The Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī: Text, Manuscript and History

Abstract

This article represents the preliminary findings of a study of the textual history of the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al- Zamān al-Hamadhānī. The article discusses different extant manuscript collections of the Maqāmāt, examines the ways that the different manuscript recensions of the Maqāmāt reflect features of the work’s literary history, and presents new material absent in the most commonly available version of the Maqāmāt, that published by noted Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abdu during the nineteenth century. The conclusion of the article argues that prior to the edition of ʿAbduh, the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī was an open corpus that grew as a result of the influence of the larger collection of Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥarīrī.