This talk will concern the Middle Eastern literary form known as the maqāmāt. The maqāma tale form was invented in the tenth century in eastern Iran by Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 1008). The classical maqāma, typified by the works of al-Hamadhānī and his first imitator, al-Ḥarīrī, who lived a century later, is often about begging or picaresque themes—that is, the roguish theft of money from others. The term maqāma is often translated as “assembly” in English or “séance” in French, but a more sensitive rendering might be an occasion for stopping to speak, relating to the performative character of the texts belonging to the genre.
Like the genre’s itinerant shape-shifting characters, maqāmāt works showed a great capacity to traverse linguistic, religious, and cultural boundaries over their nearly millennium of circulation around the Muslim world. Their relatively continuous and widespread circulation over time and space and their thematic focus on travel, picaresque, humor, parody, geography, and trade reveal the interrelations between Arabic literature of premodern and modern periods as well as interrelations between and across literatures of the world. This talk will also discuss relations between the Maqāma and key works of European literature, such as particular tales of Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the legends of Till Eulenspiegel.
