For more than eight centuries, Al-Hariri's best known work, his Maqamat has been regarded as one of the greatest treasure in Arabic literature after the Quran and the Pre-Islamic poetic canons.

[3] Although his place of birth is uncertain, scholars suggest that he was probably born in Mashan near Basra, where his family had a palm tree plantation.

The street where he died, Bani Haram, was a place where certain families were known to have settled and was a centre of Basra's silk manufacturing industry.

[11] As soon as it first appeared, Al-Hariri's Maqamat attained enormous popularity across the Arab-speaking world,[13] with people travelling from as far afield as Andalusia (Spain) to hear the verse read from the author's lips.

At the time, this type of public recitation was the main method for disseminating copies of literary works in the Arab speaking world.

However, his opponents accused him of plagiarism; they claimed that the Assemblies were in fact the work of a writer from the Western Maghreb who had died in Baghdad and whose papers had fallen into Al-Hariri's hands.

[18] In terms of al-Hariri's physical appearance, he was very short in stature and wore a beard, which he had the habit of plucking when he was deep in thought[19] He was described as not a particularly handsome man.

[21] The region of Mesopotamia was under the control of the Seljuk Empire from 1055 to 1135, since the Oghuz Turk Tughril Beg had expelled the Shiite Buyid dynasty.

In order to counter the ambitions of Abbasid Caliph al-Mustarshid (1118-1135), who wanted to acquire world dominance, in 1124 Mahmūd granted the city of Wasit to Imad al-Din Zengi (born 1085) as an ıqta, and conferred him the Military Governorship of Basra together with Baghdad and the whole of Iraq in 1127.

[25] As a genre, the maqamat was originally developed by Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadani (969–1008),[26][27] but Al-Hariri elevated it into major literary form.

[31] In a passage that al-Hariri added to a version of his Maqamat, he lists a variety of techniques: "Language, serious and light, jewells of eloquence, verses from the Qur'an, choice metaphors, Arab proverbs, grammatical riddles, double meanings of words, discourses, orations and entertaining jests.

[33] Oral retellings of maqamat were often improvised, however, al-Hariri who composed his stories in private, intended them as finished works that he expected to be recited without embellishment.

[45]The most famous translation of his Maqamat was a German version by the poet and Orientalist Friedrich Rückert as Die Verwandlungen von Abu Serug and sought to emulate the rhymes and wordplay of the original.