Maqāmāt al-barbīr / / Max Robert Shmookler, Mohammad Diaa Eddin Alaswad.

• HerausgeberIn: Diaa Eddin Alaswad, Mohammad ,; Shmookler, Max Robert,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2023]; 2024
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: Arabic
• Series: Bibliotheca Islamica ; 50
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (188 p.)

Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Laṭīf bin Muḥammad al-Barbīr (1747-1811) was a late eighteenth century adīb, poet, critic, and muftī 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 maqāma presented here in print for the first time. This work, entitled Maqāmāt al-Barbīr, is edited based on MS Dār 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 maqāma 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 Nahḍa.