Al-Ḥarīrī

Auteur

Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim ibn ʿAlī al-Ḥarīrī was born near Basra, Iraq, in 1054, and died there in 1122. He was an administrative official and a noted grammarian. The Maqāmāt The Maqāmāt (“The Sessions”) are fifty short stories, written in rhyming prose (sajʿ) mixed with poems. The narrator, al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām, meets in different cities an eloquent and cunning old man, Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, who earns his living through his words: preaching, riddles, pleadings, poems. The book is full of puns, rare words and linguistic feats: some passages read both ways, others only use letters without dots. A school book For centuries, the Maqāmāts were learned by heart to master the classical Arabic language, and numerous commentaries explain the vocabulary. The illustrated manuscripts, in particular that painted by Yaḥyā al-Wāsiṭī in 1237, are among the treasures of Arabic painting. Other works Mulḥat al-iʿrāb is a grammar poem; Durrat al-ghawwāṣ corrects common language errors of his time. Photo: illustration from a Maqāmāt manuscript.