You are my body, in your final hour, the angel of faith is turned to me.
Welcome to The Vegan Report.
My name is Ryan and what you are listening to right now is a chorus interpretation of
a poem written by the first vegan who walked the earth, Abu Al-Ala Al-Ma'ari.
The poem written during the medieval era goes like this.
Don't take mother's milk, this whole yon comes, not within a measure.
The thing in my body's got no use.
The beast didn't make it just to give us no pain.
In today's episode, I invite you to discover the extraordinary life of a genius who was
thinking of animal ethics long before we were born, a legend who I want to commemorate and
from whom I want to draw insight and inspiration in our current fight for animal rights.
To discuss this topic, I have with me Dr. Kevin Blackinship, the scholar on the life
of Al-Ma'ari.
He is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Brigham Young University and is currently
writing Still No More from Nature, Al-Ma'ari and Animal Ethics in Classical Arabic Literature,
a book I am looking forward to reading.
Thank you so much, Kevin, for being here and for having accepted my invitation.
Thanks for having me on.
My first question for you is about the historical and cultural context in which Al-Ma'ari lived.
I want to know what is exactly the Islamic Golden Age and why did Al-Ma'ari live during
the Islamic Golden Age, but we think of it as the Dark Ages from a Western perspective.
And most importantly, I want to know how animals were perceived and treated back in the days.
Thanks for this.
It's a good question.
A lot of people would say that we need to put the Islamic Golden Age in scare quotes
because there were a lot of things that came out of it that stayed on in future epochs
as cultural standards, which became widespread throughout the Islamic world.
However, there's been more recent scholarly pushback against the idea that this period
that we're talking about, the Abbasid period specifically, which ranges more or less between
the mid-eighth century to the mid-thirteenth century, and people might debate that periodization.
But the reason it's called the Golden Age is because so much of the literature, the
thought and cultural and governmental practices that were established at this time, that were
produced during this time, spread throughout the Islamic world in later centuries and became
the standard even as the political power of the Abbasid dynasty waned, especially after
the tenth century.
And this was the context in which Al-Mahri was born.
He was born into a Muslim polity that was more fractured than it had ever been.
There were three rival caliphates, people within the Islamic civilization.
The caliphate is supposed to be one ruler and one government for the entire Muslim community,
the entire Muslim world.
And at this point, there were three claimants to that power.
There were the Abbasids at Baghdad, which is sort of the Golden Age dynasty and era
that we typically think of at this time.
There were the Umayyads in southern Spain at Cordoba, and then the Fultimids in North
Africa, who established their capital at Cairo in 973.
And then between these three centers of gravity, these three caliphates, there were a number
of smaller states that represented spheres of influence.
So for example, there were the Ghaznavids in parts of modern-day Iran and Afghanistan,
the Taifa kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula.
And Al-Mahri was born into one of these in-between states, the Hamdanids, a dynasty that flourished
in Aleppo, which was back then Aleppo and is still today Aleppo in northern Syria.
And all of these different dynasties, all of these different polities had patrons of
literature, of the arts, of thought and other things.
And so Al-Mahri benefited from that.
At the same time, he was, he held himself apart from any one of these dynasties.
He didn't take a job as a court poet.
In fact, he was offered one such job by the Fultimids at Cairo, and he turned it down
for different reasons.
So again, there was a flourishing of art and literature and thought and other things during
this time period, which is why we call it the Golden Age.
And in terms of literature, which Al-Mahri is a part of that tradition, the models that
were produced in this Islamic Golden Age became, or the literature that was produced in this
Golden Age, so on, quote unquote, Golden Age, became models thereafter for subsequent poets,
thinkers, essayists, and others.
So this is why we think of it as a Golden Age.
You also talked about how animals were treated.
Basically, the mainstream practice of animal husbandry, of animal slaughter preparation
was designed within Islam to be humane to animals.
At the same time, starting with the Quran, which according to the traditional Muslim
narrative and scholarship bears out this early provenance for the Quran, began in the mid-7th
century or thereabouts, or early 7th century, establishes the idea that animals were created
by God for human use.
And so this has been the mainstream and at the time also was the mainstream.
And anything that strayed from that would have been considered more extreme.
So anyone who thought that...
People avoided harm to animals as much as possible, but not if it bumped up against human interests.
Maslaha is the word in Arabic.
And so insofar as you had to weigh in any given situation between human rights versus
animal rights, animal rights to use of animal products kind of won out with the same idea
though that at the same time, the idea that animals should be treated fairly and with
respect as much as possible.
I want to go back to the question of the context.
You gave us like a wide context of that time and the different caliphate, empires, and
the spheres of influence.
But from the perspective of Al-Mahri, from his level, from his micro level, in what kind
of family was he born?
Elites, cultural elites specifically, notables and judges and poets.
His grandfather Sulaiman ibn Ahmad was the chief judge of Ma'arat al-Nu'man, which is
the city where Al-Mahri grew up.
And for those who don't know Arabic, you can tell, you can even hear the word Al-Mahri,
his name, comes from where he grew up, Ma'arat al-Nu'man.
So this is 70 kilometers southeast of what is today Aleppo.
I'm sorry, southwest of Aleppo in northern Syria.
So and his Ma'ari's first teacher was his father.
And we know this from one of two very moving elegies that Al-Mahri wrote for his father
after his father passed away at the beginning of the 11th century.
So this means that Al-Mahri had sort of elite cultural training.
He would have studied, you know, a typical medieval Muslim curriculum, if you want to
think of it that way, Quran, Arabic language, including grammar, Islamic law, some philosophy
and other things.
And in fact, in his writings, Al-Mahri likes to play on these things.
He seems specifically comfortable with law, which there were several lawyers and jurists
in his family.
So it makes sense that he would have drawn on that.
And in terms of his daily life, you know, again, it would have been steeped in reading
and study.
He showed a very early capacity for language and early talent for poetry.
And so, you know, one story that's told about that is that Al-Mahri once sat with a transmitter
of the poetry of sort of the greatest poet to come out of this era and who many Arabs
would say is the greatest poet ever in Arabic, Al-Mutanabbi, the would-be prophet, a provocative
name in and of itself.
But this transmitter of Al-Mutanabbi's poetry.
Al-Mutanabbi had a great influence on Al-Mahri.
So this transmitter was named Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Sa'd.
And one day Al-Mahri was sitting with this Muhammad and reading Al-Mutanabbi's poetry
under Muhammad's supervision.
And Mahri at one point corrected his teacher's reading.
And then they compared the passage in question and it turns out that Al-Mahri's reading
was justified, was the correct one.
And if we take this to be true, then it means that first of all, again, Al-Mutanabbi had
a major, his poetry had a major impact on Al-Mahri.
Another proof of that is Al-Mahri wrote not one, but two commentaries on Al-Mutanabbi's
poetry later in Al-Mahri's career.
And then also that this shows Al-Mahri's early talent for language and poetry.
So this is, you know, gives sort of a flavor of what his life would have been like.
And it continued like this until, you know, his early 20s or mid 20s even.
I want to ask about how he became blind and the health problems he went through.
But first, I really want to highlight the importance of literary culture for the Arabs
of that time.
Because you know, nowadays, if someone says, you know, I'm going to become a poet, it's
not really something you would celebrate if your son or daughter wanted to become a poet.
Lamentably, some might argue, lamentably.
But at the time, being a poet was something very important, incredibly so.
And first of all, was it only accessible to elite families?
And also, can you talk more about, you know, why it was that important?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I should say that poetry, you're absolutely right, Rayyan, was, but also continues to
be sort of the prestige art form of the Arabs in particular.
And then all those languages and cultures that the Arabs influenced, including Persian,
Turkish, Urdu, and other languages like this.
So the idea is that, you know, language itself, and this idea comes up with the Quran as well,
that the Quran, you know, Muslims would not say and pretty much anyone wouldn't say that
the Quran is not poetry, it's not the same thing.
However, it does indicate the primacy of language for Arabic speakers.
And I'm also aware that this is how Chinese people feel about Chinese, that they take
great pride in the beauty and difficulty of their language and how long it takes to master.
And they reverence people who have mastered it.
So and the same is true of Arabic and of Arabs.
So and poetry, you know, in pre-Islamic times was seen as a way to, it was seen as kind
of like propaganda.
And that's kind of a cheap term, you know, propaganda is not really a high art form,
as we think of it today, but it certainly was at the time.
Propaganda in the sense of championing your own tribe, of insulting your enemies, and
even of starting wars.
So there are many, you know, like the War of Basus, for example, supposedly started
because of, you know, an exchange of insult poetry.
And there are many other examples like this.
So words had consequences and still do even.
And you're right that, you know, being a poet, it's funny because there are many texts where
poets complain about their poverty.
And that's certainly true, you know, in the history of Arab Islamic civilization that
like poetry doesn't really pay well.
However, for those few people who made it through to the plum positions at court, they
could be real rock stars.
And I would compare it to being like a rock star.
So very few or a Hollywood movie star, very few people actually make it through to that
point.
But for those who do, the riches of the world are at their feet.
So and this is the same way you might think about this with poetry in medieval Islamic
civilization.
So for someone like Ma'ari, and this has to do with sort of his ambitions and part of
his life, he took a trip to Baghdad when early in his career.
And most likely he did this because he had ambitions to be a famous poet.
And I can talk more about that if you want in a second.
But in terms of the overall importance of literature and culture, at this time, as I
mentioned, politically, but also economically, things were decentralizing.
And what this meant is that markets were opening up for poets, but also essayists.
So like the great essayist of the Abbasid era is Al-Jahid.
Google eyes is what his name means because supposedly he had big brown eyes.
And so for someone like him, you asked also if literature poetry was only available to
elite families.
Supposedly Al-Jahid was poor and learned his craft of writing, of essay writing, just by
hanging around in mosques and listening to learned people talk.
Poets of means would send their children who had aspirations to be poets into the desert
to study with Bedouin tribes.
And supposedly this is the case because they thought that the Bedouin, because they weren't
mixing linguistically with other people, especially urban people, that their Arabic was the purest
form of Arabic.
And so they would send their would be poets to study with them.
In fact, today, I was just talking with a friend who lives in Jordan, is married to,
he's not Jordanian, but his wife is Jordanian and comes from one of the tribes.
And she herself illustrates this.
She doesn't have much education.
She has like a ninth grade level education.
And yet she knows all these obscure words and these ways to describe things that average
urban Jordanians don't, according to this friend of mine.
So there may be something to this practice that medieval Arabs did of sending their poets
to study with the Bedouin.
Anyway, the stakes were high for, again, for those who could make it through and get a
position at court.
But those positions were fickle, partly because rulers themselves can be fickle and partly
also because the winds of political change blow this way and that.
And after a time, a dynasty might fall, a patron might lose favor.
And so for this reason, they could be in stable and volatile positions again, just like Hollywood
or rock stars today.
So Al-Mahdi was like famous even during his time.
He was.
And we know this partly because for one reason that, so pardon me, his Al-Mahdi's works
include two collections of poetry.
In Arabic, a collection of poetry is called a diwan.
So I'll use that term throughout this just for the sake of those who might not be familiar
with these terms.
So Al-Mahdi had two diwans, two collections of poetry.
And his first diwan was called Saqt Az-Zend, which means the first tinder spark and consists
mainly of praise poetry to patrons, which indicates his early ambitions to be a court
poet, someone who sold his poetry for money, an idea that he later rejects.
And this is part of his renunciationism, something in Arabic called zuhd, which goes along with
his ideas about animals and veganism.
But anyway, his early praise poetry, there's also an interesting collection at the end
of several poems describing armor and even personifying armor, making it talk and have
dialogues and things like that.
Anyway, this early collection of poetry by Al-Mahdi was used as a teaching text, like
for other people who wanted to be poets and as a model for aspiring poets.
There are dozens and dozens of manuscripts of this work throughout the Arab world, which
I personally have seen.
And then those that I haven't seen other people have written about.
So it was widely copied.
And again, it was widely used to give people sort of a poetry education for those who wanted
to write poetry.
And again, this started even within his lifetime.
He's widely cited.
His works are widely copied.
And very quickly, he became sort of a canonized author and he continues to be that way today.
School children still study Al-Mahdi in the Middle East.
And in that sense, he kind of has, for someone like me who is writing a book about this person,
it's kind of like for native speakers of Arabic or for Muslims from the Islamic world, writing
about Al-Mahdi would kind of be like writing about, in a United States context, Charles
Dickens or Robert Frost, someone who you read their poetry in middle school or high school
growing up and then adults don't bother with them anymore.
It's kind of like, yeah, I'm done with that.
I read what I needed to of Dickens and Frost to sort of get my education.
But it's still within the DNA of education within the Middle East, which is interesting
in part because of Al-Mahdi's reputation for being an alleged heretic against Islam.
And at the very least, a free thinker and someone who had heterodox opinions about religion.
Actually, I mentioned to my parents who were schooled in North Africa that I was going
to record a podcast on Al-Mahdi.
And they said, Al-Mahdi, we know Al-Mahdi.
We learned about him in school when we were kids.
And then they said, why are you doing a podcast about him?
Your podcast is about veganism.
And I said, he's the first vegan, the first vegan who ever lived.
And they were shocked.
They were surprised.
And when I showed them some of his poetry and words about Islam and society and his
heretical views, they were also surprised and shocked.
So why is it the case that he's taught in school, even though his views that took so
much importance in his life are not understood, taught?
There's no knowledge of him being vegan or a heretic or anything like that.
How do you square the fact that he was that famous and still is, but at the same time,
he's that controversial, but nobody knows about the controversial part is kind of mind
boggling.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Especially because his fame rests on so and Mahdi's fame rests on two works, one particularly
that's well known in the West and one that's well known and well studied in the Middle
East and the Islamic world.
The one that's best known in the West is called the Epistle of Forgiveness, Risalat
al-Ghufron.
And this is, as one scholar put it, a work of eschatological tourism, meaning a journey
through heaven and hell in which the main protagonist, an old codger, grammarian, who
El Madri is actually making fun of by writing this work, meets various poets and they have
discussions about heresy, but also language, grammar, prosody, meter and poetry and things
like that, philosophy and many other things.
There's literary criticism, et cetera.
So it's a wide ranging work and it doesn't just have to do with this protagonist, this
grammarian, he meets Satan, he meets other figures.
But for a time it was thought that this work had influenced Dante's Divine Comedy.
So there's no hard and fast evidence of that.
For a time scholarship tried to find the smoking gun and they didn't find it.
There's no direct link, even that Dante had a copy of Risalat al-Ghufron on his shelves.
And most likely the connection is that there are other sort of like eschatological, you
know, up and down the scale travel narratives like this through the afterlife in Greek and
Hebrew.
And so from one of those, Dante probably would have taken maybe a Neo-Platonic work like
this and El Mari also could have also been influenced by.
There's a work also called the, there's works having to do with a journey supposedly taken
by the Prophet Muhammad called the Miraj where the Prophet ascends from Jeruel.
First he's spirited from Mecca to Jerusalem, leads all the other biblical prophets in prayer
at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and then in the Miraj is he ascends to heaven and there he talks
with Allah, talks with God on various topics including how many prayers Muslims should
be required to say each day.
So anyway, there are many other sources and possible ideas, possible avenues for ideas
that Dante could have drawn from including Western ones.
So not necessarily a connection there with El Mari.
But that's the work by El Mari best known in the West.
His best known work in the Islamic world is called Luzum Ma La Yalzam which means self-imposed
necessity and it's a technical term from Arabic poetics referring to something called double
end rhyme.
So instead of having just one rhyming consonant at the end of lines of poetry in Arabic, there
are two.
And El Mari wrote an entire collection of poetry constraining himself with this linguistic
principle, a very difficult thing to do and he succeeds.
Some people might argue it's not the best poetry.
I don't think that.
There are people who think it's very bookish, it's very ornate.
Some poems anyway, some of them are very clear.
Some of them say openly things that it's not difficult to read.
So anyway, that's his best known work in part because it's full of Zuhd which again is renunciation
and asceticism, a disdain for the things of this world, encouraging people to think about
death, so also memento mori, including descriptions of graves and bodies and things which this
is also tracks with a European tradition in art and music even.
So there's a famous song for violin called the dance macabre, the dance of death and
things like that.
And then also rationalist critiques of religion, especially religious authority.
And that's where Almari gets his controversial legacy from.
So this poetry again, in both the early work of saqt al-zand, which to remind listeners
is a work of praise poetry to patrons, and then this later work, luzumma la yazm, in
which Almari critiques religion and religious authority.
They were considered models of good language and good poetry, which is why school children
still study them, even though he has this fraught reputation.
Another example of someone who is like this would be the great wine poet of Islam, Abu
Nawaz, whom again, school children in the Middle East, in the Islamic world still study
and memorize his poetry, even though they say, before they read it, they say, I myself
would not condone or do anything that he's talking about.
He's talking about sleeping with men and women.
He's talking about wine and debauchery and all kinds of things.
But the language is beautiful and it's part of the culture is what even believing Muslims
have told me before in terms of how they square this in their minds.
Why can we read this and be okay with it somehow?
Well, another question about that very topic is why did the society of Almari was more,
I guess, open to such ideas?
In fact, it's the kind of society that produced that kind of culture and ideas and characters
like Almari.
And now that the descendants of that great legacy are more conservative and more closed
to, I guess, more marginal or daring ideas.
How do you explain that the ancestors were more open minded than their descendants?
This is a great question.
And it's actually one that's been on my mind recently that I myself don't have a concrete
answer to.
The answers that I'm working through and weighing the relative quality of them and whether they're
convincing.
But I do have one or two talking points I can offer at least without having any conclusive
answers.
So there's one book that I'd recommend called it's by Thomas Bauer called The Culture of
Ambiguity was recently translated into English and published.
And among other things, Thomas Bauer blames the modern West for sort of clamping down
on these things.
I think it's a bit simplistic to say that.
One might think of someone like Rabelais who was a priest and then also wrote Gargantua
and Pantegruel, which are some of the raunchiest, most scatological works that you can read
in Western literature.
So I don't necessarily think it was just a medieval Islamic world thing.
There's another book that's great by Zoltan Sombathi.
And I don't remember the full title, but it's on Mujun spelled M-U-J-U-N in literature and
society in the medieval Islamic world.
One thing he brings up is that Islam is not it's a diverse set of discourses of ways of
talking about things and that sometimes we think it's all one thing and that we need
to remember that there's many ways of talking and thinking about all the stuff that Islam
and Islamic culture incorporates.
I was talking with someone recently in person at a conference about a figure, a beloved
figure, an imam, so a religious figure and a judge named Jalal ad-Din al-Siyyuti.
This is a 15th century judge who wrote in the Mamluk era and al-Siyyuti wrote works
of religious law, wrote works of religious theology and other things like that.
He also has works on sex and in these works he's very explicit.
He has whole sections in one of his works on Arabic names for female genitalia and tells
stories that they would just seem like out of keeping with in a modern era you wouldn't
introduce someone as here is the priest and also pornographer, a Siyyuti.
They don't seem to go together today, which goes back to your question.
What was it about this era that encouraged, produced, tolerated things like this in a
way that the modern era doesn't?
I think part of it has to do and I hate to sound like a cliche here, but it might partly
have to do with social media.
Things just travel faster today and everything is out there in a way that things certainly
traveled quickly at the time.
Again, within Ahmadiyyat's lifetime, his own poetic works had become teaching tools and
were very famous throughout the region, but it wasn't instantaneous and it wasn't every
single thing.
You couldn't record someone visually 24 hours a day like you can today.
There was no GPS tracker in everyone's pocket like we have today with smartphones.
In part, ideas travel faster and speech travels faster including repressive speech.
To the extent that the shoutier, more repressive voices in any form they take travel faster
and intimidate people, those have a greater effect.
There's also very few, if you're a very online person, there are very few venues in which
you can have private conversations with people where you can find an audience.
This is what group chats are great for.
You don't have to tweet every single thing to all your thousands of followers.
You can have 30 people whose opinions you care about and just have this one thing that
might have been more like how things traveled for a lot of poets in the past, that they
spoke to different audiences, that they weren't instantaneously broadcasted everywhere at
once.
These all might have to do with it.
I could also be out over my skis and there might be something I'm missing.
It's truly fascinating.
Let's summarize this and talk about the health problems that Al-Mahri encountered because
I think those were consequential in his life and his work.
Here is a genius, precocious child with an inclination towards the literary world, born
in an era of great change and shifting powers.
He's ambitious.
He decides to travel to Baghdad.
By the way, nowadays people think of Baghdad as a war zone, but this was the capital of
the Abbasid Empire.
What was Baghdad like when Al-Mahri entered that city and why was he attracted to that
city at all?
Let me back up one step.
You asked about his health problems.
One thing that we know more or less with certainty, as certain as you can know something like
this is that Al-Mahri was blind or that he was severely seeing impaired.
He has a line of poetry in which he describes this condition.
Actually, it's not a line of poetry.
It's from an exchange of letters actually about veganism and animals that we can get
to a bit later in the conversation.
He says, describing his health problems, that he contracted smallpox, Al-Judari in Arabic,
when he was young and by age four, he says, there was a decree of fate about me so that
I could not discern a full grown camel from a tender young camel calf just born.
Whether he had some capacity of sight, it was bad enough that he couldn't function in
a day-to-day basis.
Also in the same exchange of letters, he's writing it in his mid-80s.
This could have been something that happened to him later on, but there's other indications
that he had infirmities from a younger age in his 20s or maybe 30s.
He describes himself as being bent-backed, which again happens to some people in their
80s, but it could also have been a factor when he was younger.
There seems to be some indication of that.
These are important to keep in mind because in his youth, around age 30 thereabouts, he
took a trip to Baghdad.
So you ask what Baghdad was like at the time.
Baghdad was in many ways for this region, for this part of the world, but also compared
to Europe, a cultural, religious, scientific hub.
Tens of thousands of volumes of manuscripts.
There was something called the Dār al-Hekmah, the House of Wisdom, literally, which was
established as a translation center in which particularly Christian Arabs who knew Syriac
would translate works from Greek, especially in fields like science, medicine, mathematics,
philosophy into Arabic through intermediaries of Syriac.
So there was this great intellectual ferment going on.
This also took the form of intellectual salons, people sitting around discussing learned topics,
literature, poetry, philosophy, religion, other things like that.
So what I like to do when I talk about Baghdad and why Al-Mahdi went there is to make a simplistic
comparison, but it's a useful one nonetheless, is to compare medieval Baghdad at that time
in the early 11th century to Hollywood today.
If you're an aspiring actor, actress, and you want to make it in the movies, you move
to LA, you move to Hollywood, and you start putting yourself out there.
In Al-Mahdi's time, that was what Baghdad was like for intellectuals and poets like Al-Mahdi.
If you wanted to make a name for yourself, you moved out of the provinces, you moved
out of the burbs like where Al-Mahdi grew up, and you went to Baghdad.
That's what he did, and he was there for 18 months.
And after that, he left.
He returned to his hometown of Ma'arat al-Nurman in northern Syria and lived there for the
rest of his life, almost 50 years, and died in his own house.
People speculate about why he left.
There's one famous story in which Al-Mahdi...
One of the people Al-Mahdi knew at Baghdad is a Shiite polymath named Al-Sharif al-Murtaba,
who is also known as the brother of the Alid poet, proto-Shiite poet, Al-Sharif al-Radi.
And there's a widely cited anecdote that explains Al-Mahdi's departure from Baghdad in the context
of Al-Mahdi being a regular attendee of literary salons that a Sharif al-Murtaba would hold.
So I mentioned before that Al-Mahdi was deeply impacted by the poetry of this previous poet,
Anmutan Nabi, who actually died not too long before Al-Mahdi was born.
So not quite contemporaries, but within a generation, Al-Mahdi was being impacted by
this master's poetry.
So anyway, at one point, at one of these literary salons held by Al-Sharif al-Murtaba,
Al-Sharif al-Murtaba mocks the poetry of Anmutan Nabi, whom Al-Mahdi greatly admired, as I said.
And in response, Al-Mahdi quipped and said,
If Anmutan Nabi had written no verse other than the line,
You ruined stations, have stations in our hearts, he should still be considered the best poet.
This refers to a very famous poem by Al-Mutan Nabi.
And supposedly, according to accounts, the reference here that Al-Mahdi was making to a line
later in that same poem by Anmutan Nabi, which says,
And if disparagement of me reaches you from some deficient fool,
Then it is proof to me that I myself am faultless.
Supposedly, according to interpreters, the deficient fool implied by Al-Mahdi is
the person who held these salons, Al-Murtaba, Sharif al-Murtaba,
and that the faultless person in the line is Anmutan Nabi.
And for this grave insult, supposedly,
a Sharif al-Murtaba had Al-Mahdi dragged out of the salon by his heels.
And that alone would have been reason enough to leave town.
Again, this could be a true story.
It could also be just an explanation for why Al-Mahdi left Baghdad and decided to return home,
humiliating at the very least.
Supposedly, also, Al-Mahdi's mother died during this time,
which would have been a major blow to him, obviously.
And supposedly, also, he ran out of money.
So there are several reasons that commentators offer to explain why Al-Mahdi gave up his
venture in Baghdad.
So then he goes back to his hometown.
And I guess that's around the same time he starts thinking about animals and the ethics of it
and veganism.
So what triggered that reflection?
This is a question that stokes controversy among scholars and observers.
In terms of where Al-Mahdi got his ideas, it's again, it's a controversial topic among scholars
and thinkers.
Al-Mahdi has been accused of being everything.
He's accused of being a zindiq, which in pre-Islamic, sorry, pre-Islamic, pre-modern
Islamic civilization can translate to a heretic, but it specifically refers to a Manichaean,
someone who believed in the duality of good and evil, that there's a kind of a
good and evil, that there's a good god and that there's an evil spirit who creates evil.
A mulhead, so an atheist, and a kafir, an unbeliever, someone whose beliefs fall outside
the pale of Islam.
And as you mentioned, as I mentioned, there's a debate about where Al-Mahdi got his ideas.
There's one report that on a trip to Tripoli, Al-Mahdi supposedly visited a Christian
monastery near modern-day Latakia, where he listened to debates about Greek philosophy,
which might have implanted seeds of skepticism in him.
Other sources say he could have picked up his ideas further east, so when he was in
Baghdad, he might have heard, he might have been exposed to the ideas of Brahmanism,
al-Badhamiyya in Arabic, or perhaps Manichaeanism, as I already mentioned, or other influence
coming from Indic religion.
The truth is that we don't know exactly where he got his ideas, and in fact, he specifically
comes out against Indic religious practices, and most specifically, subti, you know, so
called widow burning, and he makes fun of this.
He criticizes it in more than one place, including in the Epistle of Forgiveness, which I mentioned
before.
One thing that's possible is that Al-Mahdi came into this world as a doubter and a skeptic,
and that rather than him starting to think about these things because he went and talked
to these people or had these influences in his life, he might have been drawn to these
people and these influences because he was already by disposition someone who thought
this way.
It could be that as well, but again, these are some possibilities, but there's nothing
conclusive one way or the other.
LARSON That's astonishing that, you know, someone
took such positions and such original positions in the middle of the dark ages, basically.
You mentioned a few names, you know, like Kefir, and that were labeled on him.
Even, you know, the whiff of that kind of reputation in the modern day Arabic world
would get you in so much trouble.
So in what kind of trouble did Al-Mahdi run when expressing his ideas, his very controversial
ideas about religion and, you know, society, animal ethics and things like that?
LARSON Yeah, good question.
I'll give an example and it relates specifically to animals and veganism, and this will be a
chance for me to introduce one of the clearest texts about veganism that we have by Al-Mahdi.
It's the closest thing we have to a Ma'arrian treatise about animals and veganism, partly
because he writes it in language that is astonishingly clear for someone who typically
wrote in very difficult, rhetorically stylized language for a lot of his writings.
And this is an exchange of letters that Al-Mahdi had with...
Yeah, go ahead.
M. Yes.
Do you think that he adopted such language as, you know, because he was speaking to,
you know, the wild world, you know, he was not in Baghdad anymore.
He was not interested, I guess, to appealing to the elite, to the other, you know, poets.
And at the same time, he thought that maybe his ideas on animals and his belief in his convictions
needed to be shared to the wider public.
Do you think that he wanted to address those ideas to us, to the people of his era and to future generations?
M. Yeah, it's certainly possible.
Yeah, the clarity of his language in this exchange of letters that he has, which is
with a thinker and poet in his own right, someone named Al-Mu'ayyid Fidin Ashirazi,
who was a Falta Mid Missionary who'd come on, who'd go on to become the chief Falta Mid Missionary at Cairo.
And Al-Mu'ayyid Fidin reached out to Al-Mahdi, as we might say in modern parlance,
specifically to discredit him.
And there's an account in a long series of works of majalis, so sessions or salons that Al-Mu'ayyid has.
And in one of them, there's recorded a conversation with him and his devotees, his followers.
Al-Mu'ayyids, that is, in which they're talking about Al-Mahdi and his beliefs about animals,
which are beyond the pale of Islam, which, I'll remind listeners, permits the use of animals for
humans even in the bedrock text of Islam, the Quran.
And from there, Islamic law and other discourses, the mainstream of those discourses,
permits use of animal products by humans.
And so for someone like Al-Mahdi to come along and say definitively you shouldn't use any animal
products, there's a poem that he and this other poet Al-Mu'ayyid debate in which Al-Mahdi says,
don't eat meat, but also don't eat fish, but also don't use honey, also don't drink milk.
So as far as we can tell, Al-Mahdi is what we would call today a vegan.
So there's this exchange between Al-Mu'ayyid and Al-Mahdi prompted by a conversation between
Al-Mu'ayyid and his own disciples in which his disciples supposedly want to kill Al-Mahdi.
It had reached to that point. And again, Al-Mahdi is an old man at this point. He's 85.
He's living in his house in Aleppo, and there are these people agitating for his blood.
Al-Mu'ayyid says, no, no. What that would do is it would turn him into a martyr for these ideas.
It would make him even more famous and more beloved. What we should do is discredit him
intellectually in full view. And so he says, for that reason, we need to have this exchange
in writing, which he does. So there are sort of minority reports that Al-Mu'ayyid was poisoned
in his old age because of this agitation among Al-Mu'ayyid's followers. That seems not to have
been the case. Al-Mu'ayyid died, an old man, peacefully in his bed of natural causes,
not having been poisoned. But these are the stakes of someone like Al-Mahdi
living the way that he did and writing the way that he did.
Okay. Let's get into the text. And by the way, there is a link between veganism and having this
position towards religion, this contrarian heretical position towards religion. First of all,
you mentioned in the Quran, there's this belief that animals are for human use. And so that
contradicts the veganism part. But there's also the fact that it still holds true to
this day, that in order to become vegan, you need to be able to tolerate a certain level of
going against the grain because most society consumes animal products.
Okay. So can you tell us about the text that he wrote regarding animals and veganism?
When did he write those texts? What were the texts about all of that?
Yeah, absolutely. Before I mention the texts and a little bit about them, I want to absolutely,
100% affirm the point that you made, which is that veganism, voluntary veganism, as distinguished
from people who because of poverty can't afford meat or animal products, they're forced into
only eating plant-based or vegetable products, whatever. But those who choose, despite having
the means to afford meat, not to partake of animal products, is certain people in the minority and
in the minority that, as you said, requires a certain fortitude, a certain stomach for
controversy. So there's a book that I would recommend to listeners. It's by Colin Spencer.
It's called The Heretics Feast, a History of Vegetarianism. And early in the book,
the author makes this statement, except for a few rare spirits, meat eating has been the cornerstone
of society. For anyone to abstain from it was unusual. And he says that for this reason,
histories, vegans tend to be cantankerous. They tend to be the kind of people who butt heads with
society and its norms. So one of the earliest vegans or supposed vegans that we know of is
Pythagoras, who had certainly a reputation for this kind of personality. Others we might mention
are Voltaire, certainly a person who was comfortable with controversy. And El Mari himself was
no stranger to debate and controversy. Great. So in terms of the works that El Mari wrote,
first of all, the works that I've already mentioned, including the Lusum Malayalism,
it's also sometimes called Lusumiyat, which I've translated as self-imposed necessity,
this work of double end rhyme poetry, rationalist critiques of religion, reminding people about
death and other things like that. A lot of these poems have statements about animals, especially
as moral exemplars. So one of these Lusum poems is in fact the poem that El Mari and El Muayyid
debate in this exchange of letters that I mentioned previously. And it's again, certainly a
declaration, if not a call to what we would call veganism today. And so the lines in question
come at the beginning in which El Mari says, don't feed on what is seized from the water by force or
seek fair in the newly slain. Don't seize mother's fresh milk. It's for their calves, not for high
born maids. Don't terrify carefree birds, heedless of what is done. Fruity is the worst evil. Shun
thick white honey struck in the morning from fragrant blooms. The bees didn't make it just to
give it away. So a bit of humor. And El Mari links this to his overall idea of Zuhd, renunciation,
asceticism, turning away from the pleasures of this world and thinking about death as a way of
reminding you what's coming after this life and how you should prepare for it. And basically,
you know, for me, El Mari links the two, you know, with the same degree of care that you think about
your own life and your own station, your own status, maybe morally and spiritually, you should
also think about the lives of animals. That seems to be the message in this poem. So that's one
example just from this poetry that I mentioned. And again, we have this exchange of letters,
which I can get into more detail about if you want. But in that, a lot of the debate circles
around the problem of evil. And El Mari invokes that to say basically, you know,
we don't know where evil comes from. He brings up all these sort of conundrums that are impossible
to solve. And El Mari doesn't really solve them. But El Mari says, you know, can you tell where
evil comes from in this scenario or in that scenario or in that scenario? And he names several
different ones. And then the implication seems to be that because we don't know where evil comes
from or how we participate in it, religious people everywhere err on the side of doing less harm.
And from that basis, we should also treat animals the same way. We should err on the side of we
don't know what kind of harm that we do. We don't know what kind of evil we do. We don't know where
evil comes from, including the evil or harm that happens to animals. And he says, you can't
create animal products for humans without causing harm to animals. So on that basis,
he says, we should treat animals humanely and avoid using animal products.
We should treat animals humanely and avoid using animal products. A third text that I'll mention,
this was written early. So again, that exchange of letters and the Luzum. The Luzum, we're probably
written throughout El Mari's life, but he it was later in his career, maybe in his 50s. But in early
work, earlier work anyway, written around 1021, common era is called the epistle of the horse and
the mule. This is a less known work by El Mari. One day I hope to translate it in full. It is
fascinating in part because it strays like an animal from sort of the path that it's on to talk
about all manner of topics. Notionally, you know, the framing of the tale is there are
six main animal characters, the titular mule and horse of the title, and then a dove, a camel,
a hyena and a fox. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to get a message from the mule
to the actual governor at that time of Aleppo, Aziz Adawla. And so these animals debate who's
the best animal to carry this message? What form should we put the message in? Should we put it in
poetry? Is it better to have it in prose? That kind of thing. But again, they stray off into all
kinds of topics. Part of what's interesting is also they talk about the panic, Jafla, in this area
of Syria as it bordered the Byzantine, the Christian Byzantine Empire. And this is just a
few decades before the first crusade was announced. So it's a fascinating work, not least because
El-Mahdadi peppers it with popular sayings about animals, popular folklore about animals, obscure
words and other things like that. And of course, it's populated by talking animals. So it's just a
treasure trove of all these things. And there are parts, and I can explain them in a second,
because I know I've been going on for a bit. There are parts in which El-Mahdadi more or less
makes his stance clear about how people should think about animals.
First of all, why is most of that work? Why is it not available in English, French or any? Why has
it not been translated to a Western language? Why is it only in Arabic? And I bet, I bet not many
Arabic speakers are reading that kind of work right now. Yeah, yeah, you'd be right. Two reasons,
the form and the content. First, the form, the language is extremely difficult. And for that
reason, it doesn't translate well, it doesn't travel well. Typically, and I don't fault anyone
for not knowing much about classical Arabic literature, because it does need translation,
but also kind of an introduction to the wider Western cultural sphere. Because they're just
forms of writing that are unfamiliar in the West. It would be like if no one had ever heard of a
haiku, and you had to go through a lot of work to be like, hey, there's this form in Japanese
called the haiku, we should start writing it in English. Anyway, it takes a long time to kind of
domesticate a form like that and make it popular in the West. So, you know, when I ask people,
what works of classical Arabic literature do you know? Typically, they're familiar with the Quran,
which is a controversial statement anyway, because it's a very, very, very, very, very,
very popular language in the West. We're not familiar with this very much in any way, because
is it literature or not in the same way that like a play or a poem is literature. So they're
typically familiar with that. And then the Thousand and One Nights. That's it. And relatively speaking,
the Thousand and One Nights is very simple language. And also, ironically, not a big part
of sort of the mainstream classical Arabic literary tradition. It wasn't taken as a model
that of all things has become so popular in the West.
And it's because they're like fairy tales
that track with other fairy tales
from other cultural traditions.
And they also translate very easily.
So, and Mari writes in a very stylistically
difficult language with lots of obscure words
and difficult syntax and rhyming prose
and lots of poetry and things like that.
So it just doesn't translate very well.
The other thing is the content.
And Mari particularly, but this is a con,
this is an element of a style of writing more generally
called adab.
Adab in modern Arabic means literature specifically.
But adab can mean all kinds of things,
including refinement, education,
the kinds of things you would discuss over a meal.
So like if someone brings up a topic,
there were works that were written
so that like specifically you would have some anecdote
or some tidbit of information,
some factoid to bring up over dinner
if someone mentioned like, you know, government.
Oh, I heard this story about Sultan such and such
and how he did this thing that's amusing.
There's a work by Ibn Qutayba called
Ar-Yun al-Akhbar for exactly that purpose.
It's an anthology of these things.
Anyway, so this is adab writing.
It's eclectic, it's encyclopedic,
and it strays from thing to thing
and a moddy sort of fits that bill perfectly.
So this work that I was describing,
the Epistle of the Horse and the Mule falls into that.
For that reason also, it's kind of hard reading.
You know, it would be like picking up an encyclopedia
of funny factoids and anecdotes,
which is it's amusing to read,
but it's typically not the kind of thing
that Westerners might think of when they think,
oh, this is, you know, I'm gonna read a novel today,
what am I gonna read?
But there is an audience out there for that kind of work.
You mentioned, you know, you wanted to translate
the epistle.
I wish you did.
I mean, you sent me a version in Arabic,
and I, you know, started trying with my rusty Arabic
to read it, and I don't know, I can't, I can't.
This is a nightmare text, you know,
for pros that study this, like experts.
I can't, you know, make sense of it,
but I wish there was a translation,
and I bet many vegans, including, you know, listeners
right now would want to put their hands on the writings
of the very first vegan, what he was thinking,
and how was he thinking about animals
and his stance and his veganism?
I mean, that would be profoundly interesting.
Before I forget, you mentioned Pythagoras and Voltaire
as being vegans, but were they not vegetarians only?
Mm, yeah.
Yeah, and that's a good distinction.
We also don't know exactly, especially with Pythagoras,
you know, whether or not he practiced this.
You know, there are reports by his students
that, you know, he encouraged people to shun animal products,
supposedly because he believed in reincarnation
or metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.
That's something, by the way,
that Amari doesn't seem to believe in.
In fact, he rejects it explicitly.
He has a line of poetry where he makes fun
of someone named Musa ibn Ishaq.
So for readers or listeners who don't know Arabic,
Musa is just Moses in Arabic, and Ishaq is Isaac.
So two names from the Bible, and what he says is,
if what you, supposedly this Musa ibn Ishaq,
what you supposedly believe about reincarnation were true,
then you would be Moses, like the biblical Moses,
the son of Isaac the slain,
meaning Isaac, the son of Abraham,
making fun of this person who obviously lived
after biblical times, but took his name from the Bible,
and he's making fun of the fact that,
like he supposedly believed in reincarnation.
So Amari rejects this doctrine specifically.
This is why I like to say that Amari
was certainly a gadfly.
He was a free thinker.
He questioned orthodoxy.
He questioned received authority,
but he was less heterodox in his doctrines, in his thought,
than he could have been.
So there were doctrines like reincarnation, metempsychosis,
that were available to him at the time
that he explicitly rejects.
So for this reason, it's less appropriate,
even from an academic perspective,
even setting aside debates among people,
whether or not he was a heretic,
whether you buy into that or not.
Setting that aside just from an academic perspective,
it's less precise to call him a heterodox thinker
or someone outside the pale
of mainstream Islamic orthodoxy just on this basis,
again, because there were these doctrines like this
available to him that other people held at the time
that he seems to reject.
And another thing about him that astonished me
is how long he lived.
Like you said, he was blind.
He had this condition that bent his back.
How come he lived that long?
And also he was eating a vegan diet
in a time when you had no supplements,
no soy milk, like nothing.
So how did he live that long in such a, I guess,
relatively healthy life for his time?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I can only speculate.
Perhaps his diet and his lifestyle
did have something to do with it,
which we don't know much about, by the way.
There's a report that he supposedly ate just lentils
and then dates for sweet.
And then beyond that, there's also an account
that he was eating a melon one time
and was embarrassed because some of it fell onto his chest
while he was eating.
And he asked his, he had staff with him
because he was blind and couldn't see
and who would help him do daily things.
And he asked one of these people,
did anyone see this?
And this person said, no.
And so, get the sense that he would have been embarrassed
if someone had seen that.
It's a good question.
Perhaps also he worked hard his entire life
at language and literature and writing.
He was extremely, extremely productive.
13 works by him survive.
And those are just the ones that survive.
There are many others that are mentioned by authors
that are, as far as we know, lost to literary history.
So someone with that kind of energy,
maybe it was inborn as well.
Yeah, but it is remarkable that he was able
to live for so long and to produce such fresh,
insightful writing up until the moment of his death.
Supposedly this exchange of letters
that he had on veganism.
There are five letters initiated by this Mu'ayyad Faddeen,
this poet at Cairo and missionary at Cairo who wrote him.
And then Amadri writes back.
And Mu'ayyad writes a second letter and Amadri writes back.
And then Amadri finishes the exchange
with the fifth and final letter.
Amadri supposedly died in the meantime.
So right up until his death,
he's producing these incredible works.
Do we know where he was buried?
Yeah, in fact, his tomb is at Ma'adat al-Nomen
in his hometown in Northern Syria.
And this is noteworthy because there was a municipal statue
over top of his tomb.
In 2013, two years after the start
of the Syrian civil war in 2011,
that statue was decapitated.
And most likely it was,
that act was perpetrated by a branch of Al-Qaeda
called Jabhat al-Nusra, the Nusra Front.
And supposedly they did this
because of Amadri's reputation for being
a heretic against Islam.
So firm is his reputation for being such a heretic.
So, even though he lived so long ago
and died in the mid 11th century,
in the dark ages, as you put it, Rayyan,
he continues to inspire controversy
and even literal iconoclasm,
the destruction of public statues and things like that.
And it just speaks to his relevance today for us.
Did he influence anyone?
Did he have like a student
who decided to also adopt veganism?
Oh, that's a great question.
He certainly influenced people
in terms of literature and language.
So one of his famous students is named Khatib al-Tabrizi
who became famous less as a poet
than as a commentator and a grammarian.
In terms of his veganism, that's a good question.
I am not aware of anyone who started sort of a school
or something like that.
Certainly Amadri has a reputation today
and is taken as inspirational today for vegans.
I'm aware of that.
As to whether at the time it was a thing,
I don't know if it was.
I think he's taken as an inspiration
because he did something incredible at the time
when who would have even thought
of doing something like that.
But I think his flavor of veganism is less known,
this renunciation you have been talking about.
And I think for many, they will discover that
through listening to this conversation.
Did you want to add some words
about that renunciation practice he held?
In terms of Amadri's legacy
and his practice of renunciation in general,
this is something that I,
it's a talking point that I try to emphasize about Amadri.
Typically today, when people say veganism,
they associate it with a secular outlook,
which is interesting because there are many vegans
in religious traditions,
including Indic religions like Hinduism,
including in branches of Christianity.
So there's a lot of vegan or vegetarian dishes
in Ethiopian food that I'm aware of
because of fasting practices,
abstaining from meat and other things like that.
So abstaining from animal products is widely attested
even today within religion.
But for some reason, when we say vegan,
people tend to associate it with a secular lifestyle.
And what I want to say is that Amadri has impacted people
and has inspired people in that context.
Amadri himself was many things, but he was not secular.
The fact that he was an ascetic,
that he supposedly wore only coarse wool clothes,
that he slept on his prayer mat.
He has an entire work, it's called Al Fusul Wal-Ghayat,
paragraphs and periods, sections and endings,
something like that.
It's one of several works by Amadri
which the title refers to a formal principle
that he wrote in which he structured the work.
Anyway, this work is all about praise of God.
And this is one of the works also
where Amadri talks constantly about animals.
So Amadri was a lot of things, as I said,
but the fact that he was an ascetic,
the fact that he had these convictions
showed that he was deeply religious.
The nature of that belief of his religion,
the nature of his practice is debated
because he does have a lot of poetry
that criticizes religion
and even what seems to be the foundation of religion,
not just received authority or sort of unthinking belief.
So it's hard to square that,
but the point that I'm emphasizing is,
Amadri's veganism comes from a place
of belief and spirituality.
And that his, it's different again,
from people who thought that souls migrate,
that souls reincarnate.
It's also different from a work like
by the famous jurist and Sufi author, Al-Ghazali,
who among other things wrote an essay,
a chapter or something like this called
Qasr al-Shahwatin, breaking the two desires,
meaning desires for meat and for sex.
And what he says, Al-Ghazali says is that,
it's good for humans to avoid eating meat
because you are sort of tamping down these base desires.
And Amadri doesn't write that way about veganism.
What he says is, he focuses on is,
we shouldn't do harm to animals
because they're living beings.
That's sort of the core of his veganism.
So in terms of how he inspires people today,
that's something I like to emphasize
is that this comes from a place of belief.
It comes from a place of religious conviction,
whatever the nature of that religious conviction is.
I say this partly because I'm pushing back
against sort of the stereotype or the typical association
we have with Amadri, which is that,
he's a secular free thinker,
and he's the medieval Islamic hero
of atheists and free thinkers today.
And people have certainly taken him that way,
and they're absolutely welcome to,
and you can read that into his writings.
But there's also a lot about his works
that shows us he was deeply religious in some way.
I mean, how could he be anything less than religious?
This is something intense,
his practice of veganism is something intense and radical
relative to our standards.
So imagine relative to dark ages standards.
So you need a level of faith,
not just simple conviction to sustain
that kind of practice.
So it makes sense in my mind
that he had a deep spiritual life, inner life.
So I want to ask you as a parting question,
how did you get interested in Al-Mahri?
I'm so happy that you exist because there are so few people
who are interested and have the skills to study a figure
like Al-Mahri.
Yeah, when I was looking up,
when I discovered Al-Mahri, and then when I looked him up,
of course there were lots of videos and publications
by many of them vegans about him,
but most of them had no deep expertise in who he was.
They just, I guess, read his Wikipedia page.
So how did you develop that interest
and connection with Al-Mahri?
Yeah, I like this question a lot.
And here I'll, you know,
before when we were talking in the green room, as it were,
about this episode, you know, you said,
you never ask your guests about their veganism
and that's something I really appreciate.
So I offer what I'm about to say freely,
which is for full disclosure that I'm not a vegan
and that it wasn't because of that connection
that I first was drawn to Al-Mahri.
I was first drawn to Al-Mahri because of his zuhd,
his renunciationism and asceticism.
His most famous line of poetry,
which I read for the first time, gosh,
it was in 2008,
so, you know, and I was in a fourth year Arabic class
and I didn't understand what it was saying at first,
but as soon as I did, I thought, who is this person?
Here's the line of poetry.
In Arabic, it goes like this.
Khafif al-wat'a ma adhunnu adeem al-ardi
illa min hazeh al-absadi
In English, that says,
I am a poet, I am a poet,
in English, that says, lighten your step.
I think the surface of the earth is made of nothing,
but all of these bodies.
And what he's referring to is,
he's in the line previous to that,
he's saying there's these people who died in this era
and then even before that, there were more people who died
and there's all these bodies just piling up
one on top of the other all over the earth
and that's all the earth is made of, is dead bodies.
And this is obviously like a very stark expression
of memento mori, which as I mentioned,
is a long and rich cultural tradition,
not just in Islam, but also Christian Western Europe.
And I read this and when it finally clicked what it said,
I thought, oh my gosh, who is this person?
What is he about?
So that's kind of what first drew me in.
And as I discovered just the wide range of his attention
and his writings and stuff,
I saw animals popping up more and more,
not just in the context of veganism,
although certainly they're also,
but using them as literary symbols, as moral exemplars
and other things like that.
Plus his language is just, it's so challenging,
but for me, it's an attractive challenge.
It's something that drew me in
and kept me coming back to him.
So that was kind of the initial response that I got.
I really appreciate how much I've learned about veganism,
animals, other things like this.
And I've had the pleasure of interacting with vegans
over El Mari, including this exchange
that we're having right now,
as people look up to him as an early thinker and writer
and a voice for this practice and this lifestyle,
even though I myself don't practice it,
I very much appreciate and have learned a lot about this
from other people.
Not yet, maybe in the future.
That's right.
Do you think that El Mari could be used
to propagate veganism in the Arabic world?
Because that's one thing,
there's this thinking process
and you must have come across it.
When you talk with Arabic people
and tell them about ideas like veganism
or freedom of this or that,
they will often tell you,
but that is a Western idea.
That comes from the West.
And of course the West is bad.
Let's not get political,
but we understand where that feeling comes from.
But if we're talking about El Mari,
he was not a Westerner.
Yet he came up with the same conclusions
that many Westerners and others of other cultures
in regard to animal ethics and veganism.
And I wonder, can he be like a figure
that could mobilize Arabs around the cause of veganism?
Yeah, I think it certainly has that potential,
his writings do.
I think the broader problem is El Mari's legacy
as a supposed heretic
and as a supposed heterodox thinker.
Which I think if he were more
a mainstream figure in terms of Islamic law,
theology, other things that he had written on that score,
in people's minds anyway,
he might have more,
people might have more buy-in on this point.
But I think recuperating a little bit his legacy
and repurposing it in a way
that makes him more acceptable to people.
I think also you're talking about
a segment of the population in the Islamic world
and in the Middle East with a more,
liberalizing sort of progressive mindset.
And sometimes those elements of society,
those people who think that way
don't always feel comfortable,
especially in the Middle East and in the Islamic world,
expressing themselves fully,
giving full expression to their lifestyle and other things.
And just the fact of the matter is,
it's harder to live a vegan lifestyle in the Middle East,
in the Islamic world than it is in Western Europe.
And in North America,
just because there seems to be more awareness in the West,
the so-called West, of different lifestyles
and something as simple as having vegan options
at a restaurant or something like that.
So I think certainly El-Mahri
could be a starting point for that,
but it's gonna take a larger cultural shift
in order for people's mindsets to change
to where they could be open to someone like El-Mahri.
Amazing.
Did you have anything more to add, Kevin,
before we end this recording?
Just to say thank you for bringing me on.
I always like talking about this topic.
And I hope listeners are able to explore what's out there
in terms of El-Mahri's writings.
One that I can recommend,
it's published by a series called
The Library of Arabic Literature,
published by New York University Press.
And it's a two-volume translation,
and it's actually a facing bilingual translation
and edition.
So there's the Arabic on the right side
and then the English on the left
of the Epistle of Forgiveness,
in which El-Mahri's waspish,
grammarian protagonist takes a journey
through heaven and hell and talks to different people.
So that has been translated.
There's also been translations of parts of the Lusumiyat,
the Lusum al-ayyalzm,
in particular by someone named R.A. Nicholson.
And he's translated,
this is 100 years ago that he translated this,
so the language is a little bit starchy.
So if you can get through that,
it's an interesting portrayal of El-Mahri's thought
on many different topics.
And again, if you'll stay tuned,
I hope within the next couple of years
to have translated at least this very curious,
wide-ranging epistle of the horse and the mule,
and then eventually after that, the Lusum al-ayyalzm.
But these are pie in the sky projects
that I hope to get around to eventually.
Well, I hope that once you complete your work,
you'll come back on the podcast
and we'll talk about it in more details.
Thank you.
I love that.
I will add links to every book reference you gave.
I know you gave a lot, so I took some notes
and I'll try to find links
and add them to the description below for listeners.
Kevin, what a pleasure
and what an educative conversation.
Thank you so much for having taken the time
to answer my question.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Thank you everyone for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast
with the vegans you know.
Let's encourage more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring
and I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.
I love my people,
though to all the outside,
you suffer,
though to me you're fine.
Temptation, no one,
you are so fine.