Deceit and Disrobing: The Schefer Maqāmāt

The Maqāmāt was a significant literary work written by Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥarīrī between 1054 and 1122. It follows Abū Zayd, the main character, as he travels across the Middle East. Odysseus was a legendary Greek hero famous for his cunning and cleverness, and Abū Zayd shares these exact qualities. While Odysseus wanted to return home to his wife, Abū Zayd had a simpler goal: to make money. The Maqāmāt, often translated as "Assemblies" or "Impostures," tells fifty distinct stories about this con artist and trickster.

Odysseus is a man of many wiles and turns: complicated; ingenious; shrewd. Abū Zayd, the protagonist of Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim al-Ḥarīrī’s (ca. 1054–1122) Maqāmāt, is all of those things too, though his goal is less to go home to his wife than to make himself some cash.

A narrator acts as both the observer and the victim, meeting Abū Zayd repeatedly during his travels. These meetings happen in places ranging from Sanaa in Yemen to Kufa in Iraq, Alexandria in Egypt, and even Samarkand in Uzbekistan. In each encounter, Abū Zayd executes his latest scam. The narrator feels a mix of disgust and fascination, unable to look away. While the plot is thrilling, the true reason for the Maqāmāt's lasting popularity is al-Ḥarīrī's masterful command of the Arabic language. In one specific episode, known as maqāma 6, Abū Zayd dictates a letter using only undotted letters. This feat uses only half of the alphabet to show off his linguistic skill.

Yet even when he is there, it’s hard to recognize him. Abū Zayd is a master of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. In four maqāma-s (8, 35, 43, and 44), Abū Zayd recites a story or poem made up of so many words with double meanings that the speech could mean two completely different things. Another of his speeches can be read forward or backward, creating diametrical interpretations. All this in the service of one thing: tricking people into giving him money. (Al-Ḥarīrī himself was accused of being a liar and a plagiarist; some of his contemporaries argued that the style of the Maqāmāt was so different from his earlier work that he must have stolen them from a Maghrebi traveler, an accusation likely invented by some haters.) But Abū Zayd repents in maqāma 50, deciding to turn his back on literature: no more tricks for him, no more doubled meanings — only the word of God. The narrator, disappointed, leaves his side; our manuscript ends.

Over one hundred medieval manuscripts of al-Ḥarīrī's Maqāmāt still exist today. They were copied in regions ranging from West Africa to the Indian Ocean. However, only thirteen of these ancient texts are illustrated. Among them, the "Schefer" Maqāmāt, housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (manuscript BNF Arabe 5847), is the most famous. A note on the final page, folio 167v, reveals that this specific copy was completed just over a century after the original text. It was finished on the sixth day of Ramadan in the year 634 of the Hijri calendar, which corresponds to May 9, 1237, on the Gregorian calendar. The scribe and calligrapher was Yaḥyā b. Maḥmūd al-Wasiṭī, an Iraqi artist who likely created the work for the Turkic emir shown in the left-hand frontispiece on folio 1v. This emir was a lieutenant of the Abbāsid caliph al-Mustanṣir, who ruled from 1226 to 1242; his name appears inscribed on a building shown on folio 164v.

Galland’s Thousand and One Nights — translated in part from manuscripts Galland collected and in part from stories he heard from a young Syrian named Ḥannā Diyāb — cemented the Orientalist, fantastical image of the Abbāsid Caliphate (of al-Ḥarīrī and al-Wasiṭī’s world) in the European imagination. It also, however, reinvigorated the tradition among Arabophone writers: Radwa Ashour, Elias Khoury and Naguib Mahfouz have all played not only with the tales themselves but also with their European reception and manipulation: with the experience of looking back at yourself through someone else’s mirror.