Saʿd b. Manṣūr Ibn Kammūna’s Writings and Transcriptions in the Maktabat al-Rawḍa al-Ḥaydariyya, Najaf

This paper attempts to reconstruct the corpus of writings by Ibn Kammūna as well as his transcriptions of works by others that were kept in the Rawḍa al-Ḥaydariyya in Najaf during the early twentieth century. Additionally, the paper discusses a slim codex, which was sold by Dreweatts in 2019 (“Lot 69”) and resurfaced on the market in October 2020 when it was offered for auction by Sotheby’s as “Lot 406”. A tentative suggestion is made that the codex still belonged to the Rawḍa at the beginning of the twentieth century. The appendix includes a facsimile of the codex, which contains Ibn Kammūna’s Talkhīṣ Lubāb al-manṭiq wa-khulāṣat al-ḥikma, comprising excerpts from a work by Najm al-Dīn al-Nakhjiwānī, in order to support future scholarship on Ibn Kammūna and al-Nakhjiwānī.

Between Arabic and Persian Traditions

The article analyses the ways Ḥamīd al-Dīn Balḫī (d. 559/1164) adopted and adapted the technique of earlier Arabic authors, most notably al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122), in his Persian maqāmas. It also emends the traditional dating of his maqāma collection.

The Beard as Spectacle and Scandal in a Thirteenth-century Hebrew Maqāma

The Eighth Maqāma by Yaʿacov ben Elʿazar (Toledo, ca. 1200) tells the story of ʿAkhbor, a bearded beggar-preacher who is revealed to be rich and lecherous. His sexual preference for a black maid leads his four white/Arab maids to murder him viciously, but not before taking revenge on his beard. In fact, the most notable feature of the false preacher is his gargantuan beard, which occupies a full one-third of the maqāma, and other beards are also excessively described. Following Robert Bartlett, I will relate to the beard as “social text” and explore its abundant symbolical meanings within the surrounding cultures of Islam and Judaism, as well as against the backdrop of Iberian contemporary society. Further, in order to better understand Ben Elʿazar’s manipulation of both the beard and the genre, as well as his emphasis on sexual, anal and scatological humor, I will have recourse to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical discussions of “the grotesque body,” “the carnivalesque,” and to his generic model of the Mennipea.

ʿĪsā b. Hišām’s Shiism and Religious Polemic in the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī (d. 398/1008)

This study reads the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī (d. 398/1008) against the background of the sectarian milieu of the fourth/tenth century. It begins with a thorough review of the preceding scholarship on al-Hamaḏānī’s sectarian allegiances, and it confirms the contention that Hamaḏānī was a Sunni by conviction. It then proposes that the names and attributes of the narrator of al-Hamaḏānī’s Maqāmāt, ʿ Īsā b. Hišām, reflect an attempt by al-Hamaḏānī to satirize Shii values and practices. It then considers references to Shiism in six of al-Hamaḏānī’s maqāmāt: the Ḥulwāniyya, Māristāniyya, Iṣfahāniyya, Maḍiriyya, Aḏarbayjāniyya, and Kūfiyya, along with several other references to Shiism in the collection. The study further proposes a possible connection between the portrayal of ʿĪsā b. Hišām and the famed Twelver scholar Ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī (d. 381/991).

Digressions in the Islamic Archive

This essay critiques the view that al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt faced a hostile reception among piety-minded Muslims by offering a preliminary examination of al-Panǧdīhī’s unstudied sixth-/twelfth-century commentary on al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt. Al-Panǧdīhī’s commentary was the first digressive commentary on a prose adab text, and its digressions consist mainly of Qurʾānic quotations, ḥadīṯ of the Prophet Muḥammad, and stories about other prominent Muslims—what I term the Islamic archive. Al-Panǧdīhī argues in his elaborate preface that al-Ḥarīrī’s collection trains the reader to understand this archive better. Because al-Panǧdīhī’s commentary has never been printed and because scholars have tended to focus on the origins of the maqāma rather than its reception, this key text and its interpretive implications have been overlooked.

A Maqāma on Same-Sex Marriage in the Thirteenth Century

This article provides an editio princeps and English translation of al-Maqāma al-Hītiyya al-Šīrāziyya by al-Šābb al-Ẓarīf al-Tilimsānī (d. 688/1289) preserved in Berlin MS Wetzstein 1847. The maqāma describes a romantic liaison conducted between an older Mamluk and a younger boy. The analysis considers the various literary forms deployed by the author in the course of the maqāma, such as: an erotic epigram, a love letter, mujūn verse, and a marriage ḫuṭba. The conclusion of the article explores what this work reveals about the history of the maqāma form, language, and truth.

Hidden Gems

Unlike the Hebrew maqāma from Iberia, the Hebrew maqāma from Yemen has received little attention. This article brings the reader into the world of the Yemeni Hebrew maqāma between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries with such works as Aluʾel’s “Dispute Between the Calf and the Slaughterer,” the seemingly related “Parable of the Rooster,” “Haman’s Epistle,” al-Ḍāhirī’s Sefer ha-musar (roughly, “Book of adab”), Ḥarazi’s “Paths of Faith,” and Manṣura’s “Book of Thought.” Al-Ḍāhirī’s monumental work, for example, builds on diverse sources such as the maqāmāt of al-Hamaḏānī and al-Ḥarīrī, al-Ḥarīzī’s Taḥkemoni, and Immanuel of Rome’s Maḥberot and, like other maqāma collections, reworks many existing genres (folk tales, homilies, poems, letters, riddles, travelogues, dialogues, debates, and mystical writings). As such, it is a poignant testimony to Jewish intellectual culture in Yemen writ large.

“Each Nail a Jail”

Kitāb al-Masāmīr or The Book of Nails is a collection of nine maqāmāt written in late 1893 or early 1894 by the Alexandrian litterateur ʿAbdallāh al-Nadīm (d. 1896). It is al-Nadīm’s last work, composed in Istanbul, where the author lived out his final years in exile. Bringing together literary style, political rhetoric, and obscene imagery, al-Nadīm wrote Kitāb al-Masāmīr to defend his former teacher and fellow exile, Ǧamāl al-Dīn al-Afġānī (1838–1897), against the machinations of Abū l-Hudā al-Ṣayyādī (1849–1909), the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II’s most powerful Arab advisor. To do so, al-Nadīm employed key formal features of the maqāma genre to critique the corruption of the Ottoman state in his own time. The contemporaneity of the critique, and the fact that it is expressed through manipulations of literary form, invites a re-evaluation of the common assertion that maqāmāt composed in the modern period are artificial, imitative, and disconnected from contemporary societal concerns. In place of such an approach, this article turns to close readings of key characters, stylistic elements, and narrative scenes to suggest ways to read the manipulation of literary form as an integral aspect of the genre’s deep engagement with its contemporary world.

Cosmography, Cosmology, and Kalām from Samarqand to Istanbul

This article argues that astronomers’ discourses about cosmology, specifically their arguments for an ordered cosmos comprised of uniformly revolving orbs, were in a conversation with ʿilm al-kalām during the period under discussion, which is from the end of the fourteenth century through the mid-sixteenth century. In kalām, Taftāzānī’s Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid contended that the astronomers’ views of cosmic order were but a conviction (iʿtiqād) for which there was no demonstration. Mīrim Çelebī’s commentary on the popular astronomy text al-Risāla al-Fatḥiyya noted, however, the theological value of the astronomers’ ordered cosmos. Another astronomer contemporary with Mīrim Çelebī, Bīrjandī, was well-versed in kalām texts and certainly agreed with other astronomers about how the cosmos was ordered. Yet Bīrjandī did not explore the theological ramifications of an ordered cosmos.

Three Fragments of a Judaeo-Arabic Translation of Ecclesiastes with Full Tiberian Vocalisation

Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts with complete vocalisation are rare, a problem which makes reconstructing the pronunciation of the medieval language challenging. This study presents an edition of a Judaeo-Arabic translation of Ecclesiastes from the Cairo Genizah with full Tiberian vocalisation. This manuscript exhibits noteworthy features of dialectal medieval Arabic and a palaeographic style which places it in twelfth-century Egypt-Palestine. The transcription system provides specific evidence for the pronunciation of a type of medieval Judaeo-Arabic, while the translation offers a window into the culture of popular Bible translations and scribal activity in the medieval Middle East.