Al Maqama as a Cross-Genre Literary Genre (The Maqama of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamdhani as a Model)

Abstract

For the majority of critics, Maqama is the purpose and the finished product of the industry in the language of artistic prose, and it represents all forms and arts of prose and compositional writing. Badi` al-Zaman al-Hamdhani is considered the founder of this literary genre, in which he collected a number of other literary genres, such as anecdotes, news, proverbs, etc. Until these maqamat became an art that many authors and writers cared about and tried to imitate in their works, such as the Maqamat of al-Hariri, al-Suyuti, and others. This research aimed at highlighting these representations, as they show the role of Al-Hamdhani and his effort in presenting the mature and developed art of the Maqama; as such, he was the pioneer of this art, even if this was preceded by some examples that did not amount to being an independent literary genre; however, it became an art with its own rules, foundations, and components as a literary genre that was not known to its predecessors thanks to al-Hamdhani. The examiner of these Maqamat finds the literary genres present from one work to another, which enables the literary critic to track the clear genre-specific characteristics. Also, when we observe the way in which al-Hamdhani writes his Maqamat, we find that he goes beyond literary genres without neglecting them. Moreover, The literary genres share the denominations with all other genres of prose. So (Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamdhani) represents other literary genres in his Maqamat without eliminating their boundaries, so that the critic would be able to identify the prominent genre-specific characteristics, and to identify the places and positions in which (Badi’ al-Zaman) crossed the boundaries of the literary genre without eliminating it. Al-Hamdhani represented the various literary genres in his Maqamat, as there was a fine line separating these genres. Furthermore, the Maqama was able to integrate many literary genres and present them in a new model (as a Maqama), just like the modern novel. Al-Hamdhani was able to create a relationship between poetry and prose in his Maqamat, and he was able to implement them in various ways and methods, which he developed in his own style to be consistent with the prose material, in the form of a discourse between two literary genres: poetry and Maqamat, revealing an important and vital aspect of the nature of the relationship between genres and literary types to us, and the possibility of their overlap through technical processes mastered by the author. Poetry was implemented and represented in almost all of his Maqamat, so poetry was either composed by famous poets who memorize their poems and mention their names from different eras and times. In the Maqama, poetry has many functions, as it might have a deceptive, narrative, describtive, or critical function. In addition, the Maqama was able to Introduce news, stories, stories, etc. Implementing the Maqama for the various literary genres expresses the strength, skill, and breadth of the author's knowledge, as he implements them artistically and semantically. al-Hamdhani was aware and a master in integrating different literally genres in his Maqamat to serve their purpose, while preserving the fine line which separates each one of them. As such, Literary elements became essential elements in the Maqama and not independent genres.

The study aimed to identify the artistic features of literary genres that are similar to the Maqama, as well as presenting Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamdhani's implementations of literary genres in his Maqamat, in addition to some themes that were prevalent in Arab society during the fourth century AH. The researcher used the analytic descriptive approach to obtain accurate results.