Maqāmāt Al-Barbīr [Arabic]

By Max Robert Shmookler and Mohammed Diaa Eddin Alaswad

Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Laṭīf bin Muḥammad al-Barbīr (1747-1811) was a late eighteenth century adīb, poet, critic, and muftī of Beirut. Born and educated in Egypt of Levantine parents, he travelled to Beirut as a young man and subsequently settled in Damascus, where he composed the lengthy maqāma presented here in print for the first time. This work, entitled Maqāmāt al-Barbīr, is edited based on MS Dār al-Kutub 480 Adab. The scribe of this unique 50-folio manuscript is unknown. This work not only provides a rich portrait of social and cultural life in late-eighteenth-century Ottoman Damascus, but also offers a different and fascinating understanding of the maqāma as a literary form in a historical moment centuries after the classical masters of the genre and just a generation before the transformations of the Nahḍa.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: Arabic
• ISBN: 3110796961
• ISBN13: 9783110796964
• Release Date: December 2023
• Publisher: de Gruyter
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.9" x 9.6"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary