Paper short abstract:

This paper will look at the nested disinformation in the dreams recounted within the the 13th Century Andalusian Maqamat al-Saraqusti, considering the implications of tricksterism within the Islamic tradition of dreams and dream interpretation.

Paper long abstract:

Badi al-Zaman Hamadhani attributed the need to travel the world collecting stories of schemes and ruses to the onset of "evil dreams." But when he formed the tales he amassed into his tenth-century Maqamat, or "Assemblies," there was not a single dream included. Neither are there dreams in the imitation by Hariri—whose Maqamat was at one point nearly as widely read as the Qur'an. It would be almost three centuries before the Andalusian writer, Muhammad al-Saraqusti, included dreams and dream-interpreters within the trickster tales of the maqamat form. Given the central place dreams are granted within Islamic tradition—the prophet himself was an interpreter—the conspicuous absence of such stories in Hamadhani and Hariri draws our attention to the dreams that do appear in the Maqamat al-Saraqusti. This paper will look at the dreams recounted in chapters 43 and 50. As in every chapter, the narrator al-Saib Ibn Tammam is fooled and outwitted by his nemesis Abu Habib, who appears in Chapter 43 posing as an elderly ranter who recounts dreams of the lost nobility of times gone by, and in Chapter 50 as a solitary mystic who has recanted his scheming ways, having been instructed to do so in dreams. These stories of nested disinformation associate the narrative term plot with subterfuge and assassination. Emerging from a tradition that rests on the earthy and everyday, it is possible to see in Saraqusti's Maqamat an argument that such delusional energy is also binding.