Title: The Maqamat (The Assemblies) Author: Al-Hariri (Abu Muhammad al-Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri) Creation Date: c. 1101-1122 Location: Iraq (Basra)
Summary
In fifty episodes, the narrator al-Harith ibn Hammam encounters the rogue Abu Zayd al-Saruji in cities across the Islamic world — from Baghdad to Basra to Samarkand to Sanaa. In each assembly (maqama), Abu Zayd adopts a different disguise: a blind beggar, a wandering preacher, a mourning father, a travelling judge, a learned scholar. Through sheer eloquence — dazzling wordplay, rhymed prose (saj'), improvised poetry, legal and theological argument — he swindles money, food, and sympathy from his audiences. Al-Harith, who recognises him each time, is alternately appalled and mesmerised. The episodes are variations on a single theme: that a man of supreme linguistic ability can manipulate any social situation, that language is the ultimate instrument of both art and deception. In the final maqama, Abu Zayd repents and becomes an ascetic — but even his repentance is so eloquent that the reader suspects it may be another performance.
Why This Book Matters
The Maqamat of al-Hariri is the supreme achievement of Arabic literary prose and the work that most fully embodies the Arabic civilisation's extraordinary investment in language as an art form. Where other civilisations elevated the visual arts, music, or drama, classical Arabic-Islamic culture placed linguistic virtuosity at the apex of human achievement. Al-Hariri's work is the purest expression of this value: every sentence is a feat of rhyme, rhythm, allusion, and wordplay that exploits the full resources of Arabic morphology and syntax. The maqama genre that it perfected — the picaresque tale of a wandering rogue and his eloquent cons — is also a distinctly Arabic contribution to world narrative, combining the episodic structure of picaresque fiction with a self-consciousness about language that anticipates postmodern concerns.
Historical Context
Al-Hariri wrote in Basra during the late Abbasid period, when the caliphate's political power had fragmented but Arabic literary culture remained extraordinarily vital. He was a wealthy merchant and government official — not a professional littérateur — and composed the Maqamat over two decades. The genre had been invented by Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani a century earlier, but al-Hariri's version surpassed its model and became the most widely read, copied, and illustrated work of Arabic belles-lettres. The Maqamat reflect a society obsessed with adab (literary cultivation) as a marker of social distinction and a cosmopolitan urban world where one might encounter speakers from every corner of the Islamic world.
Literary Significance
Al-Hariri's prose style, known as saj' (rhymed prose), achieves a density of acoustic and semantic effect that has no equivalent in European literature. Every clause rhymes, every sentence contains multiple layers of wordplay, and the Arabic morphological system — with its root-and-pattern structure — allows puns and double meanings impossible in Indo-European languages. Cooperson's recent translation, "Impostures," brilliantly meets this challenge by rendering each maqama in a different English register or style (one in Cockney, one in Valley Girl, one in Shakespearean English), capturing the sense of linguistic virtuosity even when the specific effects cannot be transferred. The work's self-reflexive obsession with eloquence — Abu Zayd is both artist and con man, and the text never resolves whether linguistic mastery is a divine gift or a diabolic trick — makes it a surprisingly modern meditation on the nature of literary art.
Research Notes
The Maqamat was identified as essential for representing the maqama tradition and the centrality of linguistic art in Arabic literary culture. Cooperson's 2020 "Impostures" translation for the Library of Arabic Literature is a landmark achievement that makes the work accessible to English readers for the first time in a way that conveys its literary character. The illustrated manuscripts of the Maqamat, particularly the 1237 Paris manuscript by al-Wasiti, are among the masterpieces of Islamic painting. The work was immensely influential — the Hebrew maqama tradition (Judah al-Harizi) and the picaresque genre more broadly owe debts to it.
The Reading
Related al-Harith ibn Hammam — and may God have mercy upon him — as follows.
I am a man whom the love of wandering has bridled, and whom the appetite for marvels has saddled and ridden hard. From the marshes of Basra to the gardens of Damascus, from the bazaars of Baghdad to the high orchards of Samarkand, from the fragrant wadis of Sanaa to the dust of Cairo upon the Nile — I have set down my staff in every city of the realm of Islam, and I have lifted it up again with the dawn. Wherever men gather to barter or to pray, to dispute a verse or to weigh a coin, I have been among them; and wherever a tongue is loosed in eloquence, my ear has been the first to attend, and the last to depart.
In all my journeying I have seen wonders enough to fill the bellies of a hundred storytellers, and to leave them belching still. But of all the wonders God has shown me, none has bewildered my heart and confounded my judgement like the man of Saruj — that town in upper Mesopotamia which gave him his name and which he himself forsook — Abu Zayd al-Saruji, vagabond and orator, beggar and scholar, drunkard and saint, the rogue whose path crossed mine in fifty assemblies and who left me, after each, poorer in coin and richer in astonishment than I had been before.
Hear, then, what I witnessed.
The Assembly at Basra
I had come down to Basra upon some small affair, and as the muezzin called the noon prayer I found a throng pressed about the door of a mosque, jostling like camels at a narrow trough. In the midst of them stood an old man, lean as a tent-pole and ragged as a banner after battle, who lifted his voice and preached upon the vanity of the world. His words came not in plain speech but in the rhymed prose we call saj', clause answering clause as a singer answers his own echo. Where are those who built and adorned? he cried. Where are those who hoarded and stored? Death took their pleasures and left them lying in the dust.
The merchants of Basra — men who that very morning had been weighing pepper and calculating profit — wept like orphaned children. Their hands went into their robes and came out with silver, and the silver fell at the old man's feet as rain falls upon dry earth. I too was moved; my own hand crept toward my purse. And then I looked closely upon his face beneath the tattered turban, and I knew him. By God, I knew him. It was Abu Zayd.
I drew him aside when the crowd had thinned, and I rebuked him as a man rebukes a brother. "How is it," I said, "that you who speak so truly of the vanity of worldly things spend your own life pursuing those very things by deception?" He laughed at me — a quiet, dry laugh, like the rustle of a palm-leaf in a hot wind — and he answered, "Necessity is the excuse of the free man." Then he pocketed the silver, and he was gone, swallowed by the alleys of Basra as a fish is swallowed by the sea.
The Assembly at Kufa
A season later I was in Kufa upon the business of a kinsman, and again the crowd, and again the voice in the midst of it. This time the voice belonged to a man in widower's mourning, holding to his breast a small swaddled infant, weeping that his wife had died in childbed and that the babe in his arms would soon perish for want of milk. His lament rose by stages, soft at the beginning as a dove murmuring in a date-palm, then bolder, then louder, until it climbed into a wail that pierced even the most stony breast; and the lament was studded with quotations from the Book of God and verses from the elder poets, set together like pearls upon a thread, so that even a man who had lost nothing wept for what he had not lost.
The purses of Kufa opened, and the dirhams rained. And I, having seen too much to be uncritical and too little to be unmoved, lingered after the crowd dispersed and made inquiries. The infant, I learned, had been borrowed from a neighbour for the morning. The wife was alive and well and selling cucumbers at the next street. The whole grief had been a composition — every sigh measured, every tear set in its place as the jeweller sets a stone. I was outraged, as a man of religion ought to be outraged; and I was, God forgive me, also dazzled, for the cunning of it was a kind of beauty, and the beauty was beyond my power to dispraise.
The Assembly at Hulwan
It came to pass that in the town of Hulwan I attended a wedding — for I am no enemy of feasting, and a man should honour the joy of his fellow Muslims. There appeared at the door, uninvited, an old man with the dust of the road upon his sandals, who begged leave to bless the bride and groom. The host, who was a generous fellow, granted him a place. The stranger rose, and he delivered a marriage sermon such as I had never heard within the walls of any mosque or palace: every clause cadenced to its neighbour, every pair of rhymes rolling into the next pair as wave rolls into wave, the meaning carried not by sense alone but by the very sound of the words, so that the listener was bathed in music before he understood a syllable of doctrine. The host, shamed by the abundance of what he had received for the price of a meal, heaped gifts upon the speaker until the old man bent beneath them.
I, by then, had vowed to myself that nothing this rogue could do would surprise me. I confess freely: I was surprised. He passed me at the threshold, lifted the corner of his ragged cloak as a sultan lifts the corner of his robe, and winked.
The Assembly at Samarkand
In Samarkand, where the apricots are sweetest and the markets are loudest, I came upon two merchants in a furious dispute concerning a caravan of indigo and the share of profit owing to each. They had appealed to a man whom the bystanders addressed as qadi, though no qadi I had ever met carried himself with quite such studied calm. He heard them out. He weighed their claims as a goldsmith weighs grains. Then he delivered a judgement so learned, so finely reasoned, so precisely framed in the language of jurisprudence, that both merchants — though one of them must have lost — bowed in gratitude and pressed gold into his hand.
Reader, I tell you: this man held no authority from any caliph or governor. He had read no fatwa, he had signed no scroll, he had been appointed by nothing but his own eloquence to the office of judging. And yet his judgement was accepted, his sentence honoured, his reward freely given — for in a civilisation that places the spoken word above all other accomplishments, the man who speaks best speaks with the voice of justice, whether or not justice ever appointed him. It was Abu Zayd. Of course it was Abu Zayd. He met my eyes across the crowd and inclined his head no more than a hair's breadth, as one craftsman to another who has seen the trick.
The Assembly at Barkaid
In Barkaid I witnessed a feat that I will not even attempt to render into the tongues of the foreigners, for it cannot be rendered. Abu Zayd, called upon to compose a letter for a quarrelsome notable, produced a single piece of writing of which I must explain this much: in our Arabic script, the consonants stand as bare skeletons, and the small dots above or below them — what we call the diacritical marks — supply the differences between one letter and another, and thus between one word and its neighbour. Abu Zayd composed a letter in which every single word might be read in two ways, depending on whether the dots were added or withheld. With the dots in place, the letter was a panegyric, lifting its addressee to the heavens. Without them, it was a satire, dragging the same man through the dirt. One letter, two meanings, the choice belonging entirely to the eye that read.
The notable received it praised. His enemy received the copy without dots and rejoiced at the insult. Both paid Abu Zayd. I sat with my head in my hands. There is no language but ours that could do this thing; and the man who had done it strolled away whistling, as if he had merely shod a donkey.
The Assembly at Tiflis
Far from the heartlands, in the cold city of Tiflis where the Christians and the Muslims live cheek by jowl, I found Abu Zayd in the company of the Sufis — those mystics who seek the annihilation of the self in the love of God. He spoke their tongue better than they did. He pronounced the ecstatic doctrines of divine love with a fervour that made the genuine seekers fall to their knees. He spoke of the cup that holds the wine of God's presence, of the moth that consumes itself in the candle of the Real, of the lover who, finding the Beloved, ceases to be himself and becomes only the looking.
Was he sincere? Brother, I cannot tell you. I sat among that gathering and I watched his face, and his face gave nothing back. His performance was the performance of a man transported, and a man transported is exactly what the genuine Sufi looks like; and that is the wound in the heart of this matter. If a counterfeit and a true coin both ring the same when struck, what use is the ringing? If eloquence can perfectly imitate holiness, then holiness itself becomes a thing one cannot prove from the outside. The Sufis embraced him as a brother. He took their offerings, and he embraced them in return, and which of the two of them was the deceived I cannot say to this day.
The Assembly at Wasit
Once only in all our meetings did the pattern break. In the town of Wasit, in the marketplace, Abu Zayd came face to face with a young man whom he had not seen in many years — and who, by the look in his eyes and the cry in his throat, was his own son, long lost upon the roads of fortune. The two of them stood as men struck by lightning, and then they fell into each other's arms; and then Abu Zayd, when he could speak, lamented the wasted years and the cold trail of his fathering, and the son lamented in return, and their two laments wove together into one.
The tears appeared to be real tears. The grief appeared to be real grief. I drew nearer, hoping at last to find my friend caught in something that was not a performance — and I confess that my heart leapt at the thought, for I had long wanted to believe that beneath the masks there was a face. But even then, even there, the lament was so polished, the rhetoric so unfailingly elegant, that I could not be certain whether Abu Zayd was feeling or performing — or whether, by long habit, the two had ceased in him to be distinguishable. He embraced his son. They parted. He went on to the next city. I followed.
The Assembly of the Repentance
Fifty cities at last, and fifty assemblies; and in the last of them, in the holy city of Basra to which he had come full circle, Abu Zayd at last laid down his cunning and his disguises and stood before the people as himself. He was old now, and the desert sun had thinned him, and the white had come into his beard like salt upon a dark bread. He rose in the assembly and he delivered a sermon upon his own life — the years squandered in deception, the gifts God had given him (the silver tongue, the quick mind, the depth of learning) spent upon swindles and tricks, the long account that would soon be presented at the Throne of Judgement and that he had no coin to pay. He vowed to forsake the road, to put off the rags of the trickster and to take up the woollen cloak of the ascetic, to spend what days remained to him in worship and in weeping for his sins.
The assembly wept. The men of Basra who had been gulled by him a hundred times wept loudest of all, for there is no joy among the faithful like the joy of a sinner returned. And I — I wept also. God forgive me, I wept.
But on the road home that night, walking alone beneath the stars of Basra, I asked myself: how shall I know? His repentance was as polished as his cons. His confession of sin was set in the same saj' that had sold borrowed babies in Kufa and shamed wedding hosts in Hulwan and judged false judgements in Samarkand. If a man whose every utterance has been a performance now performs repentance, what test shall I apply to tell the one from the other? The Quran tells us that God alone reads hearts; and I, walking under the cold stars, was not God, and could not read.
What Remains
I have told you fifty stories — or rather, I have told you the bones of seven, and have left the other forty-three to the manuscripts and to the patient labour of those who copy them in the libraries of Baghdad and Damascus and Cordoba. And I have told them all to one purpose, which is this: that in the country of Islam, in this age of ours, no art is held in such honour as the art of speech. Not the mason with his stones, not the swordsman with his blade, not the sultan with his armies — but the man who can rise in an assembly and make language do what no other man can make it do — he is the one before whom we rise.
And the man who masters that art absolutely, who can preach and weep and judge and praise and blame and seduce and repent with equal beauty — what shall we call him? Saint? Scoundrel? Artist? The Maqamat does not answer. Abu Zayd al-Saruji walks out of Basra at the end of my account, and whether his footsteps lead to the prayer-mat or to the next gullible town, I cannot say. I have followed him as far as a man may follow another, and I have set down what I saw, in the rhymed prose he loved, in the language he honoured even as he profaned it.
May God have mercy upon him, who deceived us with such tenderness; and upon me, who loved the deceiving; and upon you, who have listened. There is no power and no strength save in God, and to Him is the return.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Michael Cooperson's Impostures (NYU Press / Library of Arabic Literature, 2020) is the landmark translation that finally makes the Maqamat accessible to English readers in a way that conveys its literary character. Each of the fifty maqamas is rendered in a different English register — from Chaucer to Cockney to Valley Girl — capturing the spirit of linguistic virtuosity even when the Arabic effects cannot be directly reproduced. The paperback English-only edition is the recommended entry point.
Translated by Michael Cooperson. The essential English translation — fifty different registers, fifty brilliant cons.
Translated by Michael Cooperson. The hardcover edition of the landmark translation — winner of the 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award.
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