The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī

Hikayat Abi l-Qasim al-Baghdadi (The Portrait of Abu l-Qasim al-Baghdadi) is an 11th-century Arabic work that tells the story of a Baghdadi party-crasher crashing a party in Isfahan. The author introduces it as a microcosm of Baghdad. While some early scholars dismissed it as disgusting and obscene, its wealth of material-cultural, philosophical, spiritual and literary treasures make it much more than just a ‘dirty book’.

This edition starts with an introduction that offers new insights into the relationship of the work to both its Greek predecessors and to its European descendants. The volume then presents a new, improved edition of the Arabic text, together with a richly annotated English translation that reflects the racy style of the original Arabic, and includes an extensive indexes of names, places, subjects, and rhymes.

Written in prose but containing numerous poems, The Portrait was widely hailed among scholars as a unique narrative in the history of Arabic literature. But it also reflects a much larger tradition of banquet texts, from ‘Trimalchio’s Dinner Party’ and Plato’s Symposium, to the works of Rabelais. The portrait it paints of a party-crasher who is at once a holy man and a rogue will be a familiar figure to scholars of the ancient Cynic tradition and is reminiscent of other portrayals of wise fools, tricksters and saints from literatures around the Mediterranean and beyond.