Maqāmāt of al-Hariri (Iraq)

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Maqāmāt of al-Hariri occupies a unique axis in the landscape of Islamic illuminated manuscripts: a secular, satirical, and rhetorical literary work elaborately illustrated with figural scenes. In Foucault’s framework, particularly in The Care of the Self, this manuscript is not merely a collection of literary prose; it is a self-conscious exercise in language, ethics, and aesthetic performance—a kind of mirror for the subject navigating ambiguity, artifice, and eloquence in an unstable world.

The text itself, comprised of 50 episodic stories about the trickster Abu Zayd and his wit-based survival, stages scenes of deception, improvisation, and shifting identities. From a Foucauldian view, this dramatic narrative enacts a theatre of parrhesia—not always in the mode of truth-telling as courage, but in the more ironic and fragmented form of masking and self-fashioning. The protagonist is not a moral paragon, but a figure navigating shifting moral terrains, cultivating the self through adaptability and rhetorical mastery.

Here, the Maqāmāt becomes a Foucauldian technē of existence: a text that teaches not virtue in the Platonic sense, but how one performs oneself within power-laden systems of language, economy, and social mobility. The highly stylized Arabic prose (sajʿ) is both medium and message—its rhythm, alliteration, and verbal play rendering language itself as a form of ethical seduction. The manuscript's illustrations, rare in Islamic tradition for their figural abundance, depict everyday life: bazaars, lectures, prisons, street scenes—each a heterotopia where norms are destabilized and roles inverted.

Foucault might see the Maqāmāt as an emblem of selfhood formed through artifice, a parody of confession, a celebration of surfaces. It reaffirms that the care of the self does not always entail withdrawal into austerity, but may involve immersion into the multiplicities of experience, ambiguity, and clever survival.