al-Hariri
c. 1054–1122
Biography
Abu Muhammad al-Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri (c. 1054–1122) was a scholar, official and man of letters from Basra in southern Iraq. He was probably born in a village near the city, grew up in Basra's Bani Haram quarter, and lived between Basra, where his business interests were, and Baghdad, where he pursued his literary work. He studied the Arabic language and jurisprudence and held an official post. The surname al-Hariri is usually linked to silk, the trade for which his quarter was known.
He is remembered for the Maqamat, some fifty tales in rhymed prose broken up with verse. A narrator, al-Harith ibn Hammam, follows a clever, destitute and eloquent wanderer, Abu Zayd al-Sarughi, from town to town. Each episode turns on Abu Zayd's skill at winning money, outwitting pedants or talking his way out of trouble. Al-Hariri did not invent the form, which Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani had established a few generations earlier, but he raised it to a standard of style and learning that generations of readers and copyists admired. He also wrote a verse treatise on Arabic grammar, Mulhat al-i'rab.
On this site the book is Maqamat al-Hariri. Its appeal lies largely in its language, since the rhyme and wordplay are the point, and it has long been studied as a model of classical Arabic prose. The rogue's tricks and the scenes of street and town life also make it a lively picture of medieval Iraq. Readers who meet the stories in translation lose much of the wordplay, but the plots, with their quick turns and sharp endings, still work on their own.
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Books
مقامات الحريري
by الحريري
Al-Hariri of Basra wrote these rhymed-prose episodes around 1100, and Arabic readers long held them among the finest prose in the language. In each, the narrator al-Harith ibn Hammam meets the beggar and trickster Abu Zayd of Saruj in a new town and is again amazed by his…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.