The Maqamat of al-Hariri
Fifty episodes in which a respectable narrator, moving between the cities of the Islamic world, keeps meeting the same silver-tongued vagabond — begging in a mosque, preaching at a graveside, pleading a case before a judge — and recognizes him only once the crowd has been fleeced by his eloquence. The rhymed prose is stuffed with lexical stunts: palindromes, passages written without dotted letters, sermons that read as piety one way and fraud the other. The most copied and most illustrated book of the medieval Arab world after the Qur'an, and the standing model for the rogue narrative.
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Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 71% · 15 shared
- 68% · 13 shared
- 68% · 13 shared
- 63% · 13 shared
- 58% · 11 shared
- 58% · 11 shared