Al-Hariri of Basra (; c. 1054 – 10 September 1122) was a poet belonging to the Beni Harram tribe of

Bedouin The Bedouin, Beduin, or Bedu ( ; , singular ) are pastorally nomadic Arab tribes who have historically inhabited the desert regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia (Iraq). The Bedouin originated in the Sy ...

Arabs, who lived and died in the city of

Basra Basra () is a port city in Iraq, southern Iraq. It is the capital of the eponymous Basra Governorate, as well as the List of largest cities of Iraq, third largest city in Iraq overall, behind Baghdad and Mosul. Located near the Iran–Iraq bor ...

, modern

Iraq Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to Iraq–Saudi Arabia border, the south, Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq border, the east, the Persian Gulf and ...

. He was a scholar of the Arabic language and a dignitary of the

Seljuk Empire The Seljuk Empire, or the Great Seljuk Empire, was a High Middle Ages, high medieval, culturally Turco-Persian tradition, Turco-Persian, Sunni Islam, Sunni Muslim empire, established and ruled by the Qiniq (tribe), Qïnïq branch of Oghuz Turks. ...

, which ruled Iraq during his lifetime, from 1055 to 1135. He is known for his '' Maqamat al-Hariri'' (also known as the ‘'Assemblies of Hariri'’), a collection of some 50 stories written in the ''

Maqama The ''maqāma'' (Arabic: مقامة aˈqaːma literally "assembly"; plural ''maqāmāt'', مقامات aqaːˈmaːt is an (originally) Arabic prosimetric literary genre of picaresque short stories originating in the tenth century C.E.Qian, ...

'' style, a mix of verse and literary prose. For more than eight centuries, Al-Hariri's best known work, his ''Maqamat'' has been regarded as one of the greatest treasure in Arabic literature after the

Quran The Quran, also Romanization, romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a Waḥy, revelation directly from God in Islam, God (''Allah, Allāh''). It is organized in 114 chapters (, ) which ...

and the Pre-Islamic poetic canons. Although the maqamat did not originate with al-Hariri, he elevated the genre to an art form.

Biography

Al-Hariri was born 446 AH (1054 AD) and died in his native city of

on 6

Rajab Rajab () is the seventh month of the Islamic calendar. The lexical definition of the classical Arabic verb ''rajaba'' is "to respect", which could also mean "be awe or be in fear", of which Rajab is a derivative. This month is regarded as one ...

, AH 516 (10 September 1122 AD). Although his place of birth is uncertain, scholars suggest that he was probably born in Mashan near Basra, where his family had a palm tree plantation. and only resided in Basra after the age of maturity. The street where he died, Bani Haram, was a place where certain families were known to have settled and was a centre of Basra's

silk manufacturing Silk is a natural protein fiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The protein fiber of silk is composed mainly of fibroin and is most commonly produced by certain insect larvae to form cocoons. The best-known silk is obtain ...

industry. His name, al-Hariri, probably reflects his residence (''hariri'' = silk manufacturer or silk merchant). He liked to boast of his Arab heritage: he was a descendant of Rabi’at al Faras, son of Nizār, the son of Ma’add, the son of Adnan al-Ya`muri, who was a

companion of Muhammad The Companions of the Prophet () were the Muslim disciples and followers of the Islamic prophet Muhammad who saw or met him during his lifetime. The companions played a major role in Muslim battles, society, hadith narration, and governance ...

. His family had achieved great wealth, enabling him to receive a good education, studying with Al-Qasabani. He is known to have studied jurisprudence, after which time he became a munshi (official writer). His occupation is generally described as a high official. Al-Hariri divided his time between Basra where he had his business interests and Baghdad where he carried out his literary activities. He is best known for writing '' Maqamat al-Hariri'' (مقامات الحريري, also known as ''The Assemblies of al-Hariri''), a virtuosic display of

saj' Saj' () is a form of rhymed prose defined by its relationship to and use of end-rhyme, meter, and parallelism. There are two types of parallelism in saj': ''iʿtidāl'' (rhythmical parallelism, meaning "balance") and ''muwāzana'' (qualitative m ...

, consisting of 50 anecdotes written in stylized prose, which was once memorized by heart by scholars, and ''Mulhat al-i'rab fi al-nawh'', an extensive poem on grammar.al-Hariri
''Encyclopædia Britannica'' 2008. ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' Online. .2008-03-12 Various accounts of Al-Hariri's inspiration to write the ''Maqmat'' can be found in the literature. One account, which has become the established account, was related by Al Hariri's son, Abu al-Qasim Abdullah, is that the author and his servants, were seated in a mosque in Banu Haaran when an indigent man, by the name of Abu Zayd, dressed in ragged cloaks, entered and spoke with great fluency and elegance. The speaker related the story of his native city of Saruj being ransacked and his daughter taken captive. As soon as it first appeared, Al-Hariri's ''Maqamat'' attained enormous popularity across the Arab-speaking world, with people travelling from as far afield as

Andalusia Andalusia ( , ; , ) is the southernmost autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community in Peninsular Spain, located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in southwestern Europe. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomou ...

(Spain) to hear the verse read from the author's lips. The work's alternative title, ‘'The Assemblies'’ comes from the fact that maqamat were recited before an assembled audience. Even during the author's lifetime, the work was worthy of memorisation, public recitation and literary commentaries. Al-Hariri himself recited his ''Maqamat'' before learned audiences and scholars. Audience members would take dictation or make corrections to their own personal manuscripts. At the time, this type of public recitation was the main method for disseminating copies of literary works in the Arab speaking world. When al-Hariri had written 40 maqamat, he collected them into a single volume and headed to Baghdad where he expected a triumphant reception. However, his opponents accused him of plagiarism; they claimed that the Assemblies were in fact the work of a writer from the Western Maghreb who had died in Baghdad and whose papers had fallen into Al-Hariri's hands. To test the merit of such claims, the Vizier sent for al-Hariri and invited him to compose a letter on a specified subject. However, Al-Hariri was not an improviser, rather he required long periods of solitude in which to compose his stories, and although he retired to a corner for a lengthy period, he was unable to produce anything and was ashamed. In an effort to redeem his reputation, al -Hariri returned to Basra where he composed ten additional maqamat in the following months. He married and had two sons. His sons were trained in the recitation of their father's ''Maqamat''. In terms of al-Hariri's physical appearance, he was very short in stature and wore a beard, which he had the habit of plucking when he was deep in thought He was described as not a particularly handsome man. When visitors shunned his appearance, he would tell them: "I am a man to be heard, not seen".

Political context

Al-Hariri lived in Iraq at a time when the Seljuks ruled over the region. The region of Mesopotamia was under the control of the

from 1055 to 1135, since the Oghuz Turk

Tughril Beg Abu Talib Muhammad Tughril ibn Mika'il (), better known as Tughril (; also spelled Toghril / Tughrul), was a Turkoman (ethnonym), Turkoman"The defeat in August 1071 of the Byzantine emperor Romanos Diogenes by the Turkomans at the battle of Mala ...

had expelled the

Shiite Shia Islam is the second-largest branch of Islam. It holds that Muhammad designated Ali ibn Abi Talib () as both his political successor (caliph) and as the spiritual leader of the Muslim community (imam). However, his right is understood ...

Buyid dynasty. Tughril Beg entered Baghdad in 1055, and was the first Seljuk ruler to style himself Sultan and Protector of the Abbasid Caliphate. Mesopotamia remained under the control of the Great Seljuks during the reign of

Muhammad I Tapar Muhammad I Tapar (, ; 20 January 1082 – 18 April 1118), was the sultan of the Seljuk Empire from 1105 to 1118. He was a son of Malik-Shah I () and Taj al-Din Khatun Safariya. Reign Muhammad was born in 20 January 1082. He succeeded his nephew, ...

(1082–1118 CE), but from 1119, his 14 years old son

Mahmud II Mahmud II (, ; 20 July 1785 – 1 July 1839) was the sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1808 until his death in 1839. Often described as the "Peter the Great of Turkey", Mahmud instituted extensive administrative, military, and fiscal reforms ...

(1118–1131) was restricted to the only rule of Iraq, while Sanjar took control of the rest of the Empire. In order to counter the ambitions of Abbasid Caliph al-Mustarshid (1118–1135), who wanted to acquire world dominance, in 1124 Mahmūd granted the city of

Wasit Wasit (, ) was an early Islamic city in Iraq. It was founded in the 8th century by the Umayyad viceroy of Iraq, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, to serve as the region's seat and as the garrison of the Syrian troops who enforced Umayyad rule there. It was ...

Imad al-Din Zengi Imad al-Din Zengi (; – 14 September 1146), also romanized as Zangi, Zengui, Zenki, and Zanki, was a Turkoman atabeg of the Seljuk Empire, who ruled Mosul, Aleppo, Hama, and, later, Edessa. He was the namesake and founder of the Zengid dyn ...

(born 1085) as an ıqta, and conferred him the Military Governorship of

together with Baghdad and the whole of Iraq in 1127. That same year, Imad al-Din Zengi was also named Governor of Mosul, where the Atabegdom of Mosul was formed.

Work

For more than eight centuries, Al-Hariri's best known work, his ''Maqamat'' has been regarded as the greatest treasure in Arabic literature after the

Al-Hariri's ''Maqamat''

As a genre, the maqamat was originally developed by

Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadani Badi' al-Zamān al-Hamadānī or al-Hamadhānī (; ; 969 in Hamadan، Iran – 1007) was a medieval poet and man of letters. He is best known for his work the ''Maqamat Badi' az-Zaman al-Hamadhani'', a collection of 52 episodic stories of a rogu ...

(969–1008), but Al-Hariri elevated it into major literary form. Al-Hariri's ''Maqamat'' consists of 50 anecdotes, related by Abu Zayd to Al-Harith who is understood to be the work's narrator. Abu Zayd is a wanderer and confidence trickster who is able to survive using his wiles and his eloquence. The work makes extensive use of language as spoken by desert Arabs – its idioms, proverbs and subtle expressions. Al-Hariri's ''Maqamat'' made extensive use of literary artifice. In one maqama, known as "the reversal" sentences can be read in reverse, giving each passage an opposite meaning. In the 26th maqama, known as the "Spotted", the protagonist composes a "spotted letter" in which a character with a dot is alternated with a character without a dot. In a passage that al-Hariri added to a version of his ''Maqamat'', he lists a variety of techniques: "Language, serious and light, jewells of eloquence, verses from the Qur'an, choice metaphors, Arab proverbs, grammatical riddles, double meanings of words, discourses, orations and entertaining jests." Like most books of the period, maqamat were intended to be read aloud before a large gathering. Oral retellings of maqamat were often improvised, however, al-Hariri who composed his stories in private, intended them as finished works that he expected to be recited without embellishment. This text was translated into Hebrew by

Yehuda Alharizi Yehuda Alharizi, also Judah ben Solomon Harizi or al-Harizi (, ), was a rabbi, translator, poet, and traveler active in al-Andalus (mid-12th century Toledo, Spain? – 1225 in Aleppo, Ayyubid Syria). He was supported by wealthy patrons, to who ...

(d. 1225) as ''Maḥberet itiʾel'' and was a major influence on Alharizi's own maqamat, the ''Taḥkemoni''.

Other works

A good deal of his correspondence has survived. He also wrote some

qasida The qaṣīda (also spelled ''qaṣīdah''; plural ''qaṣā’id'') is an ancient Arabic word and form of poetry, often translated as ode. The qasida originated in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and passed into non-Arabic cultures after the Arab Mus ...

s that made extensive use of alliteration. He also wrote two treatises on grammar: * ''Durra al-Ghawwas – The Pearl of the Diver Being a Treatise of the Mistakes n Arabic GrammarCommitted by Persons of Rank'' – an anthology of grammatical errors written in verse * ''Mulhat al-Irab – The Beauties of Grammar'' – a collection of poems

Editions and translations

The work was copied many times by the various Islamic dynasties due to the royal custom of commissioning copies of well-known manuscripts for their private libraries. From the 13th and 14th centuries, the work was translated into a number of Middle-Eastern languages including Hebrew and Turkish. Some of the earliest copies and imitations of the ''Maqamat'' in European languages appeared in Andalusia as early as the 13th century. Western audiences, however, were only introduced to the work when the first Latin translations appeared in the 17th century. During al-Hariri's lifetime, editions of his work were published without any illustrations. From the early 13th century, illustrated editions of the manuscript began to appear. Ten different illustrated editions were known for some time, but with the discovery of a new illustrated edition in 1960, the total now stands at eleven. One of the earliest and most widely known illustrated editions is that by al-Wasiti (1236), now in the

Bibliothèque nationale de France The (; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites, ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository of all that is published in France. Some of its extensive collections, including bo ...

The most famous translation of his

t was a German version by the poet and Orientalist

Friedrich Rückert Johann Michael Friedrich Rückert (16 May 1788 – 31 January 1866) was a German poet, translation, translator, and professor of Oriental languages. Biography Johann Michael Friedrich Rückert was born 16 May 1788 in Schweinfurt and was the e ...

as ''Die Verwandlungen von Abu Serug'' and sought to emulate the rhymes and wordplay of the original. The main English translation is the nineteenth-century edition by

Thomas Chenery Thomas William Chenery (1826 – 11 February 1884) was an English scholar and editor of ''The Times''. His diplomatic background and choice of capable reporters helped to revive the paper's reputation for international news. Biography Chenery w ...

and

Francis Joseph Steingass Francis Joseph Steingass (March 16, 1825, Frankfurt am Main – January 1903) was a British linguist and orientalist. Biography Steingass completed his education, including a PhD, in Munich, Germany. Later, he was a professor of Modern Langu ...

. Hundreds of printed editions of the ''Maqamat'' can be found.''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society'', American Philosophical Society, 1971, p. 34 Notable editions and translations include: *

(trans), ''Die Verwandlungen des Abu Seid von Serug, oder die Makamen des Hariri'', Cotta, 1837 (in German) *

and Francis J. Steingass (trans),
– The Assemblies of Al-Ḥarîri: with an introduction about the life and times of al-Hariri (Translated from the Arabic with Notes Historical and Grammatical)
', Oriental Translation Fund, New Series, 3, 2 vols, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1867 (in English) * Amina Shah (trans.), ''The Assemblies of Al-Hariri: Fifty Encounters with the Shaykh Abu Zayd of Seruj'', London, Octagon, 1980 * Theodore Preston (trans.), ''Makamat or Rhetorical Anecdotes of Al Hariri of Basra: Translated from the Original Arabic with Annotations'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1850 * Michael Cooperson (ed.),
Maqamat Abi Zayd al-Saruji by Al-Hariri
', NYU Library of Arabic Literature: New York University Press, 2020. (Arabic edition) * Michael Cooperson (trans.) ''Impostures by Al-Hariri'', NYU Library of Arabic Literature: New York University Press, 2020. (English translation)

References

Sources

* Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, ''Maqama: A History of a Genre'', Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002 * Charles F. Horne, ed.
Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East''
New York, Parke, Austin, & Lipscomb, 1917, Vol. VI: Medieval Arabia, pp. 143–201, (contains maqāmāt 1–12) *

External links

by al-Wasiti from 2003 facsimile edition and comments by

Oleg Grabar Oleg Grabar (November 3, 1929 – January 8, 2011) was a French-born art historian and archeologist, who spent most of his career in the United States, as a leading figure in the field of Islamic art and architecture in the Western academ ...

''Maqamat'', English translation with presentation
at Fordham University's ''History Sourcebooks Project'' * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hariri of Basra 1050s births 1122 deaths 11th-century Arab people 12th-century Arab people Poets from the Abbasid Caliphate People from Basra Maqama 11th-century Arabic-language poets Muslim poets