Al-Maqamat al Awaliya. Mohamed IDRIS

Al-Maqamat al-Awalia was first published in the renowned orientalist journal Le Journal asiatique in 1913 and 1914, while Risalat al-Abrar (The Epistle of the Righteous) had appeared some years earlier, in 1887. These works by Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Tahir al-Jabbari al-Battiwi remained confined to the pages of specialized academic journals and publications, accessible only to a privileged circle of researchers working in the field of Maghrebi dialects and popular literary traditions, and thus never reached the wider readership that such works rightfully deserved. It is on these grounds that the Centre deemed it a matter of public interest to make these two significant literary attempts available to readers within the framework of its project for the publication of literary production in the Algerian language most notably the Maqamat, which represent a singular experiment in the history of Algerian national literature in establishing an artistic prose tradition in the Maghrebi vernacular, alongside malhun poetry. As for the author, he was a scholar and magistrate from the Oran region, born in the early years of French colonial occupation, whose intellectual formation -shaped by his movement between zawiyas, his sustained companionship with the tulba and their distinctive cultural world, and his profound mastery of the Arabic dialects of western Algeria- equipped him to produce these remarkably vibrant literary texts. The publication of the twelve Maqamat came largely through the persistent encouragement of his friend Delphin, then director of the Algiers school, who persuaded him to continue writing though the work was published, regrettably, only after its author's death. The foremost scholarly significance of these works lies in the distinctive literary approach devised by al-Jabbari in addressing the question of language -described by Delphin as a process of “Maghrebization” of classical Arabic- whereby the syntactic structures of standard Arabic are preserved while the rich lexicon of local vernacular dialects is woven into the fabric of the text, producing a literary work that gives authentic expression to the Maghrebi cultural spirit. This literary experiment is deserving of both scholarly recognition and sustained critical inquiry, and the present republication seeks above all to enrich reflection and debate on the Algerian language and its written literary expressions.