Blind Justice

“You are deficient in understanding and religion,

Come to me, and hear something of the truth.

Do not eat unjustly the fish that the water has given up,

And do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,

Or the white milk of mothers, which they intended for their offspring, not for noble ladies.

Do not grieve the innocent birds by taking their eggs, for injustice is the worst of crimes.

And leave the honey which the bees, through their labor, gathered from the flowers of fragrant plants, for it was not stored for the benefit of

Another, nor did they hoard it for profit or as a gift.

I wash my hands of all this, and hope to reach understanding before my hair turns gray.”

These lines were not written by a compassionate Jain monk, nor by a modern animal rights activist.

This rebuke was penned over a thousand years ago by the Syrian thinker and poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri, a native of Aleppo.

A statue of al-Ma'arri (973–1058) in the city of Aleppo, Syria.

Al-Ma'arri, who was blinded by smallpox as a child, rose to fame at a young age as a formidable scholar and poet.

After a period of study in Baghdad, then the epicenter of Islamic learning, he returned to his homeland to live a life of monastic asceticism until his death at eighty-four.

Al-Ma'arri’s thought was an anomaly in his time; many revered him as a saint, while just as many branded him a heretic.

His philosophy is marked by a profound pessimism regarding the human condition and a biting critique of religious dogmatism, which he saw as a collection of fables used to mislead the masses. In contrast, al-Ma'arri championed an authentic moral life—one not motivated by the promise of reward or the fear of punishment, but by the intrinsic value of the good deed itself.

He advocated for vegetarianism, and perhaps even what we would now call veganism—a radical stance for his era. Furthermore, he argued against procreation, believing that by not bringing children into the world, one could halt the cycle of human suffering.

Though al-Ma'arri’s doctrine is heavy with skepticism and a dark view of human nature, his appeal to the autonomous individual—the person capable of choosing their own values in defiance of their environment—strikes me as a form of true freedom. It suggests a cautious optimism: the hope that human beings might transcend their arbitrary, bestial origins and reach for something loftier.