The Maqāmāt of Ḥarīrī features an intellectual pursuing a trickster to collect his rare words, sophisticated compositions, and curious accounts. Writing against the grain of modernist and Orientalist readings, Essakouti argues that strangeness in both language and space is the key to this forgotten classic, which makes it worth reading also today. Only a stranger (gharīb) who comes from a distant land can fulfill the audience’s obsessive desire for curiosities, wondrous accounts, and exotic vocabulary (gharīb), which always exists elsewhere.
This is a book about strangeness and strangers in the Maqāmāt of Ḥarīrī, an Arabic compendium of literary fiction from the 6th/12th century, featuring in fifty episodic narratives an intellectual pursuing a trickster to collect his rare words, sophisticated compositions, and curious accounts. Strangeness is a key element of the maqāma genre. Al-Ḥarīrī accentuates this element and employs it in two different aspects of his maqāmāt: the vocabulary, and the trickster’s relationship to space. The first aspect of unusual vocabulary combines Bedouin terms, curses, argot, and jargon, which Arabic lexicography categorizes as gharīb: “strange” or “rare.” The second manifests in the relationship of human experience with space: moving from one location to another, being in isolation or exile, away from home and familiarity, trading curiosities, collecting unusual anecdotes, and being a gharīb, a stranger.
Premodern readers of the Ḥarīriyya recognized the strangeness of al-Ḥarīrī’s language and widely appreciated it. Their Arabic modernist counterparts objected to the Ḥarīriyya’s immorality, ornate language, and repetitive plots. They preferred a literary style closer to European literatures. This shift was influenced by early modern European scholarship on Classical Arabic literature. Against the grain of early Orientalist and modernist readings, Essakouti argues that the Ḥarīriyya makes more sense, from an aesthetic, intellectual, and literary standpoint, when it is read and appraised according to its own terms, particularly through the reception paradigm its first readers adopted.
This paradigm has been neglected in much of contemporary scholarship, which has exhibited a lackluster engagement with the element of gharīb (the strange) in the Ḥarīriyya, especially spatial strangeness. Essakouti shows that linguistic gharāba (rare words and difficult expressions) and physical ghurba (being a stranger) are interdependent and strongly dependent on each other in the Ḥarīriyya. The Ḥarīriyya makes liberal use of the double-entendre, and the interdependence of the two is also a double-entendre: only a gharīb (stranger) can provide the gharīb (rare vocabulary). Only a stranger who comes from a distant land can fulfill the audience’s obsessive desire for curiosities, wondrous accounts, and exotic vocabulary, which always exists elsewhere.
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Dr. Asmaa Essakouti was born on 23 June 1993. She studied Arabic and Comparative Literature at the Moulay Ismail and Ibn Zohr Universities in Morocco and at Doha Institute in Qatar. She received her PhD in Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin in 2023. Since March 2024, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at University of Münster. Her research interests include pre-modern and modern Arabic literature, narratology, fiction, and humour.
Literatures in Context is a peer-reviewed book series devoted to Near Eastern and North African literatures. The editors want the title of the series to be understood programmatically. They presuppose a concept of world literature that includes Near Eastern and North African literatures. What is more, they assume that literatures are in many ways marked by intertextuality, that they constitute readings of extremely diverse earlier texts, and that they are posited within a field of tensions, much broader than their respective national language. For the earlier eras of Near Eastern and North African literatures, this field of tensions geographically covers the regions of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. In modern times, it has become a space of interaction that has long since included “global” Western literatures (and realities). This does not imply that the modern Near Eastern and North African literatures have severed themselves from their predecessors. Instead it is precisely the tension between different sets of references in modern Near Eastern and North African literatures, or their “local historical context”, which is a great part of their attraction, that remains a crucial field of research for the modern scholar.
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