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
