Al-Ma'arri

Abu al-‘Ala' al-Ma'arri lost his sight to smallpox at four. He travelled to Baghdad as a young man, refused offers of court patronage, and returned to live for the rest of his life in his small Syrian town. He never married, never ate meat (the only major medieval Arabic literary figure to argue, in verse, against animal slaughter), and produced two of the strangest books in classical Arabic literature: the Luzumiyyat, a collection of more than 1,500 epigrammatic poems with double rhyme that turn rhetorical convention into philosophical questioning, and the Risalat al-Ghufran (Epistle of Forgiveness), a fictional journey through the afterlife that anticipates Dante by two centuries.

His verse is openly sceptical of organised religion ("the world holds two kinds of men: those with brains and no religion, and those with religion and no brains"), which has made him a recurring touchstone for Arabic free thought — and a recurring target. His tomb in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man was beheaded by Salafist militants in 2013.