المقامة الوعظية (al-Maqāma al-Wāʿiẓiyya) — Arabic reader with translation

‹ Maqāmāt al-Hamadhānī · suggested reading path: step 3 — arranged easiest-first, not a classical order

📜 About this Maqāma

al-Maqāma al-Waʿẓiyya is one of Badīʻ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī's roughly fifty maqāmāt — short, self-contained set-pieces told in ornate rhymed prose (sajʻ), each narrated by the fixed frame-narrator ʿĪsā ibn Hishām. This one breaks the usual pattern: there is no con and no swindle. Wandering in Basra, ʿĪsā comes upon a crowd gathered around a preacher delivering a sermon of real and sustained power — the world as a bridge to be crossed rather than built on, the snare baited with scattered grain, poverty as the ornament of the Prophet. He then recites a long elegiac qaṣīda he attributes to ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn, on the dead who lie beneath the earth they once owned. Only at the very end does ʿĪsā push through the crowd to ask who the man is — and gets the answer the reader has been waiting for. 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 الوَعْظِيَّة — literally, "The Maqāma of Preaching"

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.

الوَعْظِيَّةو-ع-ظ

al-Waʿẓiyya — the nisba (relative-adjective) form of waʿẓ, ‘preaching, admonition’: add the ـِيَّة (-iyya) ending to a noun and it means ‘of/relating to X.’ So the title reads ‘the preaching maqāma’ — named, as every maqāma in the collection is, after whatever its plot turns on. Here that is not a place or an object but an act: the sermon itself is the set-piece. The root و-ع-ظ gives wāʿiẓ (a preacher) and mawʿiẓa (an exhortation), both everyday words still.