“Each Nail a Jail”

Abstract

Abstract Kitāb al-Masāmīr or The Book of Nails is a collection of nine maqāmāt written in late 1893 or early 1894 by the Alexandrian litterateur ʿAbdallāh al-Nadīm (d. 1896). It is al-Nadīm’s last work, composed in Istanbul, where the author lived out his final years in exile. Bringing together literary style, political rhetoric, and obscene imagery, al-Nadīm wrote Kitāb al-Masāmīr to defend his former teacher and fellow exile, Ǧamāl al-Dīn al-Afġānī (1838–1897), against the machinations of Abū l-Hudā al-Ṣayyādī (1849–1909), the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II’s most powerful Arab advisor. To do so, al-Nadīm employed key formal features of the maqāma genre to critique the corruption of the Ottoman state in his own time. The contemporaneity of the critique, and the fact that it is expressed through manipulations of literary form, invites a re-evaluation of the common assertion that maqāmāt composed in the modern period are artificial, imitative, and disconnected from contemporary societal concerns. In place of such an approach, this article turns to close readings of key characters, stylistic elements, and narrative scenes to suggest ways to read the manipulation of literary form as an integral aspect of the genre’s deep engagement with its contemporary world.