author
Hariri
1054–1122
Best known for the brilliant, fast-moving Maqamat, this 11th-century writer turned wordplay, wit, and linguistic skill into an art form. His stories became classics of Arabic literature and were admired for both their humor and their extraordinary style.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born near Basra in present-day Iraq, al-Hariri of Basra was an Arab scholar, poet, and master of Arabic prose who lived from 1054 to 1122. He is remembered above all for the Maqamat, a collection of fifty episodic tales that helped define one of the great showcase forms of classical Arabic literature.
Al-Hariri was also known as a scholar of language and literature, and some sources describe him as a government official as well. What made his writing stand out was its dazzling control of rhyme, rhetoric, puns, and verbal puzzles, all woven into stories that follow the eloquent trickster Abu Zayd and his narrator, al-Harith.
For many readers, al-Hariri is the author to turn to for the sheer musicality and cleverness of classical Arabic. His work was copied, illustrated, studied, and admired for centuries, and it still offers a vivid sense of how playful, demanding, and inventive literary art could be in the medieval Arabic world.