Before World Literature offers an account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of one of the most widely read Arabic texts of the postclassical period: the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, a twelfth-century collection of fifty trickster stories written in an elaborate and highly allusive form of prose.

Exploring literature in Arabic, Bengali, Persian, Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu, and Turkish, this collection of essays answers important questions about the place of religion in society, secularity and literature, the complexities of treating religion as a stable category, and its relationship to virtue, ethics, legitimacy and social hegemony.