outdone.
So matters stood until 495/1101–2, 8 when an unlikely prospect named al-Ḥarīrī 9 decided to challenge the Wonder of the Age. 10 Al-Ḥarīrī (who was born in 446/1054 and died in 516/1122) 11 was a proud citizen of the southern Iraqi town of Basra. During his lifetime, the town was governed by a motley parade of Abbasid caliphs, Seljuk sultans, Arab chieftains, and Turkish emirs. 12 One source reports that al-Ḥarīrī was a wealthy landowner while another claims he was employed by the Abbasid administration in Baghdad to report on local affairs. Though “extremely clever and articulate,” he was also “short, ugly, stingy, and filthy in his person” 13—all liabilities in a world where knowledge was transmitted face to face and being an author often meant performing one’s works in public. Most damningly, al-Ḥarīrī was unable to compose on the spot. While thinking, he would pull at his beard, which he did so often that he plucked the hairs out. 14 After he presented his first Imposture he was asked to write another, but even after weeks of solitary effort, “blackening page after page,” he “found himself unable to put two words together.” 15 Later, after he had managed to produce forty episodes, he was asked, while calling on a high official in Baghdad, to improvise one more. “Taking pen case and paper, he went off to a corner of the audience room and remained there for a good long while, but no inspiration came and he left the room, mortified.” 16 So unlikely a superstar did he seem that he was widely accused of plagiarizing his stories from a visiting North African.
But al-Ḥarīrī had the last laugh. When the Impostures were finished, he took his scribbled manuscript to Baghdad. There he read the work aloud to one al-Mubārak al-Anṣārī, who made a fair copy. In Rajab 504/January 1111, al-Ḥarīrī invited a group of prominent literary and legal scholars to hear the first five Impostures read aloud. The attendees must have liked what they heard, as many of them returned for session after session to hear the whole work through. Just over a month later, on Shaʿban 7, 504/February 18, 1111, the first public reading of the Impostures came to an end, with at least thirty-eight senior men of letters in attendance. The auditors’ names and the precise date of the last session are carefully noted on al-Mubārak’s fair copy, which by some miracle has survived into modern times.
After the first reading of the Impostures was finished, the fair copy was used to teach the Impostures another twenty-nine times. The last of these teach-ins took place in Damascus in Rabiʿ al-Awwal 683/June 1284. 17 As impressive as its diffusion is, this manuscript is only one of the seven hundred copies reportedly approved by al-Ḥarīrī himself. This number means that he was approached seven hundred times by people who wanted him to confirm that they had studied an authentic copy of his work. 18 After his death, the Impostures continued to grow in popularity. As one of his biographers puts it:
The Impostures have enjoyed a reception unlike anything else in literary history. The work is of such a high standard, so marvelous in expression, and so copious in vocabulary, as to carry all before it. The author’s choice of words, and his careful arrangement of them, are such that one might well despair of imitating him, much less of matching his achievement. The work is justly celebrated by critics as well as admirers, and has received more than its due of accolades. 19
Unlike al-Hamadhānī’s, al-Ḥarīrī’s Impostures are clearly intended to fit together as a collection. In the first Imposture, the narrator, al-Ḥārith, meets the eloquent rogue, Abū Zayd, for the first time; in the last Imposture, Abū Zayd supposedly reforms. There is also more consistency across the stories. With a few notable exceptions, all of them feature Abū Zayd as “a clever and unscrupulous protagonist, disguised differently in each episode,” who “succeeds, through a display of eloquence, in swindling money out of the gullible narrator”—namely, al-Ḥārith, “who only realizes [Abū Zayd’s] identity . . . when it is too late.” 20 In effect, al-Ḥarīrī has taken one of al-Hamadhānī’s plots and standardized it. He is also more consistent than his predecessor in matters of form. Al-Hamadhānī may have one poem in an Imposture, or several, or none, while al-Ḥarīrī often has just two. Similarly, al-Hamadhānī frequently drops out of rhyme in transitional passages, while al-Ḥarīrī almost never drops out of rhyme unless he is quoting a Qurʾanic verse or pious formula.
Most famously, al-Ḥarīrī made a point of including examples of the kinds of trick writing that his predecessor had claimed to be able to produce. In Imposture 28, the roguish Abū Zayd delivers a sermon in which every word consists entirely of undotted letters (excluding, that is, half the letters in the Arabic alphabet). In Imposture 6, he dictates a letter in which every second word contains only dotted letters and the remaining words only undotted ones. In Impostures 8, 35, 43, and 44, he composes a story or poem that seems to be about one thing but contains so many words with double meanings that it can be read as telling an equally coherent story about something else. In Imposture 16, he extemporizes several palindromes (sentences that read the same backward as forward). In Imposture 17, he delivers a sermon that can be read word by word from the end to produce a different but equally plausible speech. In 32, he produces ninety legal riddles, each based on a pun. And in 46, he trains schoolchildren to perform feats such as taking all the words that contain the rare letter ẓāʾ and putting them into a poem. To some critics, manipulations like these have seemed an embarrassing waste of time, and evidence of the decadence of “Oriental taste.” 21 To my mind, however, they lie at the heart of al-Ḥarīrī’s enterprise.
As Matthew Keegan has recently argued, the Impostures are about learning. 22 Here it is useful to recall that twelfth-century Arabic was not simply a means of communication in the ordinary sense. For one thing, native speakers had long been in the minority in the territories captured by Islam, and in many places still were. Thus it was by no means guaranteed that any given Muslim, much less anyone living under Muslim rule, could speak the language. Moreover, Arabic was the language in which God had revealed the Qurʾan to the Prophet Muḥammad. For non-native speakers, learning it meant fully inhabiting one’s identity as a Muslim—and not coincidentally making oneself eligible for opportunities denied to one’s monolingual Persian-, Coptic-, Berber-, or Aramaic-speaking cousins. This aspirational quality of Arabic is evident from the eagerness with which al-Ḥarīrī’s characters debate fine points of grammar, semantics, and etymology. It also explains their palpable fear of making mistakes, as well as their chagrin when Abū Zayd outdoes them in punning, rhyming, riddling, or whatever the challenge might be.
Yet Abū Zayd does more than take cocky neophytes down a peg. He does things with language
