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Readers of al-Ḥarīrī’s Introduction may wonder what terrible thing he is worried about having done. His hero, Abū Zayd, practices fraud, drinks alcohol, and occasionally steals, all without being punished. At the same time, he delivers powerful sermons that move his listeners to tears. Are his sermons somehow invalidated by his hypocrisy? And are the Impostures, which are supposed to teach Arabic, tainted by the sordidness of the events they describe?

James Monroe’s pioneering study of al-Ḥarīrī’s predecessor al-Hamadhānī argued that both sets of Impostures are parodic inversions “of the values embodied in the ḥadīth” (the words and actions attributed to the Prophet) and other genres of Arabic writing (The Art, 26). This thesis has been revived, though with important modifications, by Devin J. Stewart, who reads al-Hamadhānī’s Impostures as parodies of “specific genres of Islamic religious discourse, particularly the hadith-lecture or majlis.” But, he adds, al-Ḥarīrī’s Impostures, though they retain the framing device associated with hadith transmission (“So-and-so related to us”), are nevertheless more concerned with “belles lettres per se” (Stewart, “The Maqāma,” 149–50). And indeed, several important studies of the genre emphasize its continuity with other kinds of writing in Arabic. Abdelfattah Kilito, for example, has discussed the Impostures’ development of themes already present in travelogues and in anecdotes about madmen, mimics, and beggars (Kilito, Séances, 19–94). Similarly, Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s study of al-Hamadhānī analyzes his “creative use of preexisting literary roles, techniques, and situations,” including, for example, the dish that never arrives, a staple of the hospitality anecdote (Malti-Douglas, Maqāmāt, 1). And Philip Kennedy’s recent study of (mis)recognition explores the web of intertextuality that links the Impostures to the Qurʾan, Qurʾanic exegesis, folklore, and poetry (Kennedy, Recognition, 246–312).

In contrast to those who find the Impostures parodic, Katia Zakharia sees Abū Zayd’s language “as a path toward God and truth” and the Impostures as a text to be decoded. The result of her own decoding is a story about the hero’s gradual progression toward mystical bliss (Abū Zayd, citation at 59). Matthew Keegan’s more recent reading also invokes decoding, but of a different kind. For him, al-Ḥarīrī’s text, at least to its original audiences, was not parodic or subversive. Rather, the Impostures had a pedagogic function: to teach the reader the skills necessary to make sense of complex, polyvalent texts, above all the Qurʾan (Keegan, “Commentarial Acts,” 404). On this view, al-Ḥarīrī’s introduction may thus be read as saying exactly what it seems to be saying—namely, that using fiction to teach people how to read was an anxiety-producing business. This is not because fictionality as such was problematic (on which see the discussion of §0.6 below), but because the stakes of learning to read correctly might be nothing less than salvation.

The Qurʾanic verse cited in §0.2 has been a matter of controversy. Extant early manuscripts, including al-Ḥarīrī’s authorized copy, have Q Takwīr 81:19–21, “These are the words . . . ” (I quote from George Sale’s translation of 1734). But other manuscripts reportedly contained a different verse, Q Anbiyāʾ 21:107: “We have not sent thee but as a mercy unto all creatures” (also Sale, with an interpolation omitted). According to one commentator, al-Ḥarīrī was unaware that the “honourable messenger” mentioned in 81:19 is the angel Gabriel, not the Prophet Muḥammad. When he realized his mistake, he replaced the verse with 21:107, which is unambiguously about the Prophet. By then, though, the first version had already been widely disseminated. The result was what Keegan calls a “productive co-mingling” of the two versions that allowed commentators to debate not only al-Ḥarīrī’s competence as a reader of the Qurʾan but the merits of the Impostures as a whole (Keegan, “Commentarial Acts,” citation at 297).

“Badee al-Zamán” (§0.3) is my pseudo-eighteenth-century spelling of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008), author of the first (known) Imposture. For more on him and his relationship to al-Ḥarīrī, see my Introduction.

“Ecbatana” is the name Gibbon knows for Badīʿ al-Zamān’s hometown of Hamadhan, which lies in the northeast of what is now Iran. “Abu Al-Fath of Scanderoon” is Abū l-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī, the eloquent protagonist of al-Hamadhānī’s Impostures. “Jesu ben Hesham” is ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, Abū l-Fatḥ’s sidekick and narrator.

“A certain personage”: the biographer Yāqūt identifies the supposed patron as Sharaf al-Dīn Anūshirwān ibn Khālid al-Iṣfahānī or al-Kāshānī (d. 532 or 533/1137, 1138, or 1139; Lambton, “Anūshirwān b. Khālid”), vizier to the Abbasid caliph al-Mustarshid (reigned 512–29/1118–35). According to a report attributed to al-Ḥarīrī himself, the vizier read what is now Imposture 48, at the time still the only one written, and urged him to compose more like it. But another biographer, Ibn Khallikān, says that a copy of the Impostures he saw in Cairo bore a note in al-Ḥarīrī’s own hand saying that he had written them for another vizier to al-Mustarshid, namely Jalāl al-Dīn Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Ṣadaqah, called ʿAmīd al-Dawlah (d. 522/1128; see Hillenbrand, “al-Mustarshid”).

In her discussion of this passage, Zakharia argues that it is unlikely that al-Ḥarīrī would have spent years toiling away on his Impostures to please a patron whom he would then fail to name. In her view, the “certain personage, whose command is no less profitably than deservedly obeyed,” is probably God (Zakharia, Abū Zayd, 70–75, though her claim that al-Ḥarīrī spent twenty years on the Impostures is inaccurate, as the correct figure is ten years, per MacKay, Certificates, 8–9). Keegan makes a different proposal—namely, that the two biographical reports can be reconciled if we read the annotation on the Cairo copy to mean that al-Ḥarīrī “dedicated that particular manuscript” to ʿAmīd al-Dawlah (Keegan, “Commentarial Acts,” 154). On this view, the original commissioner of the work could still be Anūshirwān ibn Khālid.

It should be noted that neither of the viziers is described as paying anything for the Impostures, or otherwise supporting the author. One contemporary figure, however, reportedly did reward him: this is Dubays al-Asadī, head of the Mazyadids, a quasi-independent Arab dynasty based in central Iraq. In Imposture 39, Abū Zayd, who has just delivered a baby, is acclaimed “as if he were . . . Dubays al-Asadī” (§39.7). When he learned that he had been praised in the Impostures, Dubays sent al-Ḥarīrī a staggering number of gifts (Sharīshī, Sharḥ, 4:313). That Dubays’s name should have remained in situ is ironic, as his interests were often opposed to those of al-Ḥarīrī’s supposed Abbasid patrons, to the point that he later rebelled openly against the caliph (Bosworth, “Mazyad”). In any case, al-Ḥarīrī evidently managed to take advantage of the complex political and cultural rivalries of the period to monetize his Impostures with or without a commission from a patron.

Various explanations are offered as to why al-Ḥarīrī wrote exactly fifty Impostures (§0.4). He may have intended to outdo al-Hamadhānī, who was credited with forty. But, as Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila has pointed out, the number of al-Hamadhānī’s Impostures “was not necessarily stabilized” by al-Ḥarīrī’s time. In fact, the number of Impostures credited to al-Hamadhānī “may have been influenced by the later al-Ḥarīrī” (Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama, 148–49). As work by Bilal Orfali and Maurice Pomerantz has shown, the state of al-Hamadhānī’s oeuvre is quite chaotic, with different Impostures and Imposture-like texts being attributed to him, or taken away from him, by various editors (see, e.g., Orfali and Pomerantz, “Three Maqāmāt”). It is only with al-Ḥarīrī that we find the soon-to-become-classical model of a fixed number of episodes, usually forty or fifty, with a preface by the author. Later readers, possibly including al-Ḥarīrī himself, may have assumed this model existed from the beginning, and thus back-projected onto al-Hamadhānī an awareness of genre he did not possess (Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama, 149). In any event, al-Ḥarīrī clearly thinks of al-Hamadhānī as the man to beat. Here in the preface, he is piously deferential, but in §47.9 he has Abū Zayd declare himself a greater master of language than al-Hamadhānī’s hero, Abū l-Fatḥ.

“Abu Zeid of Batnae” (§0.4) is Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, the eloquent protagonist of al-Ḥarīrī’s Impostures, and “Hareth Ebn Hamam of Bassora” is al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām, the starstruck narrator. (“Batnae” is an ancient name for Sarūj, and “Bassora” Gibbon’s spelling of Basra, the city in southern Iraq.) A recurrent story has it that Abū Zayd is modeled on a real-life mendicant whom al-Ḥarīrī met, or heard of, in Basra (see the Notes on Imposture 48). It is not clear whether this supposed model was named Abū Zayd, or simply al-Sarūjī. The latter means “from Sarūj,” a town located on what was then the frontier with Byzantium and is now part of southeast Turkey near the Syrian border (see the note on §1.9). Inspired by real life or not, the names bear at least a formal resemblance to those of the corresponding characters in al-Hamadhānī. “Zayd” may allude to the figure of the same name used in examples in grammar books: “Zayd struck ʿAmr,” for example, has a resonance similar to “See Spot run” for American English speakers. Al-Ḥārith’s name apparently derives from a saying attributed to the Prophet to the effect that every man is a ḥārith, that is, one who plows, or more generally, toils for his bread; as well as a hammām, that is, one beset by cares (Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt, 4:65; Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama, 155).

In §0.4, al-Ḥarīrī refers to Impostures 2 and 25 using titles: “of Hulwan” and “of Karaj,” respectively. Al-Hamadhānī’s earlier Impostures have titles, so it is not surprising to find al-Ḥarīrī giving titles to his as well. But the reference in §0.4 does not mean that all of those titles had stabilized or that any of them were treated as part of the text. Al-Ḥarīrī’s authorized copy introduces all but one of the Impostures by number only: “Imposture No. 1,” “Imposture No. 2,” and so on. The now-conventional titles may have come into use when al-Ḥarīrī began teaching the Impostures, as he and his students would doubtless have found it more helpful to refer to “the one about Hulwan” than to “No. 2.” The Istanbul University manuscript, which has titles scribbled in the margins, may represent an intermediate stage during which the titles had attached themselves to their Impostures without counting as part of the text. The fact that several Impostures have alternative titles is compatible with this reconstruction. Indeed, the manuscript copied and illustrated by al-Wāsiṭī over a century later does not use titles at all.

“Kodama” (§0.5) is my invented eighteenth-century spelling for Qudāmah ibn Jaʿfar (d. after 320/932), most famous for his Naqd al-shiʿr (The Assaying of Verse), a pioneering survey of Arabic poetics.

“Shall we declare unto you . . .” (§0.6): Q Kahf 18:103–104, tr. Sale.

“This fiction (waḍʿ), its captious judge will say, violates the laws of God (min manāhī l-sharʿ)” (§0.6). What al-Ḥarīrī is afraid of, according to Kilito, is being called out for “disguising his voice by giving it to characters who by virtue of the deception acquire a presence and an independence no different from those of real beings” (Kilito, Séances, 251; for older discussions of the fictionality problem see Nicholson, Literary History, 330–31; and Bonebakker, “Nihil obstat”). Al-Ḥarīrī goes on to defend himself by arguing that no one objects to “fables told of talking animals, or mute objects brought to life.” In the event, one reader, Ibn al-Khashshāb (d. 567/1172), did accuse him of lying. Fables and parables, he protested, cannot possibly deceive anyone, since (for example) animals cannot speak, and any story that claims they do is obviously using them to make a point. But (says Ibn al-Khashshāb) nothing prevents someone like Abū Zayd from actually existing.

How then is the reader to know that the Impostures are a fiction? One can think of several tip-offs, none of which, however, are mentioned by Ibn Barrī (d. 582/1187), who sprang to al-Ḥarīrī’s defense. Instead, as Kilito delights in telling us, Ibn Barrī insists that al-Ḥarīrī cannot have been lying because Abū Zayd was a real person after all (Kilito, Séances, 248–59, cf. also 125–33; on the “real” Abū Zayd, see the Note to Imposture 48). Keegan, however, contends that this exchange offers little evidence to support the notion of “a cultural resistance to fiction.” Rather, he says, the Arabic critical tradition had already done a lot of thinking about how fables and other kinds of fiction work. What bothers Ibn al-Khashshāb about the Impostures is not their fictionality but their failure to signal to the reader that a nonliteral reading of the text is possible (Keegan, “Commentarial Acts,” 249–302, esp. 281).