THE MAQ�M�T OF AL-HAMADH�N�:

GENERAL REMARKS AND A CONSIDERATION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS

Much has been written about the origins of the maqama, and the inter-

pretation of the writings of Bad-ic al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, his mind and

purposes. His literary antecedents have been examined, why he wrote as

he did has been the subject of speculation, but, in the absence of a critical

edition of the maqamat, rarely, if at all, has it been asked what exactly did

he write. These are questions that are still largely "subtilely obscure

beyond the imaginings of soothsayers. " Much discussion has concentrated on the attempt to see precisely

where lay the originality of Hamadhani. This was based on the notion

that Hamadhani had created a new form called the maqama. It remains

common to call upon the evidence of Hariri, who in the introduction to

his own maq1m3t wrote, with a certain false modesty, of his debt to his

outstanding and unsurpassable predecessor. Nowhere, however, does he

assert that Hamadhani "invented (abdaca) the maqama," to quote Mat-

tock out of context. What Hariri says is that in the literary assemblies

of his day there was "talk of the maqamat that Badic al-Zaman had

invented." He is not talking of the maqama as a form, newly invented or

not, but in using the plural he refers concretely to the actual pieces writ-

ten by Hamadhani. This is made quite clear by the fact that Hariri goes on to say, ".... and the active role within which he ascribed to Abu 'I-

Fath al-Iskandari and the narration of which to clsd ibn Hisham. "2 In

his Letters Hamadhani twice referred to his maqamat in a way that has

always seemed to me to take for granted the previous existence of some-

thing that could be called a maqama, merely specifying the general topic that his were concerned with. The relevant passage in the Letters, with all

the sentiments of which one need not agree, reads as follows: ...... man

amla min maqamat al-kudya arbaca mi'at maqama la munasaba bain al-

maqamatain (1d) lafzan wa-ld macnan ......3

It is surely right to accept with Professor A.F.L. Beeston that the sense

of "invent" (ibtada?a) in Hariri's introduction is not "to originate, create", as one might a new literary genre, but rather "to devise, to

1 J. Mattock, "The Early History of the Maq�ma," Journal of Arabic Literature, XV (1984), 1.

2 Maq�m�t al-Har�r�, Beirut (1958) 11: jar� ... dhikr al-maq�m�t allat� ibtada'ah� [not abda'a] Bad�' al-Zam�n ... wa-'az� il� Ab� 'l-Fat� al-Iskandar� nash'atah� wa-il� '�s� ibn Hish�m riw�yatah�. 3 al-Hamadh�n�, Ras�'il, Beirut (1890), 390 and 516.

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make up imaginatively" a piece of writing. The belief that this is the cor-

rect interpretation of Hariri is buttressed by a passage in a work by Ibn Sharaf al-Qairawani (d. 460/1067), in which he writes that Hamadhani

zawwara maqiimiit, literally "faked", or "fabricated some maqiimiit. "4 This is stated just after rnention of animal fables, which are clearly pro- ducts of imagination, and leads into al-Qairawam's saying that he

similarly intends to compose some imaginary conversations on the topic of literature. On the other hand I have never quite understood Beeston's

claim that Hamadhani made a "frank admission that his stories are fic-

tional" , unless he had in mind the phrase in which al-Khwarizmi, who

had criticized his literary output for being limited to the "rnaqdmas of al-

Iskandari", was challenged by Hamadhani to match him in producing khams maqa-mdt aw cashr muftarayiit, "five maqamas or ten made-up pieces. 116 6 In Hamadhani' s Maqimit the characters' names are not burles-

qued in any way - indeed, the narrator, 'Isd ibn Hisham, bears the same name as a Hadith scholar who had taught Hamadhani in his home town7 7

- and the inconsistency in the portrayal of the character of Abu 'I-Fath, whatever significance one may wish to see in that, only becomes clear in

the reading, emerges slowly from between the lines. The fictionality of each piece is no more immediately evident than it is in many other stories

which were attached in their telling to known, historical characters.

The north-African writer al-Husri (d. 413/1022) claimed in a well-

known passage that Hamadhani was inspired to write his Maqiimiit by the

desire to emulate "forty tales" devised by Ibn Duraid, the famous gram- marian and lexicographer, from his own imagination. This has rightly been discounted, if taken in a narrow sense. Beeston holds that

Hamadhani drew his inspiration broadly from "the common stock of

Arabic anecdotage current at the time." This would include the sort of

anecdotal material that al-Qali has preserved. Much of this material finds

direct echoes in the Maqamat, including short episodes that are indeed

quoted from Ibn Duraid. I suppose al-Husri could have named Ibn

Duraid purely illustratively, as a significant forerunner in that sort of

4 Mas�'il al-Intiq�d, ed. Ch. Pellat, Algiers (1953), 4. See also the introductions of the Copenhagen Ms. of the Maq�m�t, cod. arab. 224 fol. 1a, and Cambr. Ms. Qq. 118, fol. 4b: maq�m�t ...yuzawwiruh� 'al� lis�n r�wiya ... See B.M. Ms. Or. 5635, fol. 1b for same passage, but reading ya'z�h�. This stock introduction in the Mss. seems to derive from the text in the Mas�'il.

5 A. F. L. Beeston, "The Genesis of the Maq�m�t Genre," JAL II (1971), 1-12. 6 Ras�'il, 389-90. 7 It is true that Har�r� (op. cit., 11) looked upon both characters as fictitious. However,

behind al-Qairaw�n�'s imaginary interlocutor, Ab� 'l-Rayy�n al-Salt ibn al-Sakan, lay a former teacher of his, Ab� 'l-Hasan 'Al� ibn Ab� 'l-Rij�l, as Pellat believed (Mas�'il etc., 115).

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material, and with some justification. For example, the insult swapping of a husband and wife is directly comparable with that in the Shdmzyya and similar to the Dinariyya, and the descriptions of horses with so many

"long" or "short" points remind one of the lfamdiiniyya. The passages of pithy question and answer concerning literature, e.g. "Who of all is

the most poetic?" and "What do you say about Dhu '1-Rumma?", find

their parallels in the Jahiziyya, for example. A collection like that of al-

Qali is full of much that is reminiscent of the Maqiimiit in setting,

phraseology and attitude, "common stock" in fact, not forgetting the

unexpectedly eloquent Bedouin, shepherd boy, or "youth ... in rags, who, one would imagine, was incapable of putting two words together." The advice of a Bedouin woman to her son is like the satirical wasiyya

given by al-Iskandari to his son in the maqama known by that name, and

the Bedouin romance, attributed in this case to al-Asma'i, prepares us

for the Bishriyya.8 It is a useful exercise to look at the few occurrences of the word maqama

found within Hamadhani's Maqamat and also any uses of the word in

contemporary writers. The appearance of the plural form in the Juj'inijja is part of a quotation from the poet Zuhair, where its proper sense is, in

any case, obscure: wa-fi-ni maqa-mdtun hisanun wujfhuhum etc.9 9 The

Asadiyya refers to the maqiimiit and the maqa-ldt of Abu 'I-Fath al-Iskandari in terms which suggest that they are both to be understood as verbal pro- ductions that delight and charm the hearer. In the Wa'zlyya, after listen-

ing to the public homily of a qa'im (later to be revealed as Abu 'I-Fath), the relator, Ibn Hisham, asks a bystander who it is, but is told to wait

patiently for the end of his maqama. This last example is clearly associated

with the well-known appearances of the word (more commonly maqam in

the singular) in the context of homilies before the great in Ibn Qutaiba's

CUyiin al-Akhbar.

In his Letters, apart from the direct reference to his literary works as

maqamat, Hamadhani, to my knowledge, uses the word in only two con-

texts, and there the meaning is not immediately clear. It occurs twice in

one letter (wa-min caliimiitihim qubh maqiimiitihim and idha z'nadfa ... ila qubh

maqiimiitihim qisar qiimiitihim) and in the other in the phrase man mawaqif khidmatihi mashhura wa-maqiimiituhu mashkiira.10 These examples seem to have a completely different sense. They correspond rather to the way I

have found the word to be used by two of Hamadhani's contemporaries.

8 Ab� 'Al� al-Q�l�, al-Am�l�, Cairo (1926), i, 41, 44, 66, 104, 187-8; ii, 79, 179-80, 248, appendix vol. , 150-52.

9 Abduh's edition, 52, ult. Ras�'il, 32, quotes the verse correctly. 10 Ras�'il, 106-7, and 278.

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In ?Utbi's s Ta )rzkh al-Yamini there are several usages of the word maqiimiit in the sense of "exploits", for example, allutiib al-ma)thiira wa- %-maqimit

al-mashhura, min mawiiqifihi wa-maqiimiitihi, and fi ghazawitihi wa-

maqiimiitihi.11 Note in particular the passage in which the author says that

Sultan Mahmud's fame crossed the sea to Egypt and that "his exploits were studied there, the like of which had not been told of the Two-

Horned One [Alexander]." 12 AI- Tha C alibi refers his readers to an

account by al-Busti (d. 400/1009-10) of the futah and maqiimiit of

Sebuktegin, the father of Mahmud of Ghazna. 13 There is one further use

of the word in Hamadhani's Maqama Rustifiyya. There, in a list of various

methods of roguery, the ashdb al- Caliimiit wa-manyati-al-maqa-mdt are men-

tioned. Exactly what is meant by this is not clear. If yati- here means

"performs, does", as is likely, then the maqa-mdt in this context could well

indicate dubious sermonizing for gain. The conjunction of Caliimiit with

maqiimiit seems to be significant (or just a handy rhyme!), as it appears in the first quote from the Letters above, and in the Waczzyya, after urging

patience till the end of the maqama, the bystander says, lacallahu yunbi'u bi-caliimatihi. The full meaning of these phrases remains obsure.

What is one to make of such a variety of meanings for this word?

Perhaps the answer is that it is a mistake to look for one clear strand. The

word as used is one of those incredibly rich words with so many resonances. It starts with the basic notion of "a standing forth" and from

there it can cover the place, the people, the discourses associated with

certain gatherings. Or they can co-exist, so that perhaps for Hamadhani

and his listeners a maqama of al-Iskandari could be his typical "standing" to deliver one of his hypocritical homilies (itself a maqam or maqama), or

his "exploit", used ironically of one of his typical kudya ruses. This latter

sense of "exploit" is well attested, as seen above, in the writings of

Hamadhani's contemporaries. Hariri gave us an unequivocal statement of the size of his output when

he wrote in his own introduction "I have composed .... fifty maqamas."14 The position with Hamadhani is less clear. In his Letters, as we have seen, he twice refers to the maqiimiit he had written. Both times the context is

one of boasting that he had written four hundred, whereas Abu Bakr al-

Khwarizmi, his great rival, could not even manage ten. It seems not to

have been acknowledged that Hamadhani's boast is probably behind the

11 'Utb�, Ta'r�kh al-Yam�n�, Delhi ed. 15, 18, 88, and also 88, 140, 279. 12 op. cit., 263 (... durisat bi-h� maq�m�tuhu ...) 13 al-Tha'�lib�, Yat�mat al-Dahr, ed. 'Al� Mu�ammad 'Abd al-Lat�f, Cairo (1934), iv,

286. 14 Maq�m�t al-Har�r�, 12.

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often quoted text of al-Tha?alibi, to the effect that after coming to

Nishapur in 382/992-3 Hamadhani "dictated four hundred maqamas, which he ascribed to Abu '1-Fath al-Iskandari, on mendicancy etc." 15

The figure four hundred and also, it seems, the last half of the quotation taken from Hamadhani's Letters (see above p. 89) were picked up by al-

Husri for his passage on Hamadhani and his maqiimiit.16 As has been

rightly suggested, the figure should not be taken literally, particularly in

the light of the context in which it was first used.

What other literary evidence is there for the number of maqa-mdt left by Hamadhani? Al-Qairawani in his work referred to above, which seems to have been written in North Africa between the year 1055 and his death in 1067, has a surprising passage which reads as follows:

"The number of them [the maqa-mdt], as their transmitters (ruze>atuha) assert, is twenty, except that this quantity has not reached us yet.""

As far as I am aware Hamadhani's fellow easterner, al-Tha'dlib-1,

quotes only from the Letters and not a single passage from the Maqimat. The Maghribi anthologist, al-Husri, however, gives us the text of eigh- teen maqiimiit in his anthology. That figure is not incompatible with the

passage above, quoted from al-Q,airawani, but, of course, we cannot

assume that al-Husri quoted all that he knew of.

For the sake of convenience we shall number the individual maqamas in the order in which they appear in the commonly used editions. Nos 1 to 51 follow the contents and the order of the Istanbul edition of

1298/1881. What we shall call no. 52 (the Bishriyya) is not identified as

a maqama in that edition. The editor included it in the appendix of the

so-called mulah (" amusing anecdotes"), for which see later. In Muham- mad Abduh's edition the Bishriyya is the last item, but the last of only 51 1

maqamas, because the Shamiyya was omitted. If we remember to insert the

Shimijja as the new no. 26 and renumber the subsequent pieces accord-

ingly, adding the Bishriyya at the end, the two editions can be reconciled. This will provide a frame of reference for the ordering of the individual

pieces. There is one group of manuscripts, which are all of the Ottoman

period

15 al-Tha'�lib�, Yat�mat al-Dahr, ed. 'Al� Mu�ammad 'Abd al-Lat�f, Cairo (1934), iv, 241.

16 al-Husr�, Zahr al-�d�b, ed. Zak� Mub�rak, Cairo (1925), i, 235. 17 Ibn Sharaf al-Qairaw�n�, loc. cit. 18 For notes on the Istanbul Mss. of the Maq�m�t, see O. Rescher, "Über arabische

manuscripte der Laleli-moschee etc.", Le Monde Oriental, vii (1913), 112-3.

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i. B.M. [British Library] Or. 5635 (16th cent.) ii. Cambridge 1096 ( = Q,q. 118) (964/1557) iii. Nur osmaniyye 4270 (1064/1654) iv. Fatih 4098 (1116/1704) v. 'Asir Efendi (1130/1718) vi. Copenhagen (or Havn.) 224

All these manuscripts are said to contain fifty maqamas, except the last

one, no. vi, which is defective and contains only thirty one. There is

every likelihood that it originally contained fifty like the others. Apart from no. vi I have only been able to examine two of these manuscripts, nos i an ii, in which the two maqamas that are missing, short of the full

fifty-two, are the Matlabiyya and the Bishriyya, nos. 51 and 52 respectively. One might hazard the guess that the same two maqamas are missing from

Mss. nos. iii-v.

There are, however, three other earlier manuscripts. The first in date

is again from Istanbul, Ms. Fatih 4097. At the end of fol. 39a it is stated

that the copying of the manuscript was completed on 1 st Rabi? I, 520, that is, 27th March, 1126.19 On fol. 1a are various short notes of owner-

ship and waqf Below a brief title is a more substantial note, recording the basic provisions of a waqf of the manuscript, made by a Mabfiz b.

Ma?tuq b. Abi Bakr b. 'Umar b. al-Baruri(?) al-Baghdadi (also called al-

wiiCiz), and dated Muharram 694/November-December 1294. The

volume was to be kept at his turba below Mt. Qasyün in the Damascus

suburb of al-Salihiyya and to be borrowed against a pledge. Any bor-

rower was obliged to recite the Fdtiha once and the Ikhlas three times for

the spiritual benefit of the donor and his parents. This manuscript con-

tains only forty maqamat-indeed the title page has Kitib al-Maqa-mdt al-

Arbaczn-and their order is quite unlike that of the editions and late Mss.

listed above.

The second is another Istanbul manuscript, Ms. Aya Sofya 4283. This

was written for the library of a Zahir al-Din (bi-rasm al-khizana al-

maze?laze?iyya al-sadrzyya al-muca??amiyya al-muncimiyya al-makhdfmijja al-

.?-7,ihirzyya ... ) by Ahmad ibn al-Suhruwardi in the middle third of Muhar-

ram, 622 (22-31 January 1 225). 2° On an end paper a note of ownership

19 Not as in Rescher (op. cit.) 526, which gives the date 21 st January 1132. The year 520 is quite clear and is repeated by a later hand in figures in the bottom left corner of the folio.

20 Not al-Sahr�r�, as in Maq�m�t, ed. Y�suf al-Nabhan�, Istanbul (1298/1881), 100. The editor also says that the copy was made for an al-Malik al-Mu'azzam etc. That can- not be derived from the dedication. The al-sadriyya makes it likely that the patron was a civilian administrator.

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bears (in figures) the date 898 (1492-3), and on the title page is a short note stating that this copy was made a waqf by the Ottoman Sultan

Mahmud Khan. Judging by the tughra2' in the seal placed just above the

note, the Ottoman Mahmud I (Mahmud Khan ibn Mustafa) is intended, who ruled 1143-1168 (1730-1754). This collection contains in all thirty- three maqamas, as normally understood. In addition, this manuscript has seven of the mainly short pieces that are called mulah in the Istanbul edi-

tion, but introduces them with the rubric maqama ukhra ("another maqima"), and the first in this group begins with haddathana cLii ibn Hisham qala... , rather than the qala al-BadZC of the edition. For one other

piece the rubric is maqama ze?a-risala. ?2 The third and last manuscript in this group of earlier date is one in

Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale no. 3923. It dates from the 14th century A.D., and is restricted to nineteen maqamas.23

At this point it will be convenient to set out the contents of the six

manuscripts, for which sufficient information is to hand, in tabular form. The maqamas are listed in the standard order, and the figures in the subse-

quent columns represent the order in which they appear in the individual

manuscripts. A dash indicates that that maqama is missing.

21 In the photograph at my disposal the tughra is not very clear, but the identification is likely. It is certainly not the tughra of Sultan Ma�m�d II, who reigned 1223-1255 (1808- 1839). See Suha Umur, Osmanli Padi�ah Tu�ralari (Istanbul 1980), pp. 248 and 291-5.

22 These seven pieces correspond in the Istanbul edition to p. 98 (this is the one which opens in ris�la style); p. 92, pp. 96-7, p. 95, last 3 lines, p. 96, lines 2-6, p. 96, lines 8-16, p. 97, lines 4-13. The editor used the Aya Sofya and the Nur Osmaniyye Mss. Why he included the Bishriyya among the mula�, when the former Ms. classes it as a maq�ma, is not stated. I presume that the Bishriyya and the further short items found in the edition are given as mula� in the Nur Osmaniyye Ms.

23 I am grateful to Jacqueline Sublet for supplying me with details of the contents of this Ms. and also a copy of a note by G. Vajda. The Ms., "probably Syrian", has 190 ff. and in addition to the maq�mas contains 64 of Hamadh�n�'s letters.

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The titles are included for ease of reference, as they have become

familiar and accepted. However, one important point to note is that there

are very few titles indeed in the early Fatih 4097 manuscript. 14 The

British Museum Ms. has no titles, while the Copenhagen manuscript's rubrics merely number the maqamas. The first maqama in the Aya Sofya Ms. has the rubric maqima fi )1- su )ii! ("... on begging"). All the rest in

that collection have no explicit title, but merely the rubric maqama ukhra.

("another maqama"). On the other hand the Paris Ms. does have some

titles but they differ from those commonly used, as do those that are found in the Cambridge Ms.:

Both the almost total lack of titles in four of the manuscripts and their

variation where they occur in the Paris and Cambridge manuscripts indicate that they cannot be attributed to Hamadhani himself. Indeed, the editor of the 1298 A.H. Istanbul edition, finding no titles in the Aya

Sofya manuscript nor, as he also makes clear, in the Nur Osmaniyye

manuscript-these are the two he used for his edition-, provided them

himself as seemed appropriate. z5

Looking at the main table above, it is worthy of note that certain

maqamas appear in none of the three early Mss., that is, nos. 38-41

(N6im, Khalaf, NTsheipu-r, CIlm), and 45-50 (ShiCr, Muliik, Sufriyya, Sari,

24 The Rus�fiyya has f� wasf al-tarr�r�n; the Bishriyya has f� qissat Bishr ibn (Aw�na al-'Abd�; the Madir�yya is introduced with wa-hiya maq�mat al-mad�ra, and the Saimariyya with wa-hiya maq�mat Ab� 'l-'Anbas al-Saimar�. One or two at the beginning of the Ms. have titles in the margin, added by a latter hand.

25 Op. cit. , 100.

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Tamam, Khamr). It is also the case that none of these is quoted by al-

Husn, whose anthology pre-dates our earliest manuscript. In fact, his

anthology only gives us nos. 1-7, 10-18, 20 and 30, if I have correctly noted them all.

What significance do we attach to this? Do we immediately question the authenticity of those pieces unrepresented in the three pre-Ottoman Mss.? One should face the possibility that the copyists of those Mss. had

access only to incomplete copies, in the way that al-Qairawani, quoted above, said that less than the number of maqamas known to exist (and that

already a number much reduced from that in current editions) was

available in his day and place. Our oldest Ms. (Fatih 4097) poses this sort

of problem. In the colophon (fol. 39a) one reads: "This is the last of his

maqamas that have been found. I have copied them from a copy ......(?) I ask God's pardon for [any mistakes of] addition or omission. "26 Two

words are not clear. The first could be saqzma, i.e. "defective", literally ` `sick" . However, would this mean that it was simply a poor, inaccurate

manuscript, or that it was incomplete, as perhaps the first sentence

implies? My purpose has been to make a preliminary survey of manuscripts.

Any critical edition should surely take a close look at those maqamas, iden-

tified above, the ones that occur in none of the early Mss., and others

too, no doubt, and subject them to thematic, and lexical and general

linguistic analysis. That cannot be a straightforward task, because of the

two pieces which one might at first impression think questionable from

many angles (pace some recent views), no. 51 (Matlabiyya) is found in the

Aya Sofya Ms. and no. 52 (Bishriyya) is found in both the Aya Sofya and

the Fatih 4097 Mss.

Even without having precise information on all the Ottoman Mss., I think one would be justified in taking them as a group, probably all

derived from one source. They all have the same contents, fifty maqamas, those that I have seen give them in the same order and they all have

closely similar short introductions. Those pieces that are totally lacking from the earlier Mss. we must either assume to have derived from a

separate and genuine manuscript tradition now lost or to be items added to the corpus. Here one might entertain the idea that, rather than Hariri

imitating the size of Hamadhani's output, as has been suggested but is

nowhere expressed by Hariri himself, the sum of fifty maqamas found in the Ottoman Mss. is the result of efforts to effect the reverse, to bring Hamadhani's œuvre up to the size of Hariri's.

26 wa-h�dh� �khir m� wujida min maq�m�tihi wa-nasakhtuh� min nuskha [ ....... ] wa-ana astaghfir All�h min al-z�y�da wa 'l-nuqs�n.

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Some recent writings have argued that the Maqiimiit of Hamadhani

must be considered as a series and not viewed atomistically. 27 Apart from

any other consideration, such a thesis is very shaky without an estab-

lished corpus and a critical text. Mattock has suggested that Hamadhani

did not intend his Maqiimiit to be read as though each was a separate item, and that the variations in the narrative technique and in the way the

main protaganist revealed or did not reveal his identity was what he calls

a ' "running gag", a joke that provokes ... an increasingly exasperated, but at the same time amused, reaction from the audience.' As he admits, this interpretation largely depends on the assumption that the maqamas "were available in more or less the order in which we have them." 18

That surely is a very rash assumption, especially once one is aware of the

varying contents and their disparate ordering in the two early Istanbul

and the Paris Mss. Some of the wilder flights of fancy of Len Goodman?9 should also be

abandoned. His notion that the fact that certain ideas are expressed in

the Qarzçliyya (no. 1 in the editions) is "no accident but a means of setting forth some of the literary values that the maqamat itself seeks [sic] to

exemplify.... almost a dedication" collapses if the order of the collection

is not the author's. Furthermore, the idea that the collection, looked

upon as a coherent series, "climaxes" with the Bishriyya is also untenable.

University of Oxford D. S. RICHARDS

27 James T. Monroe, The Art of Bad�' az-Zam�n al-Hamadh�n� as Picaresque Narrative, American University of Beirut, 1983.

28 J. Mattock, op. cit., 15. 29 J.A.L., XIX (1988), p. 28.