A Literary Study of Social Themes in Maqāmāt Al-Ilōrī

الملخص

Maqāmah is a prosimetric literary genre very popular in Arabic literature and well accepted among scholars of literature across the Islamic world. It is a genre alternating ryhmic prose (sajc ) and poetry as the narrative style in its presentation. The genre had been in deep and long hibernation until very recently, especially in Nigeria; the reason for its revival could be because maqāmah is a precursor to prosaic literary writing among Muslim scholars. The genre, among Arabs, used to be for demonstration of flowery ability to express literary contents; it is often short and ornamental but replete with moral themes. The genre is well embraced among Nigerian Muslim scholars of Yoruba extraction because it suites their folkloric heritage: the Yoruba culture of telling tales by moonlight to young children before dinner makes maqāmah very adaptive to their environment. The concern of this paper is to study the sociological themes in a collection of maqāmāt written by Muhammad Awwal bin Abdus-Salaam. Literature being a social document and prism through which society could be viewed in a very crystal manner; the study chose two maqāmahs for the purpose of discussing how the writer has succeeded in making his work a true reflection of his society. One of the maqāmahs discusses a national crisis that enveloped a state in the recent past where many lives were lost in Kaduna, with hoodlums hiding under religion to perpetuate the mayhem of catastrophic consequence. The other maqāmah has as its themes guidance and advice of Muslim scholars on how to get steady and sustainable means of income instead of hinging their survival on the society all in the name of being religion scholars. The paper concludes with a critique of literary styles of the writer to appraise its conformity with standard ways of writing maqāmahs.