Dynamic vs. Static: A Kind of Parallelism in al-Hamaḏānī’s Maqāmāt

As the style of elevated diction had been dominated by parallelism in the field of meaning by the time the maqāmāt of Badīʿ az-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī were being written, it is not at all surprising that the style of the maqāma genre may best be characterized by the abundant use of parallelism where the parallel structures have a kind of simple (consonantal) rhymes – though it is to be stressed that the two phenomena were originally independent of each other. The purpose of parallelism is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception, that is, to make a unique semantic modification. The article explores this parallelism in the maqāmāt of Badīʿ az-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī.