muʿāraḍat al-Suwar wa’l-Āyāt’ (3), arranged alphabetically at the close of its discourses. It is exceedingly weak and insipid. Glory be to the One who blinded both his physical sight and his inward vision. I have also examined his work called ‘Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam.’”
Ibn al-Jawzī then cited many lines of verse that reveal his irreverence, among them:
If no share of Your provision reaches the rational man,
while You provide for a madman and a fool,
then, O Lord of Heaven, no blame rests on one
who, seeing from You what he detests, turns heretic.
He also quoted:
Far, far indeed is the whole race of mankind astray,
though the discerning eye has seen what has befallen it. (4)