The Islamic Picaresque and the Birth of the Bourgeoisie: al-Jawbarī, Book of Charlatans (Damascus, 1210s) [PREVIEW]

The picaresque, a genre of satirical novel which is usually traced from Spain to Britain to America, where Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would be the best-known examples, follows the adventures of hucksters, preachers, and charlatans on the underside of capitalist society—as opposed to those on the top of “respectable” society, who, these works often hint, just happen to be the most successful of the world’s many gangsters. However, as we know the European bourgeoisie emerged from the margins of the merchant capital networks that were already flowing between China, India, and the Islamic world, and indeed we find many Islamic precedents for the picaresque in the numerous stories, songs, and plays about the banū sāsān, the gentleman (and woman) thieves who live free and easy (sometimes not so easy) from Morocco to India and beyond. The most voluminous of these works, which sadly does not survive, was written in al-ʾAndalus (Muslim Spain) itself, and so they give us a window into the biome of class struggle that birthed the modern European bourgeoisie, as well as provide hints how we proletarian hustlers might draw on the energies of the “dangerous class” to bring about the Kingless Generation.

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