Realms of Strangers: Readers, Language, and Trickery in Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī

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. https://www.uni-muenster.de/ALEA/team/AsmaaAssakouti.html