Reddit reply in r/classicliterature: african literature — December 1, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

Yes the maqamat are the most prominent example of fiction in Islamicate civilization. I don't know if Africa produced any maqamat. They began to be produced from the Abbassid period onwards and al-Hariri's maqamat were the most popular.

The maqamat are probably most analogous to the Canterbury Tales. They are not analogous to something like Oedipus or Hamlet or Pride & Prejudice or Crime & Punishment.

One of the greatest pieces of fiction in Islamic civilization is Concordance of the Birds by al-Attar, which is a mystic epic poem. It's probably most analogous with Paradise Lost by Milton.

There are quite a few Persian epics about Joseph & Zulaykha. The Shahnameh contains a lot of pre-Islamic material but is also a product of Islamic Persia.

At a certain point in Christian Europe, novels & plays became a part of moral edification and education that never happened in the Islamic world. Nietzsche talks about the importance of art in "post" Christian Europe.

While the Muslim world now has this concept of adab (fine literature, literally meaning "etiquette") it's definitely a postcolonial development.

Before then, being sophisticated meant having a rigorous religious education that comprised logic, philosophy, history, rhetoric, language, astronomy, mathematics, the religious sciences, etiquette, spirituality, etc. Fiction was not seen as a source of these kinds of wisdom, and even the Greco-Roman texts studied were almost exclusively philosophical, mathematical, or scientific/medical. I don't even know if any attention was paid to Roman poetry since there was such a focus on Arabic poetry.

With respect to pre-colonial Islamic Africa I don't know what kind of, if any, prominent works of fiction came out of it. Of course, after there are Naguib Mahfuzh, Tayyib Saleh, and many others.