SOURCE: Lavi, Abraham. “The Rationale of Al-Harīzī in Biblicizing the Maqāmāt of Al-Harīrī.” The Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 74, no. 3 (January 1984): 280-93.

[In the following essay, Lavi examines Judah al-Harīzī's Hebrew translation of the Maqāmāt.]

Sometime between the years 1213 and 1216 the Spanish-Jewish scholar Judah al-Harīzī translated al-Harīrī's Maqāmāt into Hebrew. This translation is now known under the title Maḥberōt Ithiel. Unfortunately only twenty-five complete Maḥbarōt—II-XXVI—the last part of I, and the beginning of XXVII are in our possession. The others, and the preface with which al-Harīzī, in keeping with his usual practice, probably introduced the book, are missing. We know that he translated all the fifty Maqāmāt, because he himself says so twice in the introduction to his Taḥkemōnī (Taḥkemōnī, English translation by V. E. Reichert [Jerusalem, 1965], pp. 9-40).

As Schirmann has noted (Die hebräische Uebersetzung der Maqamen des Hariri [Frankfurt, 1930], p. 18) al-Harīzī set himself the task not so much of translating as of hebraizing the Maqāmāt, a choice prompted by the view put forward in the preface to the Taḥkemōnī that the beauties of Arabic poetry are of Hebrew origin (Reichert, ibid.). Inevitably the Arab-Islamic background, as Schirmann points out (pp. 20-21), often shines through, but al-Harīzī did hebraize whatever he could. Biblical names take the place of Arabic names, and at times Biblical quotations are rendered as if cited from the Koran.

He did this deliberately, because his translation was not meant to spread Islamic culture among the Jews of his time, who were already familiar with Islamic culture and had mastered the Arabic language more thoroughly than the Hebrew. Judah ha-Levi, Maimonides, Baḥya ibn Paquda, and others wrote some of their most important works in Arabic. Al-Harīzī's sole goal, as one can conclude from what he says in the preface to the Taḥkemōnī, was to demonstrate the wealth of the Hebrew language and to show that a person well-versed in it could achieve anything he desired, even with difficult material like the Maqāmāt. The best way to achieve this goal was to render al-Harīrī's Assemblies into Hebrew, excluding the Islamic ingredients, replacing them with Biblical quotations, or ignoring them, as al-Harīzī sometimes did. Therefore, when one reads the Maqāmāt of al-Harīrī in its Hebrew version, namely the Maḥberōt Ithiel, one can hardly recognize the original Arabic.

Al-Harīzī himself must clearly have known the difference between this kind of translation and a translation in the stricter sense. He practiced the latter kind when he prepared a Hebrew version of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed.

I shall now attempt to reconstruct al-Harīzī's method in selecting Biblical equivalents for Arabic names. I shall also discuss one illuminating instance where a linguistic singularity—an Arabic punning phrase—left al-Harīzī without an obvious Hebrew counterpart, and where he used the same associative method of hebraization as he had used with names.

I AL-HāRITH IBN HAMMāM (THE RāWī) EQUALS ITHIEL (THE MAGGīD).

Maḥberōt Ithiel is the title by which al-Harīzī's work is known. Maḥberet (plural maḥbarōt, plural construct maḥberōt) became the Hebrew equivalent of maqāmah, as we can see in Taḥkemōnī (Kaminka, Taḥkemōnī [Warsaw, 1899], sha‘ar 3, p. 41); al-Harīzī mentions ha-Maḥberet ha-ḥamūdāh, “the delightful Maḥberet,” of Solomon ben Siqbal (or Saqbel), who lived in Spain in the first half of the 12th century and whose work was published in Schirmann's Ha-Shīrāh ha-‘ibrīt bi-Sefārad ube-Provence, (Jerusalem, 1950-51), I, 554. This Maḥberet, according to Schirmann, was probably the oldest one in Hebrew literature. Maḥberet was thus a factor. But why did al-Harīzī's choice fall upon Ithiel (Prov. 30:1) to replace al-Hārith ibn Hammām, al-Harīzī's narrator?

The Maḥberet of Solomon ben Saqbel, as is indicated by al-Harīzī in the Taḥkemōnī (sha‘ar 3), starts with the words Ne’ūm Asher ben Yehudah, “the speech of Asher ben Judah.” It would seem that al-Harīzī's own opening formula was based on this model. Practicing what is called in Arabic iqtibās, “introducing well-known phrases from the Koran or the Hadīth for the sake of ornament,” and in Hebrew signōn shibbūṣī, “style characterized by the interweaving of Biblical phrases”—in which al-Harīzī was a master—our translator must have looked for a Biblical phrase wherein ne’ūm precedes a personal name suitable for a counterpart of al-Harīrī's Hārith. Now ne’ūm occurs more than 300 times but almost always refers to the speech of God. In only three passages does ne’ūm stand before the names of persons: Balaam (Num. 24:3), King David (2 Sam. 23:1), and Ithiel (Prov. 30:1). The first two are evidently unsuitable, because the rāwī is neither a Gentile prophet nor a king, but Ithiel is recommended by more than mere elimination.

The phrase in Prov. 30:1 is ne’ūm hag-geber le-Ithiel, which Ibn Ezra (like the King James Bible translators) understood to mean “the words of the man to Ithiel.” It is clear, however, that al-Harīzī took the phrase to mean “the words of the man, namely the words belonging to Ithiel,” because he uses both ne’ūm hag-geber le-Ithiel in Maqāmah 25 and ne’ūm hag-geber Ithiel in all other Maḥbarōt (except the fifth, which begins with wa-anī) in the sense “thus spoke the man Ithiel.”

Let us now consider the name of the rāwī in al-Harīrī, al-Hārith ibn Hammān. In his preface al-Harīrī states that ‘Isā ibn Hishām, the rāwī in Badī‘ al-Zamān's prototype Maqāmāt, is an obscure person (de Sacy, I, 22). Not so al-Hārith ibn Hammām. The name is derived from a ḥadīth uttered by the prophet Muḥammad concerning the naming of children. It reads: “The most fitting (aṣdaquhā) are al-Hārith and Hammām, and the most hateful Harb and Murrah” (Chenery, I, 270). Al-Hārith is “one who plows” and thus labors to earn his livelihood; al-Hammām is “one who is burdened with anxieties.” This is the opinion of Sharīshī in his comment on Maqāmah 1 (Bulaq, 1876, I, 22), and of Ibn Khallikān as cited by de Sacy (Amsterdam, 1968, I, 1). Although the association of Hārith with Muhammad's Hādīth might seem farfetched, I have chosen to rely on these two prominent Arabic scholars.

The name Ithiel recommends itself for three reasons. First, it occurs in the Book of Proverbs which is associated with the wisdom of Solomon, somewhat as Hārith ibn Hammām is associated with the wisdom of Muḥammad. Second, some of the sayings of Ithiel in Prov. 30 seem to imply the qualities of al-Harīrī's narrator, for example:

Two things have I asked from thee, do not deny me them before I die: remove far from me vanity and lies; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with my allotted portion, lest I become satiated and deny Thee, and say, “Who is the Lord?”, or lest I be poor and steal and violate the name of God

(Prov. 30:7-9).

Ithiel was a scholar. It is likely al-Harīzī, like Sharīshī (I, 22) and Ibn Khallikān (de Sacy, I, 1), regarded the rāwī¹ as al-Harīrī's double. He must have thought that Ithiel the ḥakam as a maggīd² was a good double for a learned author.

No doubt al-Harīzī went about choosing a Hebrew equivalent for an Arabic name in the same way as he would choose any Hebrew word to render an Arabic one. This is how he speaks of his procedure in the preface to his translation of Maimonides' commentary on Mishnah Zera‘īm (said to be his first translation from Arabic into Hebrew, done between 1194 and 1197): “This is the method which I use in translation: in most cases I translate word for word, after having striven to comprehend the topic. When I encounter a difficult Arabic word that I want to explain (le-fārēsh), I find three or four Hebrew words, the best of which I choose. … The scholars of all nations have agreed that no one can translate a book without knowing three things: (1) the secret of the source-language, (2) the secret of the receptor language, and (3) the secret of the wisdom in the material translated.”

II ABū ZAYD AL-SARūJī EQUALS HEBER THE KENITE OF ZAANANNIM.

The associations that governed al-Harīzī's choice can be grouped under three subheadings, namely: (A) the prohibition of wine-drinking;³ (B) vagabondage; and (C) linguistic traits.

A. Abū Zayd is represented in the Maqāmāt as involved with wine-drinking until the last Maqāmah, in which he repents and announces that henceforth he will be a good Muslim and of course drink no more. According to Yāqūt and Sharīshī, the character is patterned on a friend and pupil of al-Harīrī who drank and then repented.⁴

Interestingly enough, the name chosen by al-Harīzī does not in the Bible belong to a Jew. A particular law of the Kenites renders Heber the Kenite a better counterpart of the Muslim Abū Zayd than would a Jew.

Commenting on 1 Chron. 2:55, “And the families of scribes who dwelt at Jabez … these are the Qinim who came of Hammath, the father of the house of Rechab,” David Qimḥi (Ra DaQ, d. 1235) and others say that the Qinim mentioned here are identical with the Kenites, and that the house of Rechab is identical with the Rechabites mentioned by Jeremiah (35:2-10), where the prophet is ordered by the Lord to bring the Rechabites into one of the chambers of the Lord and to give them wine to drink. Jeremiah obeyed but the Rechabites refused to drink, saying, “We will drink no wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us saying, You shall drink no wine, neither you nor your sons forever, nor plant vineyards, nor have them.” Here then Heber the Kenite is associated with people who are forbidden to drink wine.

B. There is no need to prove that Abū Zayd is a vagabond, since this is clear from every chapter-heading in the Maqāmāt. However, in order to be completely convinced it is enough to read the last assembly (tr. Steingass, [London, 1898], II, 178), where Abū Zayd speaks about himself in this respect. Certainly such tricks as those described in the Maqāmāt could not have continued very long if they all occurred in one place.

In Judg. 4:11 we read the following about al-Harīzī's hero: “Now Heber the Kenite had severed himself from the Kenites, even from the children of Hobab, the father-in-law of Moses, and had pitched his tent as far as Elon in Zaanannim, which is by Kadesh.”

The Kenites, as described in the Bible, were a group of nomadic metal-working clans. They are enumerated with the Kenizites and the Kadmonites (Gen. 15:19). They were allies of Israel, as we can see from the relation between Jethro, the priest of Midian, and Moses (Exod. 18), and from the fact that Deborah, the wife of Heber the Kenite, put an end to Sisera, the enemy of Israel (Judg. 4:21).

Heber the Kenite is associated with Cain, the first wanderer, and the Kenites were nomadic clans, two facts that make al-Harīzī's hero a vagabond like al-Harīrī's Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī and Badī‘'s Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī.

Before dealing with the third subheading, we must clarify the last word in the hero's surname, al-Sarūjī. Is it merely a kunyat al-kibar, a surname of old age, as Sharīshī and Ibn al-‘Arabī tell us (Sharīshī, I, 22-23), or did a place named Sarūj actually exist, as did its Biblical counterpart Zaanannim? Our sources prove that al-Sarūjī may be a nisbah derived from an actual place name. Ibn al-Athīr, in his al-Kāmil fī al-Ta’rīkh, (Beirut, 1966; X, 324-25), reports the fall of Sarūj among the events which occurred in the year 1100.

C. Linguistic traits. The Biblical Zaanannim, which stands in apposition to the Arabic Sarūj, is derived from the root ṣ‘n which means “to wander,” “to be nomadic,” or “to move.” Isaiah (33:20) used this verb in the future negative, ohel bal yiṣ‘an, “an immovable tent.” In Hebrew it is from this root that ṣo‘ăni was later constructed. In Arabic this same root z‘n means similarly “to move” or “to depart.” In the beginning of the fourth assembly al-Harīrī uses the verb za‘antu, “I traveled” (de Sacy, I, 38), and al-Harīzī translated it with the same Hebrew root, ṣa‘antī (Peres, p. 27). On the other hand, the root of the Arabic noun Sarūj is srj, which means a saddle (plural surūj), or as a verb, “to saddle (an animal).”

In the last assembly, when he reveals his identity to those who do not know him, Abū Zayd says inter alia nasha’tu fī Sarūj, warubbītu ‘alā al-surūj (“in Sarūj I was reared, and in the saddles I got my training). Al-Harīzī was no doubt able to render this important pun eloquently in the last Maqāmah, a play on Zaanannim and some form of the verb ṣa‘an.

III QAṭī‘AT AL-RABī‘ EQUALS MIZPEH GILEAD

This geographical name, “al-Rabī‘'s fief,” which appears at the beginning of the 24th Maqāmah, designates a large and populous quarter of a suburb of Baghdad (Assemblies of al-Harīrī, tr. T. Chenery [London, 1867], I, 493); as we learn from the content of the Maqāmah, it was also a place of pleasure and entertainment. It consisted of an inner fief and an outer one. One was situated to the right of Bāb al-Karkh and the other near the Nahr al-Qallā‘īn quarter. The source does not indicate which fief was located in which section, but the locations were separated from each other on the west side of the Tigris. This was known as Qaṭī‘at al-Rabī‘, because the ground was given by al-Manṣūr (754-75) to his ḥājib (“chamberlain”) Abū al-Faḍl al-Rabī‘ ibn Yūnis. Later, after the advent of al-Manṣūr's son al-Mahdī (775-85), al-Rabī‘ moved to the east side and received an additional fief, while retaining his holdings on the west side. The estates of al-Rabī‘ were therefore on both sides of the river (J. Lassner. The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages [Detroit, 1970], index, p. 310). As to al-Rabī‘ himself, Chenery, citing Ibn Khallikān, says that al-Rabī‘ enjoyed the greatest power during the reign of his patrons al-Manṣūr and al-Mahdī.

The events in the 24th Maḥbaret are introduced by niqro’ niqre’ti, a phrase from 2 Sam. 1:6, where it is followed by the words be-har ha-Gilbo‘a, “on the Mount of Gilboa.” Why did al-Harīzī reject be-har ha-Gilbo‘a and choose from elsewhere (Jud. 11:29) Miṣpeh Gil‘ad for his rendering of Qaṭī‘at al-Rabī‘? The Mount of Gilboa, the place where Saul and Jonathan met their deaths, the place cursed by King David—“Ye Mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew nor rain upon you” (2 Sam. 1:21)—was presumably ill-suited as a site for the festivities described in the narrative. What features of Miṣpeh Gil‘ad did then positively recommend that place-name to al-Harīzī? The following facts must be considered: Miṣpeh Gil‘ad, which was located east of the Jordan, was part of the naḥalāh (“inheritance”) allocated by Moses to half of Manasseh's tribe, and the other half of this tribe's inheritance was west of the Jordan in the allotment made by Joshua (Josh. 17).

Thus Miṣpeh Gil‘ad is associated with the granting of lands by persons in supreme authority (Moses and Joshua), and parallels the caliph's grant of the fiefs to al-Rabī‘. Furthermore—and this seems to be the most specific and therefore most decisive aspect of the matter—the lands granted to Manasseh lay on both banks of the Jordan, just as the fiefs granted to al-Rabī‘ lay on both banks of the Tigris. In addition to all this, Gilead, or rather Mizpeh of Gilead, brings to the mind of any Jew well acquainted with the Bible the personality of Jephthah the Gileadite. Judg. 11:1 says, we-Yiftaḥ hag-Gil‘adi hayāh gibbōr ḥayil we-hu ben iššāh, “and Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valor, and he was the son of a harlot.” Concerning al-Rabī‘ Chenery, citing Ibn Khallikān, says that he “enjoyed the greatest power during the reigns of his patrons al-Manṣūr and al-Mahdī, and was of low origin.” His ancestor Abū Farwat al-Haffār had been a slave of the Caliph ‘Uthmān ibn ‘Affān, and having received his freedom, became a gravedigger, whence his surname al-Haffār, “the digger” (Chenery, I, 493).

It remains to be added that on the basis of passages like Jer. 46:11, ‘alī Gil‘ad‘ u-qeḥī ṣorī betulat bat Miṣrayim (“go up to Gilead and take balm, O Virgin of Egypt”), al-Harīzī thought of Gilead as a place to which people might go for a cure. In the Taḥkemōnī (ed. Kaminka, sha‘ar 48, p. 376) he sends his narrator to Gilead for just that purpose. In al-Harīzī's view, Gilead had the same kind of restorative effect as was associated with Qaṭī‘at al-Rabī‘, where the narrator and a group of young people went to enjoy a life of leisure. Al-Harīrī, in order to describe the beauty of one garden in the Qaṭī‘ah, uses a quotation from the Koran (10:25). He says: (“and we came forth to a garden which had assumed its gilding and adorned itself, whose flowers were various in their types and hues”). Sharīshī has filled not less than four complete large-format pages with prose and poetry in order to show what was meant by this Koranic verse and the one following it. Al-Harīzī, knowing what effect these two rhymed Arabic clauses would have on the reader, and wishing to give a similar impression to his Bible-knowing readers, produced a piece of rhymed poetry using all his imagination and employing all his superb figurative style in order to achieve his aim (Peres, pp. 203-04).

All in all, al-Harīzī could hardly have found a more felicitous counterpart to Qaṭī‘at al-Rabī‘ than Miṣpeh Gile‘ad.

IV

Al-kumayt al-shamūs
(the strong ruddy wine)

(de Sacy, I, 279)

ḥolat ahabīm (the love-sick one)
me‘oreret shīr ‘agabīm
(stirring up love songs)
hi bat ha-‘anabim
(she, the daughter of the grapes)

(Maḥberot Ithiel, [Tel-Aviv, 1951], p. 202)

A pun presents the translator with a difficulty; a phrase of two punning words may drive him to despair! Al-Harīzī's solution of this problem affords us a particularly good glimpse into his workshop, because the Hebrew version seems altogether strange and unwieldy, until we realize that by it al-Harīzī intends to call to the reader's (the learned reader's) mind a Biblical association that will parallel the Arabic phrase. Kumayt is originally the diminutive of akmat and means “reddish-brown, tawny, chestnut, bay, maroon.” Therefore, by metonymy, it came to denote a bay horse, male or female, or a tawny ruddy wine (Lisān al-‘Arab, II, 81-82). Kumayt in both meanings is to be found in the Mu‘allaqāt odes. In the first ode, Imru-al-Qays, the wandering king, says: “a gay bay, sliding the saddle-felt from his back's thwart, just as a smooth pebble slides off the rain cascading” (al-Mu‘allaqāt al-sab‘, with al-Zawzanī's commentary [Cairo, 1967], p. 35; The Seven Odes, tr. A. J. Arberry, 1967, p. 65). Tarafah employs Kumayt in the second ode in the sense of wine. He says, “of them the first to rise before the censurers awake, and to drink tawny wine which sparkles when the clear stream is poured into it” (al-Zawzanī, p. 72; Arberry, p. 79). The verse speaks of the first of three enjoyments that make the author's life worth living, the other two being assistance to a warrior surrounded by enemies and the presence of a female companion.

Shamūs means restive or obstinate. Metonymically it could mean a horse or wine, because a horse can be restive and excessive drinking of wine induces stubborn behavior (Lisān al-‘Arab, VI, 113-15). Al-Harīrī employs shamūs in two other Maqāmāt, the thirty-second and the fiftieth (de Sacy, II, 420 and 674) with the meaning of restive horse. Unfortunately no Hebrew translation of these two assemblies is available for comparison.

Thus the Arabic phrase has a secondary meaning (a meaning excluded by the context, but still part of the verbal intricacy, and one of which the reader trained in such rhetorical devices as tawriyah would certainly be conscious). Al-Harīzī, who had set himself the task of proving that Hebrew was no poorer than Arabic in linguistic flexibility, could not be content with some simple Hebrew phrase for “red wine.”

Holat ahabīm is based (with a slight change necessitated by the rhyme) on ḥolat ahabāh, “sick with love,” in Song of Songs (2:5). The association with wine is immediate—hebi’anī el bēt ha-yayin in the preceding verse. Now ḥolat ahabāh, by itself, would mean wine to no one, and therefore al-Harīzī glosses it with two more phrases. Of these, bat ha-‘anabīm is a standard expression for wine, both in Arabic and in Hebrew.⁵

At this point al-Harīzī could expect the careful reader to stop and ask why bat ha-‘anabīm was not by itself sufficient?

The metaphor must hinge on the languor shared by the lovesick and those with whom strong wine—kumayt shamūs—has run away.

But the phrase is still off—after all it is the drinker, not the drink, who experiences the languor. There is a further reason that justifies the boldness of al-Harīzī's image. If the reader familiar with the Arabic language looks for the tawriyah-like second meaning of kumayt shamūs, he will find it only a few verses away from ḥolat ahabāh, in 1:9: le-sūsatī be-rikbē par‘oh dimmitik ra‘yatī. An explicit comparison of the ḥolat ahabāh to a mare serves as the counterpart of the secondary meaning, the second metonymy, in the Arabic.

As Shirmann mentions, al-Harīzī did not biblicize all the names in the Maqāmāt. It seems that only those that he felt played an important role were biblicized. The others were dealt with differently. The following examples will give some idea of the system which al-Harīzī adopted in rendering such names into Hebrew.

(1) Abū ‘Ubādah, the prominent poet Walīd ‘Ubayd al-Buḥturī, who lived at the beginning of the 9th century, became in the Maḥberōt Ithiel aḥad ham-meshōrerīm, “one of the poets.”

(2) Sībawayh (died ca. 795), the great Persian philologist and the composer of the first systematic textbook of Arabic grammar in usage even in our day—known simply as al-Kitāb, “the Book”—was replaced by the phrase sefer ba‘alē had-diqdūq wesōdōtāw, “the book of the people who are masters of grammar and its mysteries” (de Sacy, p. 781; Peres, p. 203).

(3) Qaylah, who is said to have been the ancestress of the families of Aws and Khazraj in Yathrib in the time of Muḥammad, was reduced in Hebrew to mishpaḥtī, “my family” (de Sacy, p. 34, Peres, p. 20).

(4) Ka-nadmānay jadhīmah maḥabbah⁶—“the boon companions of Jadhīmah in affection”—this is Jadhīmah al-Abrash, son of Malik al-Azdī. His two boon companions were Malik and ‘Uqayl. The three dwelt together and were faithful to one another for forty years, until death separated them. They were alluded to in Hebrew by the phrase qeshūrīm be-ḥūṭ ha-emūnāh, “bound with the thread of faithfulness.”

(5) Āl Sāsān, “race of Sāsān,” known in Arabic literature as the legendary chief and patron of all beggars and mountebanks, are referred to as merudīm ṣerīkīm, “wretched poor” (de Sacy, p. 23; Peres, p. 11).

(6) Āl Ghassān, the princes of Ghassān, were changed into negīdīm u-melakīm, “rulers and kings” (ibid.).

Although these examples were not biblicized, the words or phrases used instead show that al-Harīzī knew everything about them. They were treated in such a manner because it appeared that the role they played was so trivial that al-Harīzī did not find it necessary to look for a Biblical personality to replace them.

However, two proper names kept their identity in Maḥberōt Ithiel:

Al-Samaw’al (Samuel) ibn ‘Adiyā, the well-known Jewish poet who lived in Arabia during the 6th century b.c., proved his loyalty and faithfulness by sacrificing his own son's life for his friend, the prominent poet Imrū al-Qays, by refusing to hand over the five pieces of protective armor to Qays's enemy. This made him known all over Arabia, and even today, when an Arab wants to emphasize someone's loyalty he uses the proverb awfā min al-Samaw’al, “more loyal than al-Samaw’al”

(Mishle ‘Arab, ed. Sh. N. Yehudah [Jerusalem, 1939], part 2, proverb No. 2342).

The other proper name is Nehar Perat, the Euphrates River, which he does not biblicize, and no wonder, because it is mentioned over thirty times in the Bible.

At the beginning of the twenty-second Maqamah al-Harīrī uses the word al-Furāt at the end of three successive sentences (the second, third, and fourth), each with a different meaning: (1) the Euphrates, (2) a proper noun, and (3) an adjective meaning “sweet.”

Al-Harīzī followed, in his own way, the pattern of al-Harīrī and ended the same sentences with the letters p, r, t. The first and the third mean the Euphrates, and the second could be regarded as a proper noun, ben Pōrāt, taken from Gen. 49:22, in apposition to Banī al-Furāt,⁷ but the exact Biblical meaning of ben pōrāt is “fruitful bough.” For al-Harīzī, a poet, the rhyming was more important than the exact meaning, even though all the possible meanings could be symbolic of the river.

Notes

1. It is worth mentioning that the rāwī used by Badī‘ al-Zamān, who introduced this genre of literature, probably came to replace the isnād, or chain of authorities, which accompanies the telling of any event, especially the ḥadīth. This eyewitness rāwī has no direct connection with the institution of the rāwī before the 8th century, when the art of converting verbal communications into literary efforts was not widespread among the Arabs. In those days literary manifestations were thus preserved essentially by oral tradition. As there were no books of general literature, the need felt by professional people to preserve this material created a kind of narrator of poetry, which led to the institution of the rāwī.

2. Al-Harīzī's maggīd also has no direct connection with the meaning of this word acquired about a century later, when the maggīd came to denote two special occupations: first, the popular and often itinerant preacher; and second, an angel of mundane spirit who teaches in mysterious ways the scholars worthy of such communication.

3. The plot of the 48th Maqāmah begins with the hero Abū Zayd arriving at the mosque in Basra, where he hears a discussion about ḥurūf al-badal (permutative letters). Abū Zayd entered not to learn syntax but to get money. As the prayers began he had to remain silent. When they were over, an elderly man of great eloquence emerged from the congregation asking whether anyone could tell him of a penance for his transgression. Sharīshī in his comment relates the following story, taken from al-Mas‘ūdī: The name of this person was Ibn Qitrī, the qadi of Mazār, a town in the neighborhood of Basra, who once repented of drinking but after a while returned to his former vice. That day, when he was in the Banū Harām mosque in Basra, he repented again and asked for penance for his sin. Abū Zayd arose from his place, assuming the appearance of a virtuous man, and in a most rhetorical speech claimed to be a fugitive from Sarūj after it had fallen into the hands of the Rūm, or Byzantines (instead of saying the Ifranj or Franks), who slew the believers, plundered their property, and took their women into captivity. Abū Zayd added that he had lost all his possessions and that his daughter had been taken captive, because he now had no money to ransom her. Then he said, wa-a‘innī ‘alā fakāk ibnatī min yad al-‘idā fa-bidhā tanmaḥī al-ma’āthim ‘amman tamarrada (“and help me to rescue my daughter from the hostile enemy hands, for by such acts you will wipe out the sins of those who have rebelled”). When Abū Zayd finished reciting his verses, the qadi was convinced that the old Bohemian was honest and gave him, according to Sharīshī's comment (ibid.), ten dinars towards the ransom. Then the old swindler went to a tavern at a safe distance from the mosque and spent there the money.

4. The circumstances in which al-Harīrī was inspired to compose his Maqāmāt and to assign the leading role to his hero Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, are related by the author in the Irshād al-Arīb of Yāqūt (ed. Margoliouth [London, 1931], V, 167-68) and in the Sharḥ al-Maqāmāt al-Harīrīyah of Sharīshī (I, 13). His son Abū al-Qāsim ‘Abd Allāh tells this story as related by Ibn Khallikān in his Biographical Dictionary (de Slane's translation, 1961, II, 490). Both Yāqūt and Ibn Khallikān, each relying on a different source, identify the old Bohemian Abū Zayd of Sarūj with al-Muṭahhar ibn Salām al-Baṣrī. Ibn Khallikān (ibid., p. 491), who drew his information from the book Anbā al-Ruwāt fī anbā’ al-Nuḥāt by the qadi Jamāl al-Dīn Abū al-Hasan ‘Alī ibn Yūsuf al-Shaybānī al-Qifṭī, the vezier of Aleppo (d. 1248-49), says that the real name of the person designated as Abū Zayd was al-Muṭahhar ibn Salām, who was a native of Basra, a grammarian, and a pupil of al-Harīrī, under whom he studied in that city and thanks to whose lessons he attained proficiency. Yāqūt (ibid., p. 173) tells the following story: when al-Harīrī heard that his ṣāḥib (friend) al-Muṭahhar ibn Salām al-Baṣrī, the hero of his Maqāmāt, had gotten drunk, he wrote three lines of poetry, telling him that drinking wine defiles him, since he is called Muṭahhar, which means “cleansed,” and that a strong person's deeds should justify the name his father had given him. Therefore he should either refrain from drinking in order to remain “cleansed,” or else change his name if he wishes to continue drinking wine. When al-Muṭahhar received these verses, he came barefoot to al-Harīrī holding his Koran, upon which he swore never to drink again.

5. Such metaphorical names for wine were a familiar device in those days among Jewish and Arab poets alike. For example, al-Harīzī uses it in his Taḥkemoni (ed. Kaminka, pp. 239 and 297)—bat hag-gefannim, “daughter of vines.” Abū Nuwās (died between 813 and 815) uses in his Dīwān (Egypt, 1902, p. 216) the same expression in Arabic, bint al-‘inab, “daughter of grapes,” for wine.

6. The background of these three Arabic words is the story of the narrator in Maqāmah 24 concerning the eleven youngsters with whom he was going on a wonderful spring day to one of the magnificent gardens of Qaṭī‘at al-Rabī‘, where a convival symposium in the old Greek style of after-dinner entertainment and intellectual discussion was about to be held.

7. These four sons represented a family highly distinguished in civil service during the 4th century, and they were named after their grandfather, Mūsā ibn al-Hasan al-Furāt.