Fifty Twists of the Tongue

In one of his letters Gustave Flaubert mused about writing a book “about nothing”, a book of pure style alone. The Maqāmāt of Abu Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hariri (1054–1122) may not be a book “about nothing”. But this picaresque sequence of fifty tales about an itinerant swindler of fabulous eloquence named Abu Zayd al-Saruji, as narrated by his shadowy observer, his bewildered “secret sharer” al-Harith ibn Hammam, is really a work in which the Arabic language itself in all its fabulous abundance and shimmering ambiguity proves to be the actual protagonist. As the Moroccan writer Abdelfattah Kilito remarks in his brilliant foreword to Impostures, Michael Cooperson’s new translation, Abu Zayd is “Arabic itself, the language of God in the world of man”, and so “excessive verbal performance is what [the tales] are all about”. Written throughout in rhyming prose, the mode known in Arabic as saj’, the Maqāmāt draw on virtually every stylistic effect of which Arabic is capable. Al-Hariri employs puns and riddles and double-entendres, poems, palindromes, sermons which can be read backwards and forwards to form different but equally coherent discourses, passages in which every second word contains the dots that in Arabic distinguish certain letters from another while every other word remains undotted, and lipograms, texts which consistently omit a certain letter (the device which Georges Perec used in La Disparition, a novel written without the letter e). In verbal trickery – perhaps verbal witchery is more apt – al-Hariri surpasses any stylistic constraint which Perec or other adherents of Oulipo could imagine, let alone apply.