Celebrating Recent Work by Matthew Keegan

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by Matthew L. Keegan

Before World Literature offers an account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of one of the most widely read Arabic texts of the postclassical period: the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, a twelfth-century collection of fifty trickster stories written in an elaborate and highly allusive form of prose. Innumerable Muslim scholars taught the text to new generations of students and wrote extensive commentaries on it. In the nineteenth century, however, the Maqāmāt fell rapidly out of favor, its elaborate style and its commentary tradition suddenly seen as symptoms of cultural decay.

Matthew L. Keegan shows how the emergence of world literature as a literary critical paradigm led to a wholesale reformulation of literary tastes that sidelined elaborately referential texts like the Maqāmāt. Nineteenth-century European Orientalists and Arab reformist thinkers derided the Maqāmāt for being decadent and derivative, while assailing the entire postclassical Arabic intellectual tradition. The canon of Arabic poetry and prose was reshaped accordingly, favoring classical authors whose work was perceived to be more in line with modern, European literary aesthetics.

Keegan looks to the flourishing commentary culture of the postclassical period to uncover the theories of reading and interpretation that informed engagement with Islamic texts in their own time. Tracing the social, material, and intellectual practices embedded in the commentaries on the Maqāmāt, he explores how generations of Muslims read and interpreted al-Ḥarīrī’s trickster stories, for edification and entertainment. Restoring the Maqāmāt to its place as the pinnacle of Arabic style and as an essential text of Islamic education for centuries, Before World Literature offers a model of how to read texts like the Maqāmāt on their own terms.

About the Author

is the Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His work focuses on the intersections of Arabic literature and Islamic thought in the pre-colonial period. In particular, his first book project explores the vast commentary tradition on the Maqamat of al-Hariri, a collection of Arabic trickster stories written in the 12th century that was a canonical text of Islamic education until the 19th century. Before arriving at Barnard, he received his PhD from NYU, taught at the American University of Sharjah, and completed a postdoc at the Freie Universität Berlin.

About the Speakers

 is Associate Professor of Early Modern Cultural Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, as well as Director of Columbia's Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. His research focuses on the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia, debates about religion and secularism, and the history of information management. He is the author of two books, both published by the University of Chicago Press: The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (2024) and Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (2015). The latter work won the American Comparative Literature Association's Harry Levin Prize for best first book in the field.

is an Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He specializes in Arabic literature, Islamic studies, gender, and Islamic history. His current book project, Love and Morality in Medieval Arabic Literature, focuses on how stories and storytelling, both religious and profane, became central to the construction of moral ideas around sexual lives and desires. 

is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures and specializes in South Asia, especially India and Bangladesh. School in 1984, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1993. Her research interests focus on Bengal, in eastern India and Bangladesh; she has published extensively on the Hindu-goddess-centered religious traditions from that part of the subcontinent and is now involved in a research project on Kazi Nazrul Islam, both the “Rebel Poet” of India and the National Poet of Bangladesh.

is a historian of early Islam working on the caliphal provinces Armenia and Caucasian Albania. According to ʿAbbasid-era Arabic geographies, Armenia included what is now the modern Republic of Armenia and eastern Turkey. The neighboring Caucasian Albania (Arrān) stretched over the modern Republic of Azerbaijan and eastern Georgia. Her work centers on several themes, including intercultural transmission of historical texts, quick-changing alliances in moments of intercommunal violence, and intermarriage across ethnic and religious lines.

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