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Al-Hariri of Basra was a poet belonging to the Beni Harram tribe of Bedouin Arabs, who lived and died in the city of Basra, modern Iraq. He was a scholar of the Arabic language and a dignitary of the Seljuk Empire, which ruled Iraq during his lifetime, from 1055 to 1135. He is known for his Maqamat al-Hariri, a collection of some 50 stories written in the Maqama style, a mix of verse and literary prose. 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. Although the maqamat did not originate with al-Hariri, he elevated the genre to an art form.