CSI Monday Majlis: Matthew L. Keegan

Abstract:

At the dawn of the 12th century CE, al-Hariri first circulated his collection of fifty trickster stories or maqamat by having the text read aloud in the presence of the scholarly elite of Baghdad. Over the course of the next eight centuries, this text became a central text in Islamic education and the object of scores of commentaries. This majlis introduces the main arguments of Keegan's first monograph, Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-Hariri in an Age of Commentary. It seeks to understand how the Maqamat became such an important text in the culture of commentary and how it subsequently fell dramatically out of favor in the nineteenth century when both European Orientalists and Arab reformist thinkers derided the text for being decadent and derivative.