المقامة المضيرية (al-Maqāma al-Madīriyya) — Arabic reader with translation

‹ Maqāmāt al-Hamadhānī · suggested reading path: step 2 — arranged easiest-first, not a classical order

📜 About this Maqāma

al-Maqāma al-Māḍirīyah 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 and starring the recurring trickster hero Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī. In this one, Abū al-Fatḥ refuses to touch a rich stew at a banquet — and when his companions press him for the reason, he tells them: a Baghdad merchant once dragged him home to dinner and, before a single bite was served, insisted on narrating the price and pedigree of his door, his door-knocker, his house, his servant, and eventually every ingredient in the meal itself — until Abū al-Fatḥ fled rather than sit through one more digression. 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 المُضِيرِيَّة — literally, "The Maqāma of the Māḍira [stew]"

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.

المُضِيرِيَّةم-ض-ر

al-māḍirīyah — the nisba (relative-adjective) form of al-māḍira, "a stew of meat cooked in soured milk/yoghurt": add the ـِيَّة (-īyah) ending to a noun and it means "of/relating to X." So the title literally reads "the maqāma of/about the māḍira" — every maqāma in the collection is named this way, after whatever object, place, or event its plot turns on.