This chapter will analyze the city/cities in the maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 395/1007) and Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim b. ʿAlī al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122), proposing that the city plays a meaning-making role in their work, offering us interpretative strategies through their literary geographies. Both the semantic and legal geographies in the work of these two authors will be highlighted through two main foci. First, in the case of al-Hamadhānī, I propose that the text's cities belong to the geography of the “familiar,” where the language use of the protagonist, Abū’l Fatḥ al-Iskandarī, would be readily comprehensible as the linguistic play that it is inside the Arabic literary geography he inhabits. His metaphors, stylistics, and inverted use of language would not be understood as literal but as a game. In this respect, the space of the familiar becomes a metonymy of semantic stability and the tools of adab offer us deeper insights into the maqāmāt and a richer reading experience. Second, I argue that the literary geography acts as a frame to both moral and legal stability in the maqāmāt of these authors. In al-Ḥarīrī's maqāmāt, the protagonist, Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, abuses the stability of the city's legal geography for his benefit. While the legal framework of the city may not be productive for al-Iskandarī, the protagonist of al-Hamadhānī's maqāmāt, the city and its laws are conducive to al-Sarūjī's plans. The city therefore acts as a border in the maqāmāt for both semantic as well as moral and legal stability and law enforcement.

The Maqāmāt: One City is Not Enough

One of the most famous premodern Arabic genres, the maqāma, is a prosimetric genre that combines both rhymed prose known in Arabic as sajʿ and poetry. As Rina Drory defines it, it is a “collection of short independent narratives written in ornamental rhymed prose (sajʿ) with verse insertions, and [that] share a common plot-scheme and two constant protagonists: the narrator and the hero.” Most maqāmāt follow this scheme with different adaptations according to the individual author. Invented by al-Hamadhānī, the genre is partially inspired by the life of the mendicants or al-mukaddīn and their anecdotes.