Yet Ḥarîri was not without his literary mortifications. One of these affected him extremely. Having written no less than forty Assemblies, he collected them into a single volume, and repaired to Bagdad, to enjoy the triumph which ought to await the first man of letters of the time. But envy and misrepresentation had preceded him thither. His opponents were not content with asserting that the work was full of faults, they also affected to believe that it was not his own. Al Ha-madâni had been a real improviser, as has been men­tioned; he could compose extempore in prose or verse, and in public, at the request of any bystander. But Ḥarîri was not an Abû’l Fatḥ, or an Abû Zayd. He was a slow and painstaking writer, and his exquisite compositions required time and solitude. A part of the public seems to have assumed the principle, that he who describes an improviser must himself be able to im­provise, and finding that Ḥarîri did not possess this faculty, to have argued conversely that he was not the author of the Assemblies. When Ḥarîri came to Bagdad he found that his ability and his honesty were doubted. The adventure which followed is thus related by Ibn Khallikân. “Ḥarîri at first composed only forty Assem­blies. Coming from Basra to Bagdad, he presented them as his work, but a number of the literary at Bagdad would not believe that he was the author, and said that the book was the work of a rhetorician of the Maghrib (Western Africa) who had died at Bagdad, and whose papers had fallen into Ḥarîri’s hands. The Wazîr sent for Ḥarîri to the Dîwân, and asked him what was his profession; he replied that he was a munshi (an official writer and composer): the Wazîr then bade him compose a risâleh (a kind of ornate letter or address) on a subject which he named. Ḥarîri retired with ink and paper to a corner of the hall, and remained long, but God inspired him with nothing, and he rose up ashamed.” On this occasion, one of the doubters, Abû’l Ḳâsim ‘Ali ibn Aflaḥ, or, as others say, another poet among his opponents, made a satirical couplet on him:

“We have a Shaykh, descended from Rabî‘at al Faras, who plucks the hairs from his beard in his perplexity:

May God send him an utterance at Meshân, as he has struck him with dumbness at court.”

The point of this lies in the circumstance that Meshân was a place of exile for those who displeased the govern­ment at Bagdad, while it was also the site of Ḥarîri’s estate, and the district in which he had discharged official duties. According to Ibn Khallikân it was very unhealthy. It appears, also, that Ḥarîri was accustomed to boast of his descent from Rabî‘ah, and that when engaged in thought he plucked at his beard. “On his return to Basra he composed ten more Assemblies, and sent them to Bagdad, excusing himself for his former incapacity, by alleging his reverential fear in the Wazîr’s presence.” The number of the Assemblies was thus raised to fifty.

From Ḥarîri’s preface, from various indications in the Assemblies themselves, and from traditions handed down by the commentators, we can perceive that the author had to meet other objections to his work. If not a plagiary, he was in the opinion of some an incorrect writer; in the opinion of others a person of doubtful piety. The critics spied out defects in his learning or diction; the rigid inveighed against the lightness of his narratives. Long after the Assemblies were completed, the author in his Preface speaks of their origin, and probably referring his present feeling to the epoch when he began to compose, says that he had sought to excuse himself with his patron from such a work, since he knew the envy and opposition that are excited by authorship. He says that he had reminded him of the proverb concern­ing the man who puts together but two words, or indites merely a couplet of verses, namely, that if he succeeds he is exposed to envy, and if he fails he is brought into contempt. He anticipates any objections of plagiarism, by stating that in his whole book only four lines of poetry are taken from the writings of others, and that these are introduced avowedly as quotations. The rest, he says, is his own, whether it be good or bad. He speaks with a modesty which was, perhaps, hardly sin­cere, of the superiority of Al Hamadâni, inasmuch as the latter had originated what he, Ḥarîri, could only imitate. But his chief endeavour is to defend himself from the charge of frivolity, and of giving to the world idle compositions of a kind reproved by the Koran. The strict Moslems had always held works of fiction to be, if not blameable, at least unworthy to be written or perused by serious believers. The people had, indeed, always delighted in the narratives of the story-teller, and yet, with the inconsistency of the multitude, they were inclined to join with those who denounced them as disreputable. The Koran undoubtedly gave a sufficient pretext for bigotry. Mohammed’s anger was often roused by the satires which were directed against him by poets, as well as by the histories and tales which Ḳoraysh preferred to his own revelation. The zeal of the re­former was, perhaps, largely mingled with the jealousy of the author. In later years, when he had become a powerful prince, he showed a more tolerant disposition; he listened to and praised the verses of Al Khansâ, lamented that he had never looked upon the warrior-poet ‘Antarah, and even presided at a mufákharah, or poetical contest, as to superior worth and valour, between the poets of his party and those of Temîm, an incident which led to the conversion of that tribe. But in the Koran and the Traditions there was enough to justify those who denounced such vanities. In the thirty-first Sura it is written, “There is one who will buy idle stories to make men wander from the way of God without knowledge, and who takes them for an amuse­ment. To such a one is a debasing punishment. If our ordinances be recited to him he turns away proudly as though he heard them not, as though a weight were on his ears: announce to him a dolorous punishment.” This passage had descended from on high as a denunciation of Naḍr ibn Al Ḥârith, who had bought books of the Persians, and told stories out of them to the Ḳoraysh (see Bayḍâwi in loco), and had said, “If Mohammed tells you of ‘Âd and Thamûd (the wicked tribes destroyed by God), I will tell you of Rustem and Isfendiar and the Chosroes.” This same Naḍr had also incited the Jews to pose Mohammed with questions concerning the Seven Sleepers and Thu’l Ḳarnayn, and had brought on him a temporary humiliation, when the Prophet had undertaken to answer without having added “If it please God,” and had been therefore left without inspiration, until after a time Gabriel descended and revealed the eighteenth Sura, called the “Cavern.” Naḍr had been afterwards taken prisoner at the battle of Bedr and beheaded by the hand of ‘Ali. As there could be no doubt in the mind of any believer concerning Naḍr’s fate in the next world, his career was a terrible warning to future story-tellers, who should put the untrue on a level with the true. God had also de­nounced (Sura xxiii, v. 68–69) that idle “night-talking,” in which his messages had been ridiculed, and to which Ḥarîri’s Assemblies bore a suspicious resemblance.

The author did not escape annoyance on this subject. It is related that one Abû Ṭâhir, who afterwards commented the Assemblies, came to Basra, attracted by the reputation of Ḥarîri. He repaired to the mosque to see him, and as at that moment several learned men were there, each surrounded by his circle of listeners, he asked which was Ḥarîri. “There he is,” said one, “spreading his follies among the people.” Abû Ṭâhir, surprised to find so distinguished a man unpopular among his own people, retired without another word.

In the Preface, Ḥarîri takes pains to answer these objections. He says, that though the ignorant and prejudiced might detract from him on account of what he had published, and represent it as belonging to a class of writings prohibited by the law, yet whoever looked at the matter intelligently, and with a due regard to principles, would place the Assemblies in the list of useful writings, like the fables which introduce beasts, or inanimate objects, as discoursing. For the Assem­blies, he argues, have like these a moral purpose; they are for instruction, not for display, and the fictitious story tends to the improvement of the listener. So that, if good or ill desert are to be measured by intentions, he is not only blameless, but may claim the merit of a moral and religious teacher. This defence was well adapted to satisfy reasonable theologians, since very few ventured to condemn the fable and the parable, a style of composition immemorial among Eastern nations, sanc­tioned by the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and singularly pleasing to the popular taste. The fables of Æsop had been known to the Arabs of a very early age, and been attributed to Loḳmân the Wise, a mythical personage whom some made contemporary with King David. The Sanscrit “Hitopadesa” had passed into Arabic literature through a Pehlvi translation under the name of “Kalîleh wa Dimneh,” otherwise known as the Fables of Bidpai. It was one of the most esteemed works in the literature, for the translator ‘Abd allah ibn al Moḳaffa‘, though a Persian by birth and a Magian dur­ing the greater part of his life, was so excellent a writer of Arabic that he even affected to surpass the style of the Koran, a piece of blasphemous vanity which shocked the public. ‘Abd allah was horribly murdered by order of the Khalif Manṣûr, about the year 140, but “Kalîleh wa Dimneh” had been in Ḥarîri’s time one of the most popular books in the language for more than three centuries. It may be observed that the Persian “Anwâri Sohayli” is another version of the same work. These stories and others of their kind had been generally looked upon as harmless and even profitable. The liberal minded might even quote the Koran ii. 24, “God is not ashamed to use a gnat or what is little larger, as a similitude.”