Maqamat al-barbir

Amad bin Abd al-Laf bin Muammad al-Barbr (1747-1811) was a late eighteenth century adb , poet, critic, and muft 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 maqma presented here in print for the first time. This work, entitled Maqmt al-Barbr , is edited based on MS Dr 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 maqma 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 Naha.

Auteur
Max Robert Shmookler, Columbia University, New York City, USA; Mohammad Diaa Eddin Alaswad, Damaskus, Syrien.