The Literary Genre of the Maqâmât

The Maqâmât (the Discourses) are short stories presenting two principle characters: a bourgeois, who is the narrator, and a wily vagabond and thief. The text is in a rhythmic prose (sadj´), sometimes mixed with verse. This literary genre, appeared in the tenth century, and would survive until the nineteenth century with varying success. Originally it seems to have been cultivated amongst the administrative secretaries. The originator of the genre was a Persian: Abû al-Fadl Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-Hamadhânî (968-1008). He lent his Maqâmât a stylistic perfection and a freshness of inspiration that would never be replicated by his successors, including al-Harîrî, whose work is however the better known of the two. It was Hamadhânî who invented the couple of the slightly naive narrator and the cunning, unscrupulous man of the people. Focussed on the working classes and their language, he pays quite a lot of attention to general misdemeanour. One « Discourse » is even given over to the slang of the underworld of thuggery. This interest in thieves and beggars is a recurring theme in Arabic literature and is already found in Jâhiz (d. around 868), for example, in his Hiyal al-lusûs  (“thieves tricks”), as in many tales from the Thousand and One Nights.

But it is the fifty Maqâmât from the Iraqi al-Harîrî (1054-1122) which will enjoy the greatest notoriety. In this work which was closely inspired by that of Hamadhânî, the vagabond, who is called Abû Zayd al-Sarûjî, is possibly inspired by a real person, a North Syrian, who took flight to Iraq after the taking of Sarûj (Suruç) by the Crusaders. The author, who was head of the information service in Basra, would have known him personally. A thread running throughout the Maqâmât, Abû Zayd travels the whole of the Abbasid Orient, from Baghdad to Samarkand, and mixes with all levels of society. He dupes them all.

Al-Harîrî’s efforts are spent more on the form than on the content of the story: he juggles with metaphors, enigmas and puns. Very rare terms are employed. In this way, the author lends the genre a certain classicism whilst at the same time maintaining its distance from its original source of inspiration. Even while the author was still living, the Maqâmât had become a classic and more than 700 copies were in circulation.

The work of al-Harîrî was well known in Muslim Spain where it was imitated, sometimes in languages other than Arabic. Yehûdâ ben Shlômô Hârîzî (1165-1255) translated it into Hebrew, and then himself wrote 50 Maqâmât that he called Sefer Tahkemôni. Again in Hebrew, his contemporary Jacob ben Eleazar of Toledo wrote ten more Maqâmât under the title Meshâlîm (The Parables). In the Middle East, at the end of the thirteenth century, the metropolitan, ‘Abdîsho, from Nisibe (Nusaybin), wrote a Syrian version. In the fourteenth century, there were numerous imitations, whether it was in the East or the Muslim West, and some even had religious subject matter.  The genre remained in active use until the nineteenth century, including being used by Christian authors in Arabic, like the Lebanese Nâsîf al-Yazidji (1800-1871) who used it in a successful pastiche.

Did the Maqâmât inspire any European literature? They are reminiscent of a literary genre that was very popular in Spain in the Golden Century (sixtenth century) and which was called the Picaresque Romance. All the same, we do not know if the Maqâmât was translated into Latin or as a Romance in the Middle Ages. However, it is very clear that the Spanish ‘picaro’ resembles Abû Zayd al-Sarûjî in many ways, and that the widespread circulation of the work in Spain allows us to suppose that it had a direct or indirect influence.