Fifty-Two Adventures of a Con Man

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Al-Hamadhani built his Maqamat around two recurring figures rather than one: Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari, an eloquent trickster who talks his way into money and hospitality across fifty-two separate episodes, each in a different city, and Isa ibn Hisham, the narrator who keeps running into him and telling us what happened. The device lets al-Hamadhani do two things at once. Abu al-Fath's schemes give the collection its plot and its comedy, while Isa's outsider perspective, admiring, exasperated, occasionally fooled himself, gives each short episode the frame a longer narrative would otherwise need to supply. Al-Hariri of Basra, writing roughly a century later, kept the same two-character structure for his own, even more celebrated Maqamat, which suggests the pairing was recognized fast as the genre's load-bearing invention rather than one author's private trick.