Such was the Qāḍī’s (1) statement; yet the wording that has been reliably preserved is: “The truest of names are Ḥārith and Hammām” (2), for every person is either ḥārith, that is, an active doer, or hammām, derived from himma (3), meaning resolve and intention (4).

It is related that the first maqāma he composed was the forty-eighth, the Ḥarāmiyya. The occasion arose when a man clad in two shabby garments, eloquent of tongue, entered their mosque in Basra. They asked his name and he replied, “Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī,” whereupon al-Ḥarīrī wrote this maqāma about him. The caliph al-Mustarshid’s (5) vizier—Jalāl al-Dīn ʿAmīd al-Dawla Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn Abī al-ʿIzz (6) ʿAlī ibn Ṣadaqa—then advised him to complete the cycle to an even fifty maqāmāt.

Ibn Khallikān (7) said: “I found it so in a copy penned by the author himself (8), with this marginal note: ‘This is more correct than the view of those who say the vizier concerned was Sharaf al-Dīn Abū Naṣr Anūsharwān ibn Khālid ibn Muḥammad (9) al-Qāshānī, who was also a vizier of al-Mustarshid.’”

It is further said that al-Ḥarīrī had already composed forty maqāmāt, but when he reached Baghdad people would not believe it [for none could match their like] (10). One of the ministers (11) put him to the test and asked him to compose a maqāma on the spot; he withdrew to a corner, took up an inkwell (12) and a sheet of paper, yet nothing came to him. After returning to his home town he wrote ten more and thus completed [the full fifty maqāmāt] (13).

Abū al-Qāsim ʿAlī ibn Aflah, the poet—one of those who accused him of fabrication (14)—composed the following verses about him:

[from the masraḥ metre]
A shaykh of ours from Rabīʿa of the Steeds—
He plucks his little beard in a fit of craze;
Allah loosed his tongue in Mashān, yet
In the heart of Iraq He struck him mute. (15)