In working with translated Impostures and related works in various languages, I benefited from the kind assistance of many friends and colleagues, including Ailin Qian and Shiyi Zhou (Chinese); Slavomír Čéplö, Yasser Djazaerly, Julia Hauser, and M. Rahim Shayegan (German); Alexandre Roberts and Phillip Mitsis (Greek); Catherine Bonesho, Abraham Greenstein, Lev Hakkak, and Yona Sabar (Hebrew); Jan Loop and Phillip Mitsis (Latin); Domenico Ingenito, Latifeh Hagigi, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, and M. Rahim Shayegan (Persian); and Pavel Angelos, Hristina Chobanova-Angelova, Kirill Dmitriev, and Masha Kirasirova (Russian).
Much of the translation was drafted during a LAL fellowship at the New York University campus in Abu Dhabi, where Alexandra Sandu and Amani Alzoubi made me feel welcome. I thank Mahmoud Abdalla, Kirill Dmitriev, Ranya Abdel Rahman, Hossam Barakat, Claire Gallien, Parween Habib, Trevor Kann, Alexander Key, Maru Pabón, Flora Rees, Alexandre Roberts, Sarah R. bin Tyeer, Paul Walker, David Wilmsen, and Luke Yarbrough for inviting me to read or discuss work in progress. I gratefully acknowledge the Forum for Arab and International Relations and the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Award for Translation and International Understanding for their magnanimous support of translators and translation.
Among the many others who shared their expertise, spoke a kind word when it was needed, or inspired me in ways they have probably forgotten are Ahmed Alwishah, Sean Anthony, Zeina Hashem Beck, Abdessalam Benabdelali, Hinrich Biesterfeldt, Kevin Blankinship, Jess Bravin, Dominic Brookshaw, Julia Bray, Richard Bulliet, Brigitte Caland, Frederic Clark, Peter Cole, Nino Dolidze, Emily Drumsta, Shereen El Ezabi, the late Salwa Eltorai, Albert Gatt, Jessica Goldberg, Matthew Gordon, Beatrice Gründler, May Hawas, the late Wolfhart P. Heinrichs, Lucas Herchenroeder, Walid Hamarneh, Tamer M. Hussein, Dominique Jullien, Daniel L. Keegan, Philip Kennedy, Nancy Khalek, Batool Khattab, Zia Khoshsirat, Pamela Klasova, Yaron Klein, Marcel Kurpershoek, the late Abraham Lavi, Chris Lucas, Saree Makdisi, Annabel Mallia, Denise Marie-Teece, Daniel Medin, Ronald Mendoza-De Jesus, Geoffrey Moseley, Shad Naved, Daniel Newman, Bilal Orfali, Tyler Patterson, Charles Perry, Margret Pfeiffer, Jay Phelan, Julia Phelan, Claudia Rapp, Salam Rassi, Hector Reyes, Dwight F. Reynolds, Kishwar Rizvi, Leyla Rouhi, Everett K. Rowson, Christine van-Ruymbeke, Peter Sagal, David Schaberg, Emily Selove, Stuart Semmel, M. Rahim Shayegan, Rebecca Spang, Anna Ziajka Stanton, Denise Sutherland, Adam Talib, Newell Ann Van Auken, Katrien Vanpee, Chathan Vemuri, David Wilmsen, Liran Yadgar, and Luke Yarbrough. I regret that John P. Flanagan did not live to see this book completed; I hope he would have liked it.
I would not have been able to finish a translation based on pastiche and constrained writing without relying on Project Gutenberg, the all-volunteer project that supplies searchable full-text editions of many works in English. Internet Archive provided complete online editions of many critical Arabic texts, and Abū ʿĀṣim Yaḥyā Fatḥī helpfully posted his readings of all fifty Arabic originals on YouTube.
I am indebted to my wife, Mahsa Maleki, her parents, Armita Farhoomand and Mahmoud Malaki, and my brother- and sister-in-law, Hamidreza Maleki and Shima Torabi, for seeing us through two international relocations and taking care of the children while I worked on this book. I am also grateful to my parents, Georgia and Jay N. Cooperson, who kept their doors open throughout. Much of the reading that went into this translation took place years ago in our book-filled house.
In 382/992, in the city of Nishapur in the northeast corner of what is now Iran, a young visitor named al-Hamadhānī astounded the city’s elite by defeating a local celebrity in a prose-and-poetry slam. 2 At various points during the contest, al-Hamadhānī offered to produce pieces of language subject to odd constraints: an essay without the word “the” in it, for example, or one containing verses embedded in it diagonally. Dismissing such games as “verbal jugglery,” his opponent demanded that he improvise a bureaucratic letter on a topic suggested by the audience. Al-Hamadhānī accepted this conventional challenge but added a twist that let him show off his talent: he improvised his letter starting from the last word and working backward.
Al-Hamadhānī, called “The Wonder of the Age,” died young. His greatest work, at least in retrospect, 3 is a collection of unusual stories called maqāmāt, a term I translate (following a suggestion by Shawkat Toorawa) as “impostures.” 4 Although al-Hamadhānī’s fifty-odd Impostures differ widely in content, certain characters and themes recur. 5 Every Imposture has a narrator who travels from one city or region to another. Everywhere he goes, he encounters an enigmatic figure endowed with stunning eloquence. In some cases, this figure shows off his wit at a gathering of scholars. In others he is found begging in a market or a mosque. Some Impostures contain little more than speeches and verses, but others go on to tell a story that exposes the eloquent preacher as a sinner and a fraud. 6
Although the so-called picaresque Impostures (that is, the ones with stories) have attracted the most attention in modern times, pre-modern Arabic readers were more interested in the verbal performances. Indeed, the Imposture’s most striking feature is its form. Whether spoken by the narrator, the eloquent stranger, or one of the occasional characters, the frame story and the speeches are almost all in rhymed prose. The speeches are punctuated by verse, which unlike the prose has a single rhyme and a consistent number of feet per line. Strikingly, none of al-Hamadhānī’s Impostures are palindromic, lipogrammatic, or otherwise constrained, even though al-Hamadhānī claimed he could produce texts that were. 7 But even without those flourishes, his work was regarded as the freakish production of a boy genius unlikely to be imitated, let alone outdone.
So matters stood until 495/1101–2, 8 when an unlikely prospect named al-Ḥarīrī 9 decided to challenge the Wonder of the Age. 10 Al-Ḥarīrī (who was born in 446/1054 and died in 516/1122) 11 was a proud citizen of the southern Iraqi town of Basra. During his lifetime, the town was governed by a motley parade of Abbasid caliphs, Seljuk sultans, Arab chieftains, and Turkish emirs. 12 One source reports that al-Ḥarīrī was a wealthy landowner while another claims he was employed by the Abbasid administration in Baghdad to report on local affairs. Though “extremely clever and articulate,” he was also “short, ugly, stingy, and filthy in his person” 13—all liabilities in a world where knowledge was transmitted face to face and being an author often meant performing one’s works in public. Most damningly,