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).
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Imposture 1
Ever the Twain Shall Meet
In this episode, al-Ḥārith meets Abū Zayd for the first time. Al-Ḥārith’s voice is based on that of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), particularly Huck’s description of the two con men, the King and the Duke. Abū Zayd’s pious poem combines two nineteenth-century temperance hymns. His verses at the end are a tribute to Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” first recorded in 1931.
1.1That A-rab feller told us all about it:
I hadn’t got any money, so I made up my mind to leave my loved ones behind, and sling a leg over the back of beyond, and see what luck I’d have. I had some adventures, which throwed me this way and that and th’ other, but after a long time I landed in Sana, which is in the kingdom of Sheba. By the time I fetched up there, I was a sight to look at, without a cent in the world, or
