“That's why the ancients claimed that a human being is a microcosm born of a macrocosm”, writes Abū al-Muṭahhar al-Azdī (fl. late fourth/tenth century) in Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī, “… because in him are the shapes of all the kinds of animals”. A fitting remark for a text that is a microcosm both of humans and of a city. Probably written in the late Buyid era (334/945–447/1055), Ḥikāyat depicts a fictional freeloader (ṭufaylī) who pretends to be a religious mendicant, crashes an Isfahan party, and spends the next 24 hours eating, drinking, and running his mouth. For most of the night he insults Isfahan and praises Baghdad, but then switches and abuses Baghdad before passing out drunk, waking up the next day, and leaving with the same bogus piety that he started with.

Due to its genre-bending eclecticism, its lewdness, and its knotty language, Ḥikāyat has been ignored by scholars. It survives in a single British Library manuscript and has been edited twice before (Adam Mez (ed.), Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī, Heidelberg, 1902; Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, al-Risāla al-Baghdādiyya, ed. ʿAbbūd al-Shājlī, Beirut, 1980), and translated, once into French (Abou-Moutahhar al-Azdî, 24 Heures de la vie d'une canaille, trans. René R. Khawam, Paris, 1998) and once into English (Mary St. Germain, “Al-Azdī's Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsim al-Baghdādī: Placing an anomalous text within the literary developments of its time”, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2006). These ingredients make Ḥikāyat a fitting project for Emily Selove and Geert Jan van Gelder, given Selove's monograph on the text (Emily Selove, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāṣim: A Literary Banquet, Edinburgh, 2016) and Van Gelder's interest in “the rude, the bad, and the bawdy”, to take the title to his Festschrift (Adam Talib, Marlé Hammond, and Arie Schippers (eds), The Rude, The Bad, and the Bawdy: Essays in Honour of Professor Geert Jan van Gelder, London, 2014). Their updated edition and translation, The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī, injects new life into an important text.

Ḥikāyat was written around the same time as the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008). The two texts share passages, as does al-Imtāʿ wa-l-muʾānasa (“Enjoyment and conviviality”) of Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023), hence why Ḥikāyat's last editor, ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī, thought Abū al-Muṭahhar al-Azdī – about whom nothing is known other than his authorship of Ḥikāyat – was in fact al-Tawḥīdī. Selove and Van Gelder show why this cannot be (pp. 5–6) in their astute introduction that locates Ḥikāyat in the same universe as Plato, Ovid, Rumi, Cervantes, Joyce, and Woolf. Not only are Badīʿ al-Zamān and al-Tawḥīdī quoted often in Ḥikāyat, but so are poets like Abū Nuwās (d. 198–200/813–815), Ibn al-Rūmī (d. 283/896), al-Ṣanawbarī (d. 334/945–6), and above all Ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 319/1001), whose raunchy verses fit Ḥikāyat's Rabelaisian content.

But Selove and Van Gelder want us to know that this is more than a “dirty book”. There are sections on “carpets, cushions, perfumes and miscellaneous household luxuries” (pp. 126–33), boats, swimming strokes, and sailor slang (pp. 308–15), and more, making it essential for material history (Ḥikāyat was a key source for M.M. Ahsan, Social Life under the Abbasids, London and New York, 1979). There is a chess match (pp. 270–87) and vulgar letters by Zād-Mihr, the singing girl (qayna) of secretary Abū ʿAlī ibn Jumhūr (pp. 216–33). An interesting feature is “middle Arabic”, e.g. p. 52, aysh al-baqqa wa-aysh qarṣatuhā? (“There isn't much sting in a gnat”); p. 82, aysh naqūl? aysh naʿmal? (colloquial for “to do”); p. 272, tā la tajī aswad (n. 772, tā is short for ḥattā). These colloquialisms blend with formal Arabic, although the English in The Portrait does not signal the register shifts.

Given such a challenging text, occasional words or meanings are dropped by Selove and Van Gelder, e.g. p. 137, milḥ darānī (“salt”) should read “Derani salt” (Deran is a city in Iran); p. 145, qithā basta (“bunches of another type of cucumber”) should read “bunches of snake cucumber [Cucumis melo var. flexuousus]” (Helena M. Paavilainen, Medieval Pharmacotherapy, Continuity and Change, Leiden, 2009, 593), and zuʿrūr basta, which the translation skips entirely, should read “bunches of medlar [Mespilus germanica]” (Marwān ibn Janāḥ, On the Nomenclature of Medicinal Drugs, trans. Gerrit Bos and Fabian Käs, Leiden, 2020, ii, 1060); and pp. 296–7, qiblat al-maḥāmid (“the focus of all praise”) should read “the prayer direction to which all praises flow”, and rajul ʿāra min al-ʿawrāʾ nashwān min farṭ al-ḥayāʾ (“a man free of faults, giddy with life”) should read “a man who's abandoned fault and is giddy from so much modesty”. There are obscure phrases, e.g. p. 71, kabiduhu fī jawfihi, literally “his liver is in his stomach” and which Selove and Van Gelder speculate may mean “he wears his heart on his sleeve”. But similar expressions appear in dictionaries under faratha, “to crush”, including faratha al-ḥubbu kabidah, “love crushed his liver”, i.e. “broke his heart”, yielding the sense “heartbroken” (e.g. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab, ed. Amīn Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and Muḥammad Ṣādiq al-ʿUbaydī, Beirut, third repr. 1999, x, 208). The Portrait takes special liberties with Arabic poetry, reflecting a difference of approach between Selove and Van Gelder (discussed on page 27; cf. Van Gelder's discussion in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, Literary History of Medicine, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith et al., Leiden and Boston, 2020, i, 140).

Aside from textual issues, some titles could have been added, e.g. Sinan Antoon's study of Ibn al-Ḥajjāj (The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and Sukhf, New York, 2014) given how much that poet is quoted, or Manfred Ullmann's Das Gespräch mit dem Wolf (Munich, 1981) to accompany a reference to ʿAlī talking with wolves (p. 47, n. 43). None of this cancels the overall value of The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī al-Tamīmī, with its detailed indexes of terms, places, persons, tribes, and poems, plus its rich, dizzyingly erudite annotations. Selove and Van Gelder have helped all of us in the macrocosm by offering a new edition and translation of this, one of the strangest, most engrossing texts in Classical Arabic belles lettres.