SOURCE: Beeston, A. F. L. “Al-Hamadhānī, Al-Harīrī and the Maqāmāt Genre.” In ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, edited by Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant, and G. Rex Smith, pp. 125-35. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Beeston examines the Maqāmāt genre and al-Harīrī's contribution to it.]

The telling and hearing of anecdotes has been a favourite pastime in all ages and places: round the bedouin camp-fire, in the literary salons of ‘Abbasid Baghdad, in the English public house and over the after-dinner port. The nature of an anecdote varies enormously. In length it may range from the retailing of the briefest piece of repartee, to what is virtually a short story; in content it may deal with a humorous or pithy saying, a remarkable event, a piece of literary criticism, a riddle, or even (in the Arabic ambience) a grammatical observation or a well-expressed piece of religious homily. But the anecdote proper has three features. First, the point of the piece should be set against a background of circumstantial detail which adds to its vividness. Secondly, it is either true or presented as true: a repartee gains greatly in effect if presented, for instance, as “what Churchill once said to de Gaulle”, even if it is manifest that the teller has no means of knowing what Churchill really said, and an anecdote is hence most often presented on the authority of a transmitter (Ar. rāwī) or narrator, whether historical or imaginary. Thirdly, each anecdote is a completely isolated and self-sufficient unit; though, of course, collections of anecdotes are often made, sometimes with the unifying principle of a common topic, and anecdotal collections set in a chronological framework can form the basis for a rather unsophisticated historical narrative, of the “Little Arthur's History of England” type (or, for that matter, al-Mas‘ūdī's fourth/tenth century Murūj al-dhahab, which is essentially anecdotal history), or for the picaresque novel, in which the independent episodes are strung together by the presence of a single protagonist throughout.

Collections of anecdotes in Arabic literature can be said to begin with ḥadīth, inasmuch as these are organized into collections of historical anecdotes about the sayings and doings of the Prophet and his Companions.¹ Later, we get collections usually centred on a single topic, like the Kitāb al-Bukhalā’ (“Book of Misers”) of al-Jāḥiz and Akhbār al-ṭiwāl (“Tales of Long-lived Men”) of al-Dīnawārī (d. c. 281/894). But the most voluminous of all come from Abū ‘Alī al-Muḥassin al-Tanūkhī (327-84/939-94), who after his retirement from active service as a judge (qāḍī) devoted his later years to the compilation of several anecdotal works, including the vast Nishwār al-muḥāḍarah (“Desultory Conversations”) in ten volumes, of which over half are lost.

Something has already been said about the pre-‘Abbasid oratorical (khuṭbah) style, marked by strong parallelism and “balance” but devoid of rhyme.² In the third/ninth century a new trend set in, whereby this style was married to ornamental features derived from verse, namely rhyming and tropes (the latter collectively referred to as badī‘),³ producing a new kind of saj‘ (to be distinguished from the so-called “saj‘ of the soothsayers”),⁴ which rapidly achieved a tremendous dominance over prose writing. The critic al-Mubarrad (d. 285 or 6/898-9), already divides prose into the categories of khuṭbah, kalām manthūr (unadorned prose) and saj‘, apparently regarding the last as primarily differentiated from khuṭbah by rhyme. An excellent example of the differentiation can be seen in two documents quoted by the historian Abū Ja‘far Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Tabarī (d. 310/923): one is an address of the caliph al-Mu‘tazz delivered shortly after his accession in 252/866, in conventional khuṭbah style, markedly parallelistic but unrhymed; the other, a contemporary letter of Muḥammad b. ‘Abdullāh al-Khuzā‘ī, criticizing those who supported the caliph's policy, which is rhymed and makes much use of poetical tropes.⁵ The latter is significantly introduced by the historian with the verb ansha’a, “he composed”, and it is in fact an early specimen of what later came to be known as inshā’, “chancery style”, regularly employed for diplomatic and chancery documents. The line drawn between saj‘ and inshā’ is not easy to draw, but perhaps one could say that, while both use rhyme, the other adornments are more to the fore in inshā’ than in saj‘.

In the following century the prevalence of saj‘ made great strides. The most famous preacher (khaṭīb) of the age, Ibn Nubāṭah (335-74/946-84), used it for his sermons, and in the secular domain a variety of authors developed the risālah into the “ornate epistle”, of which a noteworthy exponent was Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. al-‘Abbās al-Khwārazmi (323-83/934 93).⁶ At this stage saj‘ was still confined to the religious and political khuṭbah and belles-lettristic works of the ornate epistle type.

In the second half of the fourth/tenth century, a young man from Hamadhān in western Persia, Aḥmad b. al-Husayn al-Hamadhānī (358-98/968-1008), set out to make an impression on the literary world, and in particular to challenge the position of al-Khwārazmī, at that time the acknowledged master of the ornate epistle. But Hamadhānī's “Epistles”, though undoubtedly graceful, did not win him any recognized superiority over the older man. He then boldly invented a new genre—a feat which gained him the sobriquet of Badī‘ al-Zamān, “Marvel of the Age”, by which he has subsequently been known. His originality lay first and foremost in the use of saj‘ as a vehicle for anecdotes of the kind collected by al-Tanūkhī (some of whose compilations must have appeared before al-Hamadhānī's magnum opus). In the second place, instead of doing as the anecdotists had hitherto done, and attributing the anecdotes either to a genuine historical personage, or to some verisimilous authority such as “my grandfather” or “one of my neighbours”, he consistently throughout the work gives each episode on the authority of the same manifestly fictional narrator, whom he names ‘Isā b. Hishām. In this way he frankly acknowledges the fictional character of the narratives, and is the first Arabic author to compose a confessedly fictional prose work (the animal fables of the Kalīlah wa-Dimnah cycle, though in themselves fictional, are presented only within a frame story in which a purportedly historical character tells the fables).⁷

The novel use of saj‘ for narrative purposes is perhaps the reason for the author's choice of title for his collection, which he called Maqāmāt (“Standings”): anecdotes in unadorned prose had normally been told at majālis (sing. majlis: sittings, sessions), where both narrator and audience were seated, whereas standing was the conventional posture for the orator (khaṭīb) using saj‘. The point has been obscured by many European translators with their use of either the ambiguous term “assemblies” for maqāmāt, or the outright mistranslation “sessions, seances”.

Al-Hamadhānī's Maqāmāt comprise fifty-two pieces: the three main editions each have a total of fifty-one maqāmahs, but the Cairo and Istanbul editions have one that is not in the Beirut edition, while the latter has one that is not in either of the other two. There is a story that the author boasted of having triumphed over his rival al-Khwārazmī because he himself had composed “over 400” maqāmāt whereas the other could not produce even one. The tale cannot be taken at face value: forty and 400 have always been in the Near East idiomatic expressions for “an indefinite number”, and there are no grounds for supposing that we only possess one-eighth of the original total.

There is a certain degree of structural irregularity in these maqāmāt. In a majority of them, the narrator is ‘Isā b. Hishām, but the protagonist is an individual named Abū ’l-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī. Yet there are some in which the latter makes no appearance at all and the protagonist is the narrator himself; others in which Abū ’-Fatḥ is only dragged in peripherally, without having played any real part in the story. In the maqāmah “of the Maḍīrah” (a much relished item of cuisine), Abū ’-Fatḥ is indeed present, but plays effectively the role only of a second narrator, while the main gist of the story is the vulgar boasting of the nouveau riche host who invites him to a meal (English readers may care to look at chapter 56 of George Borrow's Bible in Spain, where Borrow's Moorish guide in Tangier delivers a harangue in somewhat the same style). Particularly striking is the very brief and unsatisfactory maqāmah “of the Ape”, in which ‘Isā b. Hishām sees a crowd of people and, having struggled through them with some difficulty, discovers that they are watching a showman with a performing ape—the showman being identified as Abū ’-Fatḥ; yet the whole piece is devoid of any point, beyond the description of the narrator's struggles to get to the front. It is difficult to avoid thinking that this is only a fragment, intended to be filled in later on by witty patter from the mouth of the showman, Abū ’-Fatḥ. One or two pieces (e.g. that “of the Lion”) are made up of two separate episodes having only the slenderest link between them (and again, the narrator is protagonist, and Abū ’-Fatḥ appears only at the end, having played no part whatever in the narrative). It does not seem, moreover, that the author has given any thought to creating a recognizable personality for Abū ’-Fatḥ: he is sometimes young, sometimes an old man; sometimes thin and sometimes well-built; and although he is normally presented as master of a marvellous flow of language, this is not displayed in all cases (note the cases of “the Maḍīrah” and “the Ape” mentioned above).

Everyone will no doubt draw his own conclusions from all this. One possible view is that, having regard to the relatively early age at which the author died, his Maqāmāt are not in a fully finished state, and that, had he lived, he would probably have tidied up the work, e.g. by giving the ape's showman a speaking part, and dividing “the Lion” into two separate maqāmabs; it is more open to question whether he would have gone so far as to revise radically those pieces in which Abū ’-Fatḥ does not appear at all, so as to make him a real protagonist of a picaresque quasi-novel. On the other hand, J. N. Mattock has adopted a different standpoint, suggesting that the work as we have it is designed as a finished unity, and that the abnormalities are purposely inserted in order to create an effect of surprise that has its own entertainment value.⁸ However, surprise can only be achieved if there is already an expectation of something different from what actually occurs; but, since the genre at this time was entirely new, it is not easy to see how there can have been an expectation on the part of the reader or hearer of any particular structure. As against this, referring to the structure of smaller entities than each separate narrative, A. Kilito has remarked that the individual maqāmāt draw upon a number of genres, themes and styles, and has suggested that “surprise”, in this context, consists of identifying these prototypes and appreciating the novel manner in which they are applied and combined, while the still unfixed state of the genre teases the reader's expectation of how each narrative, taken as a whole, will develop.⁹

It is questionable how far the content of the Maqāmāt was Hamadhānī's original invention; many are elaborations or versions of what seem to have been common topoi in anecdotage—the theme of a ragged and destitute person who nevertheless proves to be a miracle of wit and eloquence appears in Tanūkhī's al-Faraj ba‘d al-shiddah (‘Relief after Distress”),¹⁰ and there are other echoes as well, though they are given a new look by being decked out in saj‘. Another of the Faraj stories turns on the point of a man saying to his neighbour, “How would you fancy a roast kid, a pot-au-feu and some cold dishes etc.?”, but, when the neighbour turns up for the expected feast, he is told, “I only said, ‘How would you fancy?’, I never said I had the things, for my larder is empty”: the same basic point is elaborated in a different way in Hamadhānī's al-Maqāmah al-Nahīdiyyah (“of Fresh Butter”) and al-Maqāmah al-Majā‘iyyah (“of Famine”).

A feature of the social scene in Hamadhānī's time was a slightly prurient fascination with the seamy side of life—perhaps a reaction from the over-refined and over-sophisticated society of the great cities in ‘Abbasid times. The literary manifestations of this trend have been exhaustively studied in C. E. Bosworth's Medieval Islamic Underworld. This underworld is summed up by the term Banū Sāsān, which in this context has nothing to do with genuine scions of the Sasanian dynasty, but alludes to a common type of boast made by beggars and rapscallions in all societies, of being persons of noble ancestry down on their luck. This term is an all-embracing one for vagabonds of every type, from highwaymen, cutpurses and housebreakers down to mendicants who extract charity by means of fraudulently simulated disabilities (sometimes, indeed, by actual self-mutilation), including also hypocritical hedge-preachers (wu‘‘āz, quṣṣāṣ) whose powerful sermons are in contradiction with their private life. This interest appears already in the third/ninth century in an anecdote in the Kitāb al-Bukhalā’ of Jāḥiz. Here an individual named Khālid b. Yazīd, on being approached by a beggar, fumbles in his pocket for a small copper coin (fals) but by mistake hands out a silver dirham; on discovering his error he demands the coin back, and, when the bystanders expostulate at this as unfair, he says, “I know this kind of fellow, he's only a farthing-beggar, not a sixpenny-beggar”, and goes on to explain that his knowledge is due to the fact that he himself had formerly belonged to the Banū Sāsān and practised mendicancy in various guises. The anecdote continues, “and he was the person who gave a recommendation (waṣiyyah) to his son to follow the same path”; however, the phrasing of the recommendation which follows is a typical literary exercise, rather than a detailed exposition. For the latter we have to wait until somewhere in the early or mid fourth/tenth century, when a certain Abū Dulaf Mis‘ar b. Muhalhil al-Khazrajī devoted a lengthy qaṣīdah to the trickeries of vagabonds, and an explanation of the canting terms they employ (only a few such had been mentioned in the anecdote of Khālid b. Yazīd).¹¹ To some extent, the Maqāmāt cater for similar tastes, but they are very far from going into the “curious” and somewhat scabrous detail of Abū Dulaf. (Though there is a maqāmah entitled al-Sāsāniyyah, it is a very slight thing, containing no more than a couple of pieces of versified beggar's patter.) Indeed, a recent study—which, as the examples below may suggest, perhaps somewhat overstates its case—has put forward the view that the Maqāmāt have an essentially moral purpose; J. T. Monroe observes, like Kilito, that they draw upon established antecedents, including ḥadīth and homily, and suggests that Hamadhānī parodies these elements or presents them in improper contexts or sequences, thus placing a burden of logical, and ultimately moral, discrimination upon the reader.¹²

It was practically de rigueur for any literary man of the time to have at least some capability for versifying; but Hamadhānī's excursions in this direction are extremely mediocre. Apart from some quotations from well-known poets, the bits of verse in his Maqāmāt are decidedly sparse, and to a large extent confined to fragments (hardly better than doggerel) put into the mouth of Abū ’-Fatḥ as a sort of envoi at the end of an anecdote; it is noticeable that a similar piece is put into the mouth of the protagonist in the second of the Faraj anecdotes mentioned above.¹³

Writing in which the main point resides in a display of linguistic skill poses some intractable problems for a translator; yet most of Hamadhānī's Maqāmāt can be read with pleasure even in a version which perforce does not reproduce that feature. The following rendering of the maqāmah “of Armenia” may serve as an example of the narrative anecdote, albeit stripped of the allure of the language:

‘Isā b. Hishām tells the following tale. We were once on our way home from a trading trip in Armenia, and while journeying through the desert we fell in with some of its sons on the fringes thereof; they forced our camels to halt in that land of the ostrich, until they had rifled our baggage and relieved our mounts of the burden. There we had to stay during the hours of daylight, held captive by that band, tied up in groups with leather thongs, while our horses were seized and picketed. But when night followed on the tail of departing day and the canopy of stars was spread, the band made off into the deep desert, while we made our way out of it. On we went until fair Aurora had laid aside her veil of modesty and the sword of sunrise was drawn from the scabbard of darkness; but its rising found us stripped to our pelts. Surrounded by perils, we could but face up to them as we cleaved the crust of the desert. At last we got to Marāghah, where each one of us selected a travelling companion and took to the road. To me there attached himself a youth of wretched appearance, dressed in rags, named Abū ’-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī. Together we set off in quest of the staff of life, and found it where a brushwood fire was blazing in an oven Iskandarī went up to a man and asked him for a handful of salt; then he said to the baker, “Lend me the top of the stove, for I'm frozen”. Once mounted on it, he began to harangue the people about how badly off he was, and to describe his destitute condition. All the while, he was shaking out the salt from under his clothes, so as to give the impression that there was a nastiness in them [sc. that they were infested with lice]; whereat the baker cried, “Curse you! Tuck up your skirts! You've ruined our bread”, and he rushed to throw the loaves away; but Iskandarī set about gathering them up and stowing them away under his arm. I expressed admiration of the clever way he had acted, but he replied, “Just you wait, and I'll find a way of getting something to go with the bread”. He went to a man who had set out a number of clean jugs of milk, of various qualities, and asked how much they cost and whether he might have a taste. The man told him to go ahead, so he stirred his finger around in a jug, as if trying to find something he had lost; but then said, “I can't pay cash, but do you need the services of a barber-surgeon?” [ḥajjām, an unclean profession, because it included blood-letting]. “God damn you, is that what you are?” “Yes”, was the reply, whereupon the man cursed his luck and made as if to pour the milk away, but Iskandarī said, “Better me than the devil”. “Take it, and much good may it do to you,” said the man. He took it, and the two of us went away out of sight and consumed the whole lot at one go. We resumed our travels, and came to a village where Iskandarī asked the villagers for some food. One of them ran off home and brought us a bowl of milk, full to the lip and brimming over. This we sipped to the very end, and asked them for some bread, but they would not give us this except at a price. “How is it,” said Iskandarī, “that you are so free with milk but demand payment for bread?” “It was in a pan,” said the lad, “and a mouse fell into it, so we charitably give it away to travellers.” “Heavens above!” cried Iskandarī, and took the bowl and smashed it. “What a shame! What a terrible waste!” cried the lad. But our flesh crept, our stomachs turned over, and we brought up all we had eaten. “This serves us right for what we did yesterday,” said I. But Iskandarī only declaimed:

Of fastidiousness beware, clever men have no such care.
He who sups with Fate must eat scanty meal or banquet rare.
Don for one time garments new, for another ragged wear.

A riddling theme is found in the very brief maqāmah “of the Yellow One”:

‘Isā b. Hishām tells the following story. When I was about to start for home after the Pilgrimage, a man came to me saying, “I have with me a lad of yellow paternity, who'd tempt you to join the ungodly fraternity; he dances on the fingertips, and much travel has polished him up. Charity impels me to come to you, to present his plea unto you; he seeks from you a yellow bride, admired beyond measure, to all eyes a pleasure. If you consent, there will be born of them a child that will reach all lands and all ears, and when you're bent on return and have wound up your concern, he'll be before you in your homeland, so will you please display what's in your hand?” This speech I relished, and the wit of his demand, so I did what he wished. In reply he declaimed:

The begging hand puts paid to pride,
but generosity has all on its side.

(Needless to say, the yellow pair are gold coins; their child is a reputation for generosity.)

During the following century, Blachère and Masnou list five authors who are credited with compositions styled maqāmāt,¹⁴ but these are simply khuṭbahs clothed in saj‘ and apart from borrowing the name maqāmah for this species of composition, they in no way resemble the individual character of Hamadhānī's Maqāmāt. That was reserved for an author of just a century after Hamadhānī, namely Abū ’l-Hasan al-Qāsim b. ‘Alī Ibn al-Harīrī, usually known as al-Harīrī (446-516/1054-1122), who in his preface explicitly acknowledges having been inspired by Hamadhānī. But despite this, his Maqāmāt show a distinct development beyond the model. So much is this the case that his work for many centuries after entirely eclipsed his predecessor's (until this was “rediscovered” in the second half of the nineteenth century), and it is the Haririan maqāmāt that have come to be considered as the typical examples of the genre; it is indeed not unknown for literary historians to describe Harīrī's work as if such a description were applicable to all maqāmāt including those of Hamadhānī, notwithstanding the differences.

Harīrī was a grammarian, and his other writings are of a grammatical nature, with special concern for normative grammar and the correction of errors. It seems probable that, just as Erasmus wrote his Colloquies in order to teach schoolboys correct Latin linguistic usage through the medium of entertaining matter, which they were expected to learn by heart, so one of the motives for the composition of Harīrī's Maqāmāt may have been pedagogic. The work was certainly used in that way through many centuries, when it became a school textbook. The ornamental style of Hamadhānī is merely that which was becoming fashionable in his time, and the actual vocabulary of his Maqāmāt is relatively simple; it is far outdistanced by the style of Harīrī, which almost inordinately coruscates with puns, and not a few rare expressions. It looks very much as if there was an intention on the author's part of providing instruction in language; the puns, for example, can serve to inculcate the differentiation in sense between two words that differ only in voweling, and there are grammatical points which would serve as useful pegs on which a teacher could hang an exposition of some well-known grammatical crux. All this makes his saj‘ almost untranslatable.

Like his predecessor, Harīrī presents his pieces as being transmitted by a narrator who appears throughout, and is here named al-Hārith b. Hammām; but the protagonist Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī also appears in every piece (unlike Abū ’-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī) and has a well-marked personality (again in contrast with Hamadhānī's protagonist). Despite his gifts of wit and eloquence, he is a hypocritical rascal—albeit a rather engaging one—and an unrestrained drunkard who, after a serious and moving religious homily, for example, which gains him alms from the auditory, dissipates the cash in low society at a tavern drinking wine; he himself is elderly, but occasionally has with him a youthful accomplice, whom he uses in playing crafty tricks for extracting money. Except for the absence of a chronological framework, the whole collection could be (and by some critics has been) regarded as a sort of picaresque novel.

But the most striking difference between the two authors lies in their use of verse. This is much more prominent in Harīrī than in Hamadhānī, and is vastly more polished and elegant. One would hardly class Harīrī among poets of the top rank, but he nevertheless displays talents of a high order in this field. One piece of special interest occurs in the maqāmah “of Damascus”, the first line being:

lazimtu ’l-sif ĀRa wa-jubtu ’l-qif ĀRa wa-‘uftu ’l-nif ĀRa li-ajnī ’l-far AH

and it has the unusual feature that, in addition to the customary monorhyme repeated at the end of each line (here AH), there is in each line an internal rhyme (in the first line, quoted above, ĀR) occurring at quarter-line intervals, a device reminiscent of the stanzaic form of the muwashshaḥ¹⁵ which was evolving at this period. Such a rhyme-scheme is rare in English, but can be exemplified in a couplet attributed to Burns: (cf. Scott's Old Mortality, ch. 9):

I am a son of Mars who have been in many wars and show my cuts and scars wherever I come;
This here was for a wench and that other in a trench, when welcoming the French at the sound of the drum.

The piece as a whole is a delightfully rollicking praise of bacchic antinomianism, something of the flavour of which may be gathered from the following rendering (though this lacks the allure of the rhymes and the puns):

I'm constant in journeys, I wander the deserts, I've reticence spurned for the culling of joy,
and torrents I've waded and horses I've tamed for the sake of indulging in wanton delights.
I've laid aside gravity, sold all my property, so as to gulp down the goblets of wine;
and but for my longing to drink it I'd never have uttered my speeches so witty and fine,
and never have cleverly brought from Iraq my companions by telling of rosary beads.(16)
So do not be angry nor vex me with solemn reproaches, for which I've a ready reply,
and don't be surprised at an old man who battens on pasturage rich among winejars that brim:
it's wine that gives strength to the bones and is cure for all sickness and drives away trouble and grief.
The splendidest joy's when respectable conduct is shed and all shamefacedness cast aside,
and sweetest of moments in love is when lover declares all his passion without bashfulness.
So speak your love out and thus comfort your spirit wherein fiery anguish had planted its wound,
and cure all your sorrow and solace your care by that favourite remedy—daughter of vines;
and choose for your cupbearer one who will drive off with his tender glance the enamoured's distress,
who'll sing with a voice at which mountains of iron would melt when he raises his head for the song.
Don't heed the adviser who frowns on your clasping a pretty lad if the chance happens to come,
but play all your tricks to the utmost—and further; don't listen to gossip but take what seems good.
Abandon your father if he would restrain you; and spread out your nets for what game comes your way.
Be true to your friends and avoid the vile miser; do always what's handsome and generous too;
but make, ere your last hour, repentance your refuge, for he who knocks on grace's door is let in.

Harīrī's Maqāmāt had tremendous influence in following centuries, and inspired a number of imitators, including a seventh/thirteenth century Spanish Jew, Judah ben Solomon Harīrī, who wrote a collection of Haririan maqāmahs in Hebrew. The most recent example of the genre is the Hadīth ‘Isā b. Hishām of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī (1858-1930), first published as a series of articles and republished in book-form in 1906. This proclaims, by its use of the name ‘Isā b. Hishām for the narrator, its author's intention of writing in the tradition of Hamadhānī, yet its structure is different: it is a scathing satire on social mores in the Cairo of the end of the nineteenth century, expressed through the observations and misadventures of a resurrected pasha of the age of Muḥammad ‘Alī, together with his constant companion, the narrator; and each of the separate and independent episodes is presented in two sections, an introductory one of varying length (but usually fairly substantial) in highly traditional saj‘, followed without any break or transition by one in everyday language.

Blachère and Masnou list some seventy authors, between Harīrī and Muwayliḥī, of compositions either entitled “a maqāmah” or “maqāmāt”, but some of these have practically nothing in common with the Hamadhanian-Haririan maqāmāt apart from the use of the word in the title, being non-anecdotal in character, and in content sometimes scientific, sometimes literary, but hardly distinguishable from the epistle (risālah) form.¹⁷ The maqāmah considered as an identifiable literary genre, stemming from the Hamadhanian model, cannot however be satisfactorily described in terms of the very distinctive Haririan example, or even perhaps the Hamadhanian one. Its basic characteristics are that it is fictional, and presented through the mouth of a fictional narrator; it is episodic in structure, and anecdotal in substance (using the term “anecdote” in the widest sense, as at the beginning of this chapter); and it is stylistically drafted mainly in saj‘, though an admixture of verse or even (as in Muwayliḥī's work) of passages in unadorned prose is admissible.

Notes

1. CHALUP [The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period], 271, 289.

2. Ibid., ch. 5.

3. See chs. 9, 16, 21.

4. CHALUP, 185.

5. Ta’rīkh, ix, 366, 367-8; trans. Beeston, Samples of Arabic Prose, 15-16.

6. See p. 100.

7. See pp. 50-3.

8. “Early history of the maqāma”.

9. Les Séances, 13, 33.

10. Faraj, ii, 360-3, iii, 306-13; this is a collection of anecdotes, mostly drawn from literary sources, which illustrate the workings of divine providence.

11. Text and trans. Bosworth, Underworld, ii.

12. Picaresque Narratire.

13. Trans. Beeston, “Genesis”.

14. Maqāmāt (Séances) choisies, app. 1.

15. See pp. 231-2.

16. This alludes to the theme of the anecdote, in which a party of travellers cross the Syrian desert in safety, thanks (so they believe) to the daily recital of a pious litany devised by Abū Zayd.

17. See Encyclopedia of Islam [2nd edition], “Makāma”, for a fuller bibliography.

Bibliography

Beeston, A. F. L. “The genesis of the Maqāmāt genre”, Journal of Arabic Literature, 11, 1971, 1-12.

———. Samples of Arabic Prose in its Historical Development, Oxford (James Mew Fund), 1977.

Blachère, R. and Masnou, P. Maqāmāt (Séances) choisies et traduites de l'arabe avec une étude sur le genre, Paris, 1957.

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