| Al-Maqamat
is the title of a book written by Abu Muhammad al Qasim ibn Ali
al-Hariri (1054-1122) containing fifty relatively short stories (maquamat = "settings" or
"sessions"), each
one identified by the name of a city
in the Muslim world of the time. The stories tell of actual adventures
and especially the verbal pronouncements in verse or in prose of a
roguish and peripatetic hero, Abu Zayd from Saruj, a town in northern
Syria, as told by al-Harith, a sober and slightly gullible merchant
travelling from place to place. Double and triple puns, unusual
meanings of words and elaborate grammatical constructions are used to
exhibit the astounding and sophisticated wealth of the Arabic language.
The genre of the maqamat became an almost instant success because
of the extraordinary quality of its writing. Dozens of manuscripts of
Hariri's Maqamat have been preserved from his
own time, including a probable autograph, and hundreds have remained
from the thirteenth and later centuries. Nearly all of them were copied
in the core areas of the Arabic-speaking world—Egypt, Syria, Iraq—where
there lived and prospered the class of educated Arabs likely to enjoy
reading this forbidding book and interested in acquiring, perhaps even
in sponsoring, a luxury edition of a beloved work. Even though the text
itself and the reasons for its success are hardly topics for
illustrations, thirteen of these manuscripts are known to have been
provided with images inspired by narrative episodes from individual
stories. Of these, six are from the thirteenth century, five are from
the fourteenth, one is probably from the sixteenth or seventeenth
century, and one is dated in the early eighteenth, even though one of
its miniatures appears to be much earlier. Of all the
manuscripts with pictures containing al-Hariri's great work, Paris BN
ms. arabe 5847 towers above all others for the quality and variety of
its illustrations. It was
completed in C.E. 1237 (A.H. 634, in the
month of ramadan) and, according to its colophon, was copied and
illustrated by the same individual, Yahya ibn Mahmud ibn Yahya ibn Abi
al-Hasan ibn Kuwwarih al-Wasiti, presumably originating from the city
of al-Wasit. The
manuscript survives with 99 miniatures. From the
time they were first made known, in large surveys of the late
nineteenth century, the miniatures from this manuscript were praised
for their realism in depicting life. | | Nearly
every book on any aspect of
Islamic, and especially Arab, history or culture uses these images to
illustrate almost all topics except for military matters. Some of them,
the village or the drove of camels, have even found many more uses than
is legitimate to propose for them; in fact one can hardly look at the
book of traditional Islamic or Arab culture, history, or society that
does not illustrate its points with images from the Maqamat, even if
they are not appropriate with respect to time or place. The subjects of
the images are many, but also consistent and one does not need, at
least at first glance, the text to understand the activities depicted
and to agree that they provide a sort of panorama of the actual
episodes of a human life from birth to death, or else the activities of
an ordinary Arab urban middle class world, spinning, going to the
mosque, suing someone in front of a judge, travelling, drinking in a
tavern, going to the library, sleeping, eating, buying a slave. The
people involved in many of these activities may be slightly
caricaturied, but with humour and sympathy, and their facial types,
clothes, poses, or gestures can all be assumed to reflect observations
made by the artist from the surrounding world. It is easy to imagine
al-Wasiti walking around his city making sketches of the people he sees
or, perhaps more likely, storing in his memory hundreds of pictures of
daily life, including details of poses or of the ways in which clothes
cling to a person. He did not observe the vegetation in the same way
and his plants, even the trees he utilizes so artfully, remain
stereotyped and primarily ornamental. In short, it is reasonable to
define the art of al-Wasiti as one of realism of intent. He wanted his
viewers to see and recognize a specific world and to be amused by it,
but he did not feel compelled to depict every detail of every feature.
(adapted from Oleg Grabar's text)
The facsimile: Full color reproduction in the original format (27 x
38 cm), 334 pp, with 99 illustrations. Scholarly commentary (44, xxii,
38
pp) by
Oleg Grabar, Prof. of Islamic Art, Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton, New Jersey. Published by Touchart, London,
2003. Eu 2,500. (Please call for
special OMI
price)
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