Muslim Storytelling: The Oral Tradition in a Written World
Before the book, there was the voice. The great Muslim storytelling traditions — the maqama, the hikayat, the tale of the hakawati — are being recovered and reimagined.
The hakawati — the professional storyteller — was once a fixture of the coffee houses of Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul. Seated on a raised chair, embellishing tales of Antar and Abu Zayd al-Hilali with improvised detail and theatrical delivery, the hakawati held his audience for hours. The tradition died, or nearly died, as literacy spread and coffee houses acquired televisions. In Damascus, the last traditional hakawati retired in 2009.
But the impulse to tell stories does not die so easily. A new generation of Muslim writers and performers is reaching back to the oral tradition — not to preserve it in amber but to find in it something that the novel and the podcast, for all their virtues, do not always provide: a quality of presence, of shared attention, of communal experience in real time.
