This thesis is about strangeness and strangers in the Maqāmāt of Ḥarīrī; an Arabic work of literary fiction from the 6th/12th century, featuring a lettered man pursuing a trickster in fifty episodic narratives to collect his rare words, sophisticated compositions, and curious accounts. A key element of the maqāma genre, as noted by Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm ibn ʿAlī al-Ḥuṣrī in the 5th/11th century, is its strangeness. Al-Ḥarīrī accentuates this element and employs it in two different aspects of his maqāmāt: the vocabulary, and the trickster’s relationship to space. The first aspect of unusual vocabulary combines Bedouin terms, curses, argot, and jargon, which Arabic lexicography categorizes as gharīb: “strange” or “rare.” The sec-ond manifests in the relationship of human experience with space, meaning the act of mov-ing from one location to another, being in isolation or exile, away from home and familiarity, trading curiosities, collecting unusual anecdotes, and being a gharīb, a stranger. The Ḥarīriyya readers during the premodern period of Islām recognized the strangeness of al-Ḥarīrī’s language and widely appreciated it. Their Nahḍawī (Arabic modernist) counterparts objected to the literary model this feature represented, along with the Ḥarīriyya’s immorali-ty, ornate language, and repetitive plots. They sought to replace it with a literary style that was closer to European literature. This shift was a direct consequence of the influence of early modern European scholarship on Classical Arabic literature, especially al-Ḥarīrī. Against the grain of early Orientalist and modernist readings, I argue that the Ḥarīriyya makes more sense, from an aesthetic, intellectual, and literary standpoint, when it is read and appraised according to its own terms, particularly through the reception paradigm its first readers adopted. That paradigm has been neglected also in much of contemporary scholarship. Owing to the assumption that traveling and moving in space is a ‘‘hollow frame’’ in the maqāma genre, scholarship has until recently exhibited a lackluster engagement with the element of gharīb (the strange) in the Ḥarīriyya, especially spatial strange-ness. I argue that linguistic gharāba (rare words and difficult expressions) and physical ghurba (being a stranger) are interdependent and strongly dependent on each other in the Ḥarīriyya. Only a stranger who comes from a distant land can fulfill the audience’s obsessive desire for curiosities, wondrous accounts, and exotic vocabulary, which always exists elsewhere.
