Maqāmāt relate the exploits of roving trickster protagonists who use ornate linguistic devices to defraud unsuspecting victims. Like their rogue anti-heroes who are always on the move, maqāmāt also manifest an amazing capacity to travel and transform. Over the course of a millennium, versions of maqāmāt tales spread to nearly all regions of the Muslim world from West Africa to East India.
Tracing the long life of a literary form now known only to specialists, this lecture argues for the necessity of combining two radically different ways of studying texts and their historical circulation: the close reading of Philology and the distant reading of World Literature. The lecture presents a new model for the study of a pre-modern literary form that explores the textual past and engages with contemporary literary scholarship.
BIO: Maurice Pomerantz (PhD Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU-Abu Dhabi. He has been a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Fulbright Scholar in Jordan and Lebanon. He is the author of Licit Magic: The Life and Letters of Al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (Brill 2017), and many articles on the genre of the maqāma, tenth-century Arabic literary culture, and related subjects. He is an Associate Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
