Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Finnbar Barry Flood

One of the most celebrated extant medieval Arabic manuscripts is an illustrated copy of the Maqāmāt (Assemblies) of Abu Muhmmad al-Qasim ibn ‘Ali al-Hariri (d.516H/1122 CE), a popular text subject to frequent copying. The manuscript in question was produced in 634H/1237 CE, probably in Baghdad. It is often considered the cynosure of a tradition of book painting that flourished in Iraq and Syria during
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is also the most frequently discussed in modern scholarship, for the aesthetic virtue and emotional complexity of its images, the insights they provide into contemporary social life, and for its illustrious afterlifeas a source of inspiration for modernists in the Arab lands.