Matthew L. Keegan, Islam and Adab: Reading al-Hariri's Maqamat in an Age of Commentary

Matthew L. Keegan, Islam and Adab: Reading al-Hariri's Maqamat in an Age of Commentary Monday Majlis Online on the 16th of March 2026 Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter Bio: Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research focuses on the intersections of Arabic literature and Islamic thought in the pre-modern Arabic world. He has published on Arabic poetry, Quranic exegesis, Islamic legal riddles, and the study of manuscripts. He was a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. https://amec.barnard.edu/profiles/mat... https://barnard.academia.edu/MatthewK... Abstract: At the dawn of the 12th century CE, al-Hariri first circulated his collection of fifty trickster stories or maqamat by having the text read aloud in the presence of the scholarly elite of Baghdad. Over the course of the next eight centuries, this text became a central text in Islamic education and the object of scores of commentaries. This majlis introduces the main arguments of Keegan's first monograph, Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-Hariri in an Age of Commentary. It seeks to understand how the Maqamat became such an important text in the culture of commentary and how it subsequently fell dramatically out of favor in the nineteenth century when both European Orientalists and Arab reformist thinkers derided the text for being decadent and derivative. In the spirit of the label ‘Majlis’ and also to make the talks even more interesting, our speakers present the topic discussed as embedded in their own journey. You can watch the previous Majlises here    • Monday Majlis series (Centre for the Study...  . However, we don’t record the Q&A in order to keep the discussion free. Please come and enjoy the talks and the discussions : ) If you’d like to be included in the CSI (Centre for the Study of Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter) mailing list, please write to me ([email protected]). We’ll be happy to welcome you! István T Kristó-Nagy https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/4333-ist...