Kitāb al-maqāmāt

Abu Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hariri (1054–1122) was a wealthy official of Basra and a master of the Arabic language. His fifty Maqamat follow the wanderings of the eloquent rogue Abu Zayd of Saruj, who in every episode tricks his audience with a dazzling speech, as told by the narrator al-Harith ibn Hammam.

The Maqamat are a festival of wordplay, rhymed prose and rare vocabulary, and for centuries they were memorised and studied across the Arab world; illustrated manuscripts such as the famous one painted by al-Wasiti in 1237 are treasures of Islamic art. He followed the model created by al-Hamadhani.