It is said that Abul Alaa Al-Maarri once visited a mosque in Baghdad, and while he walked amid the crowd of people, being blind, he bumped into someone. The man became very angry and asked him: who are you, you dog? Al-Maari immediately answered back, saying: the dog is he who does not know seventy terms for this animal. Some interpret this answer philosophically, and consider that the Double-Fettered Captive (as Al-Maari was known) had thus ranked the man who insulted him, as well as anyone who did not know seventy terms for dog, an animal. In other words, he defied everyone with his knowledge, and made advancement begin from listing the terms for dog. The more one knows, the more one advances towards being human. The insult and the reply to it were merely a symbol asserting that a human being's humanity can only come through knowledge, for the sake of which Al-Maarri suffered persecution and insults until he retired into his home to live among his books and to put forward ideas from among the most courageous and the most advanced in the history of Islamic philosophy. It is not strange for Al-Maarri to have had many enemies in his time, as the man went against many beliefs and exposed many delusions that had been consecrated by writers and clerics who had nothing to do with rational knowledge, but whose beliefs were part of an ideology aimed at gaining political control over the simple folk and at terrorizing intellectuals and making them dependent on serving sultans. Many were subjected to such an ideology, but not the philosopher of Maarra, who put his entire life at stake to discuss and critique prevalent notions, to unleash freedom of thought, to question what goes against reason, and to strip of sanctity what is not holy – thus deserving in the eyes of his enemies the nickname “the dog of Maarra". More than nine centuries later, those who do not know seventy terms for dog have grown in number. They have returned with all of their sterile “tradition" to wake Al-Maarri from his grave and put him on trial. The “rebels" have triumphed. They have waved their swords and fired their guns at his statue, imagining that their bullets could reach his enlightened mind. The fact is that they have killed only their own dead souls, and have not vanquished the mind of the philosopher, who represents a shining example of the most prosperous period of the Abbasid Empire, with its wealth of knowledge and openness to world cultures. There were in that age obscurantists who never failed to brand the greatest thinkers as apostates. Today, they have multiplied like mushrooms, spreading from Morocco to Indonesia, their only concern to hunt down any enlightened minds, even to the grave. And it is amusing to see “democrats" side with them and defend them in the name of freedom and of fighting tyranny. Neither they nor their supporters know a single term for dog.
