Abū Zayd, the protagonist of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt, is a man of many wiles like Odysseus — except that his aim is less to get home to his wife than to talk strangers out of their money. The fifty episodes follow him across the Islamic world, met again and again by a narrator who is repulsed and fascinated in equal measure. What made the work canonical was the prose: in one episode Abū Zayd dictates a letter using only undotted letters, half the Arabic alphabet.

Over a hundred medieval copies survive, from West Africa to the Indian Ocean. Only thirteen are illustrated, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s “Schefer” copy is the most spectacular of them.

  • Completed 9 May 1237 (6 Ramadan 634 H) by the Iraqi calligrapher Yaḥyā b. Maḥmūd al-Wasiṭī, a little over a century after the text itself
  • Ninety-nine miniatures: processions and caravans, ships, the queen of Oman giving birth, the slave market of Zabid where a young man argues for his freedom
  • In four episodes Abū Zayd performs speeches built so densely from double meanings that they mean two opposite things at once; another can be read forward or backward
  • One illustration of dropped pants survives intact; another has been blacked out by a later reader, leaving the onlookers staring into an empty doorway
  • Maqāma 50 ends the book: Abū Zayd repents, renounces literature and doubled speech for the word of God, and the disappointed narrator walks away

The reception history is the strangest part. The manuscript ended up with Charles-Henri-Auguste Schefer, the French diplomat and Orientalist who interpreted in Jerusalem and Alexandria, became a favourite of the Ottoman sultan, helped negotiate the end of the Crimean War, and later ran the Chair of Persian at the École des langues orientales — from which he published the journals of Antoine Galland, translator of the Thousand and One Nights.

Galland fixed the Orientalist image of the Abbasid caliphate in the European imagination. Arabophone writers have been answering it ever since — Radwa Ashour, Elias Khoury, Naguib Mahfouz — “looking back at yourself through someone else’s mirror.” Then, in 1941, the young Iraqi artist Jawad Saleem found five reproductions of the Schefer manuscript in a French magazine article and saw a kind of painting that had vanished from the Iraqi repertoire. Ten years later he founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group on the principle of istilhām al-turāth — searching for inspiration in heritage. The PDR’s closing line ties it shut: Abū Zayd’s wanderings begin when he is driven from his home by the Crusaders of Baldwin I. Even in the twelfth century, the French wanted what the Arabs had.