8 - The maqama

Summary

THE ARABIC MAQAMA

Few classical Arabic literary phenomena have achieved as much fame, both inside and outside the Arabic world, as the maqama. The maqamat are collections of short independent narratives written in ornamental rhymed prose (sajʿ) with verse insertions, and share a common plot-scheme and two constant protagonists: the narrator and the hero. Each narrative (maqama) usually chooses one familiar adab-topos for elaboration; each tells of an episode in which the hero, a vagrant and mendicant who is also a man of letters and eloquence, appears in some public place (a market, mosque, cemetery, public bath, traveling caravan, etc.) in different guises, and tricks people into donating money to him by manipulating their feelings and beliefs. Usually the narrator witnesses the hero’s adventures, and at the end of each episode, the narrator exposes the hero’s identity, the hero justifies his behavior, and the two part amicably. This scheme appears in many variations, depending on the author and his age.

The maqama appeared on the Arabic literary scene in the tenth century, when the literary system was already well established, when bodies of knowledge constituting the core of Arabic education and learning had crystallized in the form of adab literature. Favored by the courts and scholars attached to the courts, of whose activity it was a product, adab was the alma mater of the maqama genre, serving as a literary fund from which the maqama drew practically everything, from literary models to particular themes, motifs, situations, verses of poetry, figures of speech, clichés, and ready-made rhymed-prose formulas.