Multilingual worlds in al-Ḥarīrī’s monolingual maqāmāt: A study of al-Maqāma ar-raqṭāʾ (the spotted)

This article uncovers the multilingual worlds hidden in al-Ḥarīrī’s (d.516 AH/1112 CE) monolingual, Arabo-centric maqāmāt, a collection of fifty short tales of rhymed prose narrating the exploits of a trickster figure. Focusing on space and language, it seeks to identify where in the maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī signals his attention to the Islamic world’s multilingual composition in a monolingual project that centres Arabic eloquence (balāgha), a poetic category that was deemed untranslatable by medieval poetic theorists. Drawing on the theory of geopoetics to analyse materials from medieval dictionaries of lands, lexicons, and maqāmāt commentaries, the article argues that in three maqāmāt set in the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world, al-Ḥarīrī deployed forms of ineloquent ‘constrained writing’ as a way of translating the trickster’s linguistic genius in non-Arab cities. The article uses as a case study The Spotted Maqāma (al-Maqāma ar-raqṭāʾ), set in the cities of Ahwaz (Ahwāz) and Shush (Sūs) in the Persian province of Khuzestan, in addition to Tus (Ṭūs), a district in remote Khorasan (Khurāsān). Ultimately, the article reappraises al-Ḥarīrī’s use of ‘constrained writing’ by showing how it serves as the trickster’s alternative stratagem to circumvent his poetic estrangement and lack of linguistic control, and thus overcome his inability to weaponize Arabic eloquence to deceive the audience in heterolingual regions.