Ḥarîri was of good Arab blood. He is said to have descended from Rabî‘at al Faras, the son of Niẓâr, the son of Ma‘add, the son of ‘Adnân, and to have boasted of this lofty ancestry. The sons of Rabí‘ah inhabited Hijâz for some generations, paying tribute to the sovereigns of Yemen. But in course of time they rose against their lords, and in their various tribes carried on a long and bloody war. At last they passed under the authority of the kings of Hira. At a later period Bekr and Taghlib, two of the chief branches of the race of Rabîah, quitted their homes in central Arabia, and migrated to Irak and Baḥrayn. After Islam they settled in the country known still as Diyâr Rabî‘ah. In some verses, addressed to Ḥarîri by an admiring young poet, he is described as a descendant of Khindaf, and the glory of the tribe of Temîm. The name of Khindaf, the wife of Alyas, son of Moḍar, is applied to all the de­scendants of Moḍar, through Alyas, and the mention of Temîm, who undoubtedly descended from Alyas, would seem to make some discrepancy in the author’s pedigree. It seems, however, reasonable to conclude that Ḥarîri was a descendant of one of the races issuing from Rabî‘ah, and that he represented the old Arab settlers in Irak. He was born, according to Ibn Khallikân, in the street of the Benû Ḥarâm, so called from a tribe of Arabs who had established themselves there. His name of Al Ḥarîri was derived, according to the same biographer, from his having traded in silk (ḥarîr). It is more pro­bable that it was given him on account of his father being engaged in this commerce, for our author does not appear to have had at any time other than official and literary pursuits. He was possessed of a competence, and his family owned several thousand palm trees at Meshân, some distance to the north of Basra. He received a good education, according to the fashion of his age and city, and was well versed in grammar, receiving in this science the teaching of Al Faḍl al Ḳasbâni, one of the most celebrated men of the time. The young Ḥarîri chose the profession which was then most in favour with those who combined literary tastes with political ambi­tion. He became a Munshi, or official writer, and according to ‘Imâd ad dîn, secretary to the Sultan Ṣalâh ad dîn (Saladin), whose book, the Kharîdat al Ḳasr, furnishes many particulars of his life, he was early employed in public duties, and had the official title of Ṣâḥib al Khabar. From this it would seem that his office was to inquire into and report upon the affairs of the province for the information of the central govern­ment. The high position to which official persons might rise, and the estimation in which they were held may be learnt from the author’s twenty-second Assembly, in which he compares secretaries of correspondence with secretaries of finance; and after praising both highly, refrains from placing either above the other. Ḥarîri’s official position not only gave him the acquaintance of the great, but also, probably, served him in the troubles of which Basra was for some time the scene. Several specimens of his correspondence have been preserved, and they display the qualities which are remarkable in the Assemblies,—great power over the language, and felicity of expression, but a fondness for far-fetched images, metaphorical phraseology, and those plays on words, which were looked upon as among the chief ornaments of style. He must, however, have devoted himself steadfastly to general literature, and have laid, at an early period, the foundation of the extensive and minute knowledge which is to be found in the Assem­blies.

The great object of his literary life became to explore and expound the niceties of the Arab language and history. His mind, though it united poetical with cri­tical power, was narrow; his intellectual vision had little range. He spied out defects with the microscopic eye of an insect, but the merits which he prized were nice and contracted also. His chief works, after the Assemblies, are two treatises on Grammar, one called “The Beauties of the I‘râb (or desinential syntax),” the other “The Pearl of the Diver.” A portion of these has been published by De Sacy in his “Anthologie Grammaticale Arabe.” The former is in verse of the metre called rejez, and is also mezdûj, or methnawi; that is, the second hemistich of each verse rhymes with the first. This metre was also adopted by Ibn Mâlik for his “Alfîyeh,” the most complete and celebrated of the Arabic grammatical poems. Ḥarîri in this work com­ments on his own lines, and treats questions of syntax with extraordinary subtlety. But a still more charac­teristic work is “The Pearl of the Diver,” in which the author points out the faults made by people of education in the use of words and phrases. The observation, judg­ment, and taste displayed in this book are remarkable, and the extract in the “Anthologie” will be frequently referred to in my notes. Every sentence is like a drop of grammatical gold; moreover the authority of the author is so high, that his dicta have never been disputed, and all subsequent writers have avoided the faults which he points out. But neither in these books, nor in the Assemblies themselves, is there any sign of original conceptions, or of the strength to break loose from the traditions of learning which the author had received. His works are in some respects the more valuable for this, since he represents in its most exquisite and refined form the culture of his age. He was content to do best what others were also doing, and to gain the admiration of his countryment by excellence in forms of composition with which they were well acquainted.

As I have not space for a full biography of Ḥarîri, I shall not dwell on those political troubles which un­settled the tenor of his life. He was already of middle age when the Crusaders marched through Asia Minor into Syria. Basra had suffered like the whole East from the convulsions of the Moslem world, but it was at least spared an incursion of the Christian Franks. Yet it is to the campaign of Baldwin in Syria that the compo­sition of the Assemblies is possibly due. The hero of them is represented as an inhabitant of Serûj, a place in the neighbourhood of Edessa, and as having been driven into exile by the infidels who had destroyed the city and killed or despoiled all the Unifiers of God. But before I relate the anecdotes, which have been handed down concerning the origin of our author’s great work, it will be well to describe what the Maḳâmah or Assembly really is, and how such a form of composition took its place in literature.

The first person who composed an Assembly is allowed to have been Abû ’l Faḍl Aḥmad ibn al Ḥasan al Hama-dâni, commonly known as Badî‘ az Zemân, or “The Wonder of the Time.” A short sketch of his life is given in a note to Ḥarîri’s preface. It is only necessary to state here that he was one of those literary prodigies whom it was the fashion of his age and people to admire. The Arabs had long ceased to appreciate the fresh and pure spirit of true poetry. The simple grandeur of the poets of the Ignorance no longer satisfied their tastes. They did, indeed, place these poets above any that had suc­ceeded them, but it was principally as authorities on words, phrases, and grammar, that they valued them, since such ancient poets were held to have possessed the true and chaste language of the Arabs, which had been lost in succeeding ages by literary corruptions and by admixture with foreign peoples. But in their hearts the educated class in Irak and Syria preferred the conceits of Al Boḥtori, Al Mutenebbi, and Abû ’l ‘Ala, to the noble strains of Imr al Ḳays and Ṭarafeh. He was the most successful man of letters, the most likely to receive rich presents from princes and governors, and to be en­circled by admiring listeners, who could show his wit by some far-fetched comparison, or his learning by the reci­tation of an enormous number of lines. Some men could repeat hundreds of ḳaṣîdehs or poems, others could quote verses descriptive of every part of the camel or horse, or in praise or dispraise of the multitudinous tribes. Others professed to tell the origin of all the innumerable pro­verbs and sayings which had been handed down, what hero of the Ignorance had uttered each, and on what occasion, and the issue of the adventure. A complete acquaintance with the Koran was, of course, highly ho­noured, and a felicity in applying passages of it in a new and surprising manner to the ordinary concerns of life was looked upon as legitimate wit. The tradi­tions of the founder of Islam, his Companions, and im­mediate followers, formed a department of knowledge, without which the education of the polite was not com­plete. Alleged sayings of Mohammed, ‘Âyeshah, Abû Bekr, ‘Omar, ‘Ali, ‘Abd allah ibn ‘Abbâs, and others, in­creased in number yearly, and the learned in these things pretended to test their authenticity, to examine the tes­timony in favour of each, and even to decide on the very words and grammatical forms in which each had been uttered. Lexicography was studied with an intentness which probably no other people has devoted to its own language, and the consequence was a sort of literary consciousness in everything that was written, a looking to the form, rather than the substance, which gave an artificial and pedantic character to the productions of the time.

This tendency began soon after the establishment of the Khalifate. In the earlier periods of Islam, before divinity and grammar had been developed so much as to form a large part of the most learned man’s stores, the prodigious memories of the Arabs were exercised on the productions of the poets, which, though individually short, formed, as a whole, a mass of literature of incon­ceivable magnitude. In the century preceding Moham­med almost every eminent Arab had been a declaimer of verse, and of these compositions many had merit, while all were thought worthy of being retained as the utter­ances of remarkable persons, and as monuments of a chaste diction which men feared was irrecoverably lost. Hence the (râwi), or reciter, was in high favour, and his accomplishments were looked upon as almost equal in value to the genius of the poets whom he handed down. The Râwi was indeed the primitive type of the Arab man of learning, and it was to the impres­sion which he made on the people that the tendency of the educated to the accumulation of vast stores of curious learning is for the most part to be attributed. Writing was almost unknown among the Arabs of the Ignorance at the time when their poetical vigour was at its height. The story of the death of Ṭarafeh, the author of one of the Mo‘allaḳât, the most highly prized of the early poems, shows that neither he nor his uncle Mutelemmis, also a poet, could read. It is doubtful whether Imr al Ḳays could read, though he is placed by unanimous consent at the head of all the early poets,— though the Prophet declared, in a complimentary maledic­tion, that he would be the leader of the poets to hell, and though the Khalif ‘Omar, speaking of poets, said, “Imr al Ḳays is he who has precedence of them; he has made the fountain of poetry to well forth to them.” The general opinion is that Mohammed could not read, al­though the diction of the Koran was held even by the unbelieving Ḳoraysh to be the work of magic, and though a modern critic must allow that the author of the earlier and more impassioned Suras was a great lyric poet.