Description
(Short description)
(Text)
Ahmad bin Abd al-La if bin Muhammad al-Barbir (1747-1811) was a late eighteenth century adib, poet, critic, and mufti 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 maqama presented here in print for the first time. This work, entitled Maqamat al-Barbir, is edited based on MS Dar 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 maqama 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 Nahda.
(Author portrait)
Max Robert Shmookler, Columbia University, New York City, USA; Mohammad Diaa Eddin Alaswad, Damaskus, Syrien.
