Odysseus is a man of many wiles and turns: complicated; ingenious; shrewd. Abū Zayd, the protagonist of Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim al-Ḥarīrī’s (ca. 1054–1122) Maqāmāt, is all of those things too, though his goal is less to go home to his wife than to make himself some cash.

The Maqāmāt — usually translated as Assemblies, or, more recently, as Impostures — recount fifty episodes (maqāma-s) in Abū Zayd’s life as a trickster, con man, and all-around no-gooder. The narrator keeps encountering him on his travels through the Middle East: from their first meeting in Sanaa (Yemen) to Kufa (Iraq), Alexandria (Egypt), Samarkand (Uzbekistan), and beyond. Abū Zayd runs his con; the narrator is both repulsed and fascinated. Yet as much as the plot thrills, the Maqāmāt were also made popular by al-Ḥarīrī’s virtuosic Arabic. (In maqāma 6, for example, Abū Zayd dictates a missive using only undotted letters, that is, only half of the alphabet.)

Over one hundred medieval manuscripts of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt are extant, in copies from West Africa to the Indian Ocean. Only thirteen of these, however, are illustrated, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s “Schefer” Maqāmāt is both the most famous and the most spectacular. As we learn from the colophon on the final page of the manuscript (folio 167v), the copy was completed a little over a century after the text, on Saturday, the sixth day of Ramadan, year 634 of the Hijri calendar (May 9, 1237 on the Gregorian calendar) by one Yaḥyā b. Maḥmūd al-Wasiṭī, an Iraqi calligrapher. Al-Wasiṭī probably did the work for the Turkic emir shown in the left-hand frontispiece (folio 1v), a lieutenant of the Abbāsid caliph al-Mustanṣir (r. 1226–1242; his name appears in the building on folio 164v).

Al-Wasiṭī painted ninety-nine miniatures that follow Abū Zayd as he swindles his way across the Islamic world. The readers come along: we join processions and caravans (folios 19r and 94v), board ships (61r and 119v), help the queen of Oman give birth (122v), and visit the slave market of Zabid, where a young man argues for his freedom (105r)… But most of all, we watch Abū Zayd bewitch his audience. And we get to see him expose himself, albeit just once. While one illustration of a pair of dropped pants has been preserved (folio 57r), another on folio 74v has been blacked out by a later reader, leaving the onlookers staring into an empty doorway.

Yet even when he is there, it’s hard to recognize him. Abū Zayd is a master of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. In four maqāma-s (8, 35, 43, and 44), Abū Zayd recites a story or poem made up of so many words with double meanings that the speech could mean two completely different things. Another of his speeches can be read forward or backward, creating diametrical interpretations. All this in the service of one thing: tricking people into giving him money. (Al-Ḥarīrī himself was accused of being a liar and a plagiarist; some of his contemporaries argued that the style of the Maqāmāt was so different from his earlier work that he must have stolen them from a Maghrebi traveler, an accusation likely invented by some haters.) But Abū Zayd repents in maqāma 50, deciding to turn his back on literature: no more tricks for him, no more doubled meanings — only the word of God. The narrator, disappointed, leaves his side; our manuscript ends.

But it would have another life or two, eventually as part of the personal collection of Charles-Henri-Auguste Schefer (1820–98), a prominent French diplomat and Orientalist. Schefer was the son of a German-Swedish bureaucrat who had come to France under Napoleon and survived the transition into the Restoration. Charles, like his brother Jules, moved East soon after finishing his education. He worked as an interpreter in Jerusalem, Smyrna, and Alexandria then ended up in Constantinople in 1849, where he became a favorite of the Ottoman sultan Abdul Mejid I (r. 1839–61), and helped to negotiate the end of the Crimean War in 1857.

That same year, he was named the Chair of Persian at the École des langues orientales, the foremost Orientalist academic position that had previously been held by his teacher and mentor Étienne Quatremère (Ernest Renan would take Quatremère’s place in the Hebrew department). Schefer transformed the school, vastly expanding both its libraries and its course offerings and overseeing the publication of some eighty volumes of translations from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian as well as numerous early travel accounts by Europeans in the Islamic lands. Among the latter were the 1672–73 journals of Antoine Galland (1646–1715), an earlier French Orientalist-diplomat who is best known as the translator of the Thousand and One Nights.

Galland’s Thousand and One Nights — translated in part from manuscripts Galland collected and in part from stories he heard from a young Syrian named Ḥannā Diyāb — cemented the Orientalist, fantastical image of the Abbāsid Caliphate (of al-Ḥarīrī and al-Wasiṭī’s world) in the European imagination. It also, however, reinvigorated the tradition among Arabophone writers: Radwa Ashour, Elias Khoury and Naguib Mahfouz have all played not only with the tales themselves but also with their European reception and manipulation: with the experience of looking back at yourself through someone else’s mirror.

The Schefer Maqāmat would undergo a similar process. In 1941, the young Iraqi artist Jawad Saleem (1919–61) came across five reproductions of the Schefer Maqāmāt that had accompanied an article by the Orientalist Eustache de Lorey in the Christmas 1938 edition of the French magazine l’Illustration. Saleem had been studying art in Paris and Rome, but had been forced to return to Baghdad by the outbreak of World War II. The old edition of l’Illustration exposed him to a kind of painting that had disappeared from the Iraqi repertoire in the intervening centuries. Ten years later, he would, with the artists Shakir Hassan al-Saʿid and Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, found the Baghdad Modern Art Group; their goal was to “istilhām al-turāth” — to “search for inspiration in heritage”. In 1972, after his death, the al-Wasiṭī Fine Arts Festival became one of the first art festivals in modern Iraqi history.

Al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt are the emblematic work of Arabic literature, but the West was interfering from the start: Abū Zayd’s travels begin when he is driven from his home (Sarūj, modern-day Suruç) by the arrival of the Crusaders led by Baldwin I of Jerusalem, youngest son of the Count of Boulogne. Even in the twelfth century, the French wanted what the Arabs had.