Much more, then, were the multitude unable to dis­pense with the services of the Râwi, who was their living library, their only means of communicating with the great spirits of their own time or of the past. The Râwi devoted his life to learning poetry by heart, and to informing himself of the lives of the poets and the in­cidents to which their compositions referred. Sometimes a Râwi attached himself to a single poet and travelled about reciting his verses and spreading his fame among the tribes. But after Islam, when a great monarchy took the place of the little autonomies of the desert, and the Court of Damascus supplanted the fair of ‘Okâẓ; when also, in the opinion of many, the canon of pure Arabic poetry was closed, the Râwi was transformed into the student of a capital, and often undertook to master the whole body of ancient literature. One of these marvels of me­mory was Abû ’l Ḳâsim Ḥammâd, who flourished about a century after the Hijra, and enjoyed the favour of the Khalifs Welîd ibn ‘Abd el Melik and Hishâm. The house of Omayyeh has seldom a good word from Moslem writers, but it is impossible to doubt the services to liter­ature of these great Khalifs, particularly in preserving the compositions of the past, which were in danger of being lost through the fall of so many of the reciters in the ceaseless wars. Much did indeed perish, and had it not been for men like Ḥammâd, and his patrons, we should now probably be without a single specimen of the pre-islamic poetry. Welîd asked Ḥammâd on one oc­casion how much poetry he knew: Ḥammâd replied that for each letter of the alphabet he could recite one hundred long poems rhyming with that letter, all com­posed by poets of the Ignorance. Welîd resolved to try whether or no this was an idle boast, and bade him begin his recitation. Ḥammâd began and went on until the Khalif was worn out with listening, and withdrew, leav­ing a trusty person to hear Ḥammâd to the last. At that sitting he recited two thousand nine hundred ḳaṣî-dehs, being one hundred for every letter of the alphabet, all of which had been composed by poets who flourished before Mohammed.

It was not only by repeating great quantities of verse that the Râwi must seek for reputation: he was bound to remember apposite verses in every conceivable circum­stance. Many of these feats are recorded, and, though we may doubt whether they were performed impromptu, it is certain that the Râwi would on occasions deliver himself of an immense number of passages illustrative of a single idea. There is a composition extant in which a stranger is represented as knocking at a door, which is opened by a girl. The stranger demands hospitality, and the girl asks him the name of his tribe. He gives it, and the girl at once replies with some satirical verses from a poet on that tribe. The man abashed exclaims, “No, I spoke falsely,” and mentions another tribe, on which the girl repeats satirical verses on that tribe also. The man then mentions another, and another, until the girl has satirized all the tribes of the Arabs by quota­tions from the poets. This composition is, of course, an exercitation by some Râwi, or some man of letters formed after the same type. The celebrated Aṣma‘î, who sprung, like so many learned man, from Basra, but lived at Bag-dad in the time of Harûn ar Reshîd, not only knew sixteen thousand pieces of verse in the metre called rejez, but performed astonishing feats of quotation, so that there was scarcely an object in nature that he could not illustrate by verses from the ancients. So profound was his learning that, when in old age he returned to Basra, the Khalif Al Ma’mûn used to draw up questions on doubtful points of literature and send them to him to be solved.

Al Hamadâni was a sage of this school, but he had in addition originality and wit approaching to genius. Like many of the most illustrious of the Arabic writers, he lived far from the Arabic peninsula, and may even have been of foreign origin. He was born at Hamadân, hence his name, but his life appears to have been passed and to have closed at Herat. He died in the 398th year of the Hijra, a.d. 1008. Al Hamadâni was celebrated for his wonderful memory and for his powers of improvisa­tion. He could repeat, says one biographer, a lengthy production which he had heard but once, compose poems impromptu, turn prose into verse or verse into prose with equal facility, he could make verses to any given rhymes and extemporize in any given metre. Had he done only this he would not have been superior to num­bers of others, who were admired in their own circle but failed to attain a wide reputation. But Hamadâni de­vised a new form of composition eminently fitted to dis­play the powers that he possessed. It was an advance to the dramatic style which had always been wanting to Arab literature. He imagined a witty, unscrupulous im­proviser, wandering from place to place and living on the presents which the display of his gifts produced from the generous and tasteful, and a kind of Râwi or narrator, who should be continually meeting with the other, should relate his adventures and repeat his excellent composi­tions. To these he gave the name of Maḳâmât, or “As­semblies,” because the Improviser was always introduced as making his appearance in some company of strangers among whom the narrator happened to be, and as aston­ishing them by his rhetoric and poetry. To the nar­rator he gave the name of ‘Isa ibn Hishâm, and to the Improviser that of Abû ’l Fath al Iskenderi, and he is said to have produced four hundred compositions of this sort. They were of various lengths, some of them con­taining a long adventure or composition, others consisting of only a few lines. In some of them it appears that the two persons of the drama are not introduced, and the author speaks in his own character. It will be readily understood that the rhetorician and the Râwi are only put forward to give liveliness to the composition, and that the object of the author is to display his eloquence, his poetical power, and his learning. The setting, if it may be called so, of the Maḳâmah is unimportant, the adventure related is often trivial, the diction is all in all. Both the personages strive to exhaust the beauties of the Arabic tongue, and the Improviser especially is made a master of eloquence. But it may be remarked here that Hamadâni is much less rhetorical than his imitator Ḥarîri; he has less artifice, if less genius, and in his Assemblies the story or adventure is more dwelt upon and less sacrificed to the display of style. The lapse of a century had spread the fame of Al Hamadâni through the Arabic world, and he had before Ḥarîri’s time found imitators. The learned were pleased with a class of composition which lent itself so readily to the rhetorical diction they admired, and the people loved to listen to the mingled rhythmical prose and verse as they were half chanted by the reciter. Al Hamadâni was honoured with the title of Badî‘ az Zemân, “the Wonder of the Time,” an appellation which almost supplanted his name.

The influence of Hamadâni could not but be powerful on the learned and refined Ḥarîri. The life of the latter had been passed in scholarship, but he was approaching his fiftieth year before he devoted himself to the work on which his fame rests. The origin of the Assem­blies was, according to the general tradition, as follows. The armies of the Crusade had forced their way into Syria, and carried on a remorseless war against the Moslems. Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, took possession of Edessa, which had been surrendered to him by the inhabitants, who were mostly of the Armenian race. According to an Eastern chronicler the following event took place in the year 494 (a.d. 1101). A Turkish chief named Sokman collected, in the neighbouring city of Serûj, a body of Turkomans and prepared to march against the Franks. The latter advanced to meet him, and the army of Sokman was put to flight. The Franks advanced against Serûj, laid siege to it, took it, and put to the sword the men capable of bearing arms. The women were made slaves, the place was plundered, and only those of the inhabitants escaped who sought safety in flight.