Impostures. al-Ḥarīrī
sweet relief;
But wept I not, till I beheld her sighs;
So precedence is hers, and hers the prize.
0.6It is my hope, that having presumed to lay this work of turgid rhetoric before the public, I may yet escape the blame naturally incurred by any who hands his executioner the knife; or amputates, with more severity than sense, his own offending nose. “Shall we declare unto you,” says the Koran, “those whose works are vain, whose endeavor in the present life hath been wrongly directed, and who think they do the work which is right?” Though partiality be disposed to overlook, and friendship to excuse, the manifest deficiencies of this book, it is unlikely to escape the cavils of the ignorant, or the calumny of the wilful. This fiction, its captious judge will say, violates the laws of God. Yet the eye of reason, that sees by the light of first principles, will find it a work of instruction, similar to those fables told of talking animals, or mute objects brought to life. Is there one who refuses to listen to such tales, or condemns their recital, in an idle hour? If our deeds are judged, as our acts of worship are affirmed, by our intentions, how can justice reprove any one who composes pleasantries, not to deceive, but to teach; and whose fables pretend to utility, not veracity, in the correction of error? I know not how such an author differs from any teacher of virtue or religion.
Do not resist the Muse’s mighty gale:
Against her force no mortal can prevail.
When she slackens, thou mayest slip away:
Do but survive, and thou hast won the day.
In this as in all my designs, I grasp the strong arm of God, that he might conduct me in the right path, and steer me past the stumbling-block. He is my succor and my sanctuary, my refuge and my guide. Upon him I rely, and to him I turn in penitence.
Notes
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