Jewish Maqamat

While discussing the difference between "Islamic" in the religious sense and the term in its broader cultural sense, we've seen that medieval Islamic civilization was a cultural fusion of a high order. Looking for images to illustrate the maqamat I discussed in yesterday's lecture, I came across an excellent encyclopedia entry on the foremost Jewish practitioner of the art, Yehuda al-Harizi (d 1235). Click the title of this post to go there. al-Harizi not only translated al-Hariri's Maqamat (the most celebrated of them all) into Hebrew but composed one himself in which some of the lines were one-third Arabic, one-third Hebrew, and one-third Aramaic, the rhyme and wordplay working on all three levels. The audience for this kind of thing would have been very small and very sophisticated.

Remember, Maqamat has many meanings, the modal systems of Arabic music, the literary gatherings I covered in some detail, and the literary genre that lent itself particularly well to such literary gatherings. We'll discuss the use of the term in Sufism later. The illustrated manuscript video I'm putting together will have many images from the most famous Maqamat, al-Hariri's and al-Hamadhani's in particular. The article linked to above will give you another angle on how Islamic (or "Islamicate") civilization was so cosmopolitan as to include Persian, Mediterranean, Hellenistic, Arabian, Mesopotamian, Christian, and Jewish elements.