religions Article Suffering the Sons of Eve: Animal Ethics in al-Ma arr“ ı’s¯ Epistle of the Horse and the Mule Kevin Blankinship Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA;
[email protected] Received: 1 June 2020; Accepted: 4 August 2020; Published: 10 August 2020 Abstract: In the year 1021 CE, blind author and skeptic Abu¯ l-( Ala¯ ) al-Ma( arr¯ı (d. 1057 CE) wrote Risalat¯ al-s.ahil¯ wa-l-sha¯h. ij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule), a winding prose work populated by animal characters who talk about poetry, grammar, riddles, and Syrian society on the eve of the crusades. Traditionally forgotten as a source for al-Ma( arr¯ı’s pacifism, and his vegan worldview, the S. ahil¯ lets readers see his thinking on animals more than most other works. After a brief survey of animals in Islam, which shows a mainstream desire for balance between human and non-human needs, as well as exceptional cases that strongly uphold animals as subjects per se and which stand as ( key inter-texts for al-Ma arr¯ı, this paper considers how the S. ahil¯ champions non-human creatures through images of animal cruelty deployed to shock readers into compassion, and through poetry and popular sayings (amthal)¯ recast in a zoocentric mold. It, therefore, advocates with more fervor than anthropocentric Islamic writings on animals, such as Kal¯ılah wa-Dimnah or the letters of the Ikhwan¯ ) ( al-S. afa¯ . However, this happens in a way that makes it hard to pin down the sources of al-Ma arr¯ı’s thought.