It should be noted that neither of the viziers is described as paying anything for the Impostures, or otherwise supporting the author. One contemporary figure, however, reportedly did reward him: this is Dubays al-Asadī, head of the Mazyadids, a quasi-independent Arab dynasty based in central Iraq. In Imposture 39, Abū Zayd, who has just delivered a baby, is acclaimed “as if he were . . . Dubays al-Asadī” (§39.7). When he learned that he had been praised in the Impostures, Dubays sent al-Ḥarīrī a staggering number of gifts (Sharīshī, Sharḥ, 4:313). That Dubays’s name should have remained in situ is ironic, as his interests were often opposed to those of al-Ḥarīrī’s supposed Abbasid patrons, to the point that he later rebelled openly against the caliph (Bosworth, “Mazyad”). In any case, al-Ḥarīrī evidently managed to take advantage of the complex political and cultural rivalries of the period to monetize his Impostures with or without a commission from a patron.
Various explanations are offered as to why al-Ḥarīrī wrote exactly fifty Impostures (§0.4). He may have intended to outdo al-Hamadhānī, who was credited with forty. But, as Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila has pointed out, the number of al-Hamadhānī’s Impostures “was not necessarily stabilized” by al-Ḥarīrī’s time. In fact, the number of Impostures credited to al-Hamadhānī “may have been influenced by the later al-Ḥarīrī” (Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama, 148–49). As work by Bilal Orfali and Maurice Pomerantz has shown, the state of al-Hamadhānī’s oeuvre is quite chaotic, with different Impostures and Imposture-like texts being attributed to him, or taken away from him, by various editors (see, e.g., Orfali and Pomerantz, “Three Maqāmāt”). It is only with al-Ḥarīrī that we find the soon-to-become-classical model of a fixed number of episodes, usually forty or fifty, with a preface by the author. Later readers, possibly including al-Ḥarīrī himself, may have assumed this model existed from the beginning, and thus back-projected onto al-Hamadhānī an awareness of genre he did not possess (Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama, 149). In any event, al-Ḥarīrī clearly thinks of al-Hamadhānī as the man to beat. Here in the preface, he is piously deferential, but in §47.9 he has Abū Zayd declare himself a greater master of language than al-Hamadhānī’s hero, Abū l-Fatḥ.
“Abu Zeid of Batnae” (§0.4) is Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, the eloquent protagonist of al-Ḥarīrī’s Impostures, and “Hareth Ebn Hamam of Bassora” is al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām, the starstruck narrator. (“Batnae” is an ancient name for Sarūj, and “Bassora” Gibbon’s spelling of Basra, the city in southern Iraq.) A recurrent story has it that Abū Zayd is modeled on a real-life mendicant whom al-Ḥarīrī met, or heard of, in Basra (see the Notes on Imposture 48). It is not clear whether this supposed model was named Abū Zayd, or simply al-Sarūjī. The latter means “from Sarūj,” a town located on what was then the frontier with Byzantium and is now part of southeast Turkey near the Syrian border (see the note on §1.9). Inspired by real life or not, the names bear at least a formal resemblance to those of the corresponding characters in al-Hamadhānī. “Zayd” may allude to the figure of the same name used in examples in grammar books: “Zayd struck ʿAmr,” for example, has a resonance similar to “See Spot run” for American English speakers. Al-Ḥārith’s name apparently derives from a saying attributed to the Prophet to the effect that every man is a ḥārith, that is, one who plows, or more generally, toils for his bread; as well as a hammām, that is, one beset by cares (Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt, 4:65; Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama, 155).
In §0.4, al-Ḥarīrī refers to Impostures 2 and 25 using titles: “of Hulwan” and “of Karaj,” respectively. Al-Hamadhānī’s earlier Impostures have titles, so it is not surprising to find al-Ḥarīrī giving titles to his as well. But the reference in §0.4 does not mean that all of those titles had stabilized or that any of them were treated as part of the text. Al-Ḥarīrī’s authorized copy introduces all but one of the Impostures by number only: “Imposture No. 1,” “Imposture No. 2,” and so on. The now-conventional titles may have come into use when al-Ḥarīrī began teaching the Impostures, as he and his students would doubtless have found it more helpful to refer to “the one about Hulwan” than to “No. 2.” The Istanbul University manuscript, which has titles scribbled in the margins, may represent an intermediate stage during which the titles had attached themselves to their Impostures without counting as part of the text. The fact that several Impostures have alternative titles is compatible with this reconstruction. Indeed, the manuscript copied and illustrated by al-Wāsiṭī over a century later does not use titles at all.
“Kodama” (§0.5) is my invented eighteenth-century spelling for Qudāmah ibn Jaʿfar (d. after 320/932), most famous for his Naqd al-shiʿr (The Assaying of Verse), a pioneering survey of Arabic poetics.
“Shall we declare unto you . . .” (§0.6): Q Kahf 18:103–104, tr. Sale.
“This fiction (waḍʿ), its captious judge will say, violates the laws of God (min manāhī l-sharʿ)” (§0.6). What al-Ḥarīrī is afraid of, according to Kilito, is being called out for “disguising his voice by giving it to characters who by virtue of the deception acquire a presence and an independence no different from those of real beings” (Kilito, Séances, 251; for older discussions of the fictionality problem see Nicholson, Literary History, 330–31; and Bonebakker, “Nihil obstat”). Al-Ḥarīrī goes on to defend himself by arguing that no one objects to “fables told of talking animals, or mute objects brought to life.” In the event, one reader, Ibn al-Khashshāb (d. 567/1172), did accuse him of lying. Fables and parables, he protested, cannot possibly deceive anyone, since (for example) animals cannot speak, and any story that claims they do is obviously using them to make a point. But (says Ibn al-Khashshāb) nothing prevents someone like Abū Zayd from actually existing.
How then is the reader to know that the Impostures are a fiction? One can think of several tip-offs, none of which, however, are mentioned by Ibn Barrī (d. 582/1187), who sprang to al-Ḥarīrī’s defense. Instead, as Kilito delights in telling us, Ibn Barrī insists that al-Ḥarīrī cannot have been lying because Abū Zayd was a real person after all (Kilito, Séances,