المقامة البغدادية (al-Maqāma al-Baghdadiyya) — Arabic reader with translation

‹ Maqāmāt al-Hamadhānī · suggested reading path: step 1 — arranged easiest-first, not a classical order

📜 About this Maqāma

al-Maqāma al-Baghdādiyya is one of Badīʻ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī's roughly fifty maqāmāt — short, self-contained comic tales told in ornate rhymed prose (sajʻ), each narrated by the fixed frame-narrator ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. Most of them also star a recurring trickster hero, Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī — but this is one of the handful where ʿĪsā ibn Hishām runs the con himself. Penniless and craving fresh dates in the markets of Baghdad, he spots a country traveller with a purse knotted into his belt, greets him as a long-lost friend named "Abū Zayd," brushes aside the man's protest that he is actually "Abū ʿUbayd," invents the death of his father to keep him off balance, then walks him through a roast-meat seller's and a sweet-seller's ordering a feast in his name — before slipping away "to fetch water" and leaving the bewildered man to the bill and a beating. Read it sentence by sentence below; expand any card for the English translation, vocabulary keyed to root, and a language or historical note.

🔤 Understanding the Title

المَقَامَةُ البَغْدَادِيَّة — literally, "The Baghdad Maqāma"

المَقَامَةق-و-م

al-maqāma — literally "a standing, a station" (from qāma, "to stand"). Originally the place where people gathered standing to hear an orator speak; the word then shifted to name the short oratorical/literary set-piece performed there, and finally the whole genre these fifty-odd tales belong to.

البَغْدَادِيَّة—

al-Baghdādiyya — the nisba (relative-adjective) form of Baghdād: add the ـِيَّة (-iyya) ending to a noun and it means "of/relating to X." So the title reads "the Baghdad maqāma," i.e. the one set in Baghdad — every maqāma in the collection is named this way, after whatever place, object, or event its plot turns on (al-Māḍirīyah after a stew, al-Baghdādiyya after this city).