The Man with the Staff

In the coffeehouses of old Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad, a figure would arrive in the late afternoon and take his place on a raised platform. He carried a staff — both prop and instrument, used to strike the floor for dramatic effect, to signal danger or surprise, to punctuate a moment of silence before a revelation. This was the hakawati: the teller of tales, keeper of stories, professional weaver of the spoken word.

The coffeehouse would fill. Men would order tea or coffee, settle onto their cushioned benches, and wait. Then the hakawati would begin — not at the beginning, never at the beginning, always in the middle, always in the thick of a story already underway from the previous evening, from the previous week, from a narrative chain that might have been unfolding for months.

A Different Relationship to Story

The hakawati tradition represents a fundamentally different relationship to narrative than the one we have inherited from print culture. In a world of books and streaming, the story is a fixed object: it begins, it ends, you consume it, you move on. The oral tradition was something else entirely. Stories were living, responsive things. A good hakawati read his audience as he spoke, adjusting pace, emphasis, and detail. He might linger in a comic scene if laughter was running high; he might rush through a transition if he sensed restlessness.

The audience, in turn, was not passive. They commented, they groaned at villains, they called out their affection for heroes. This was not disruption — it was participation. The story belonged to everyone in the room.

The Great Cycles

The hakawati drew from a rich repertoire of narrative cycles, many of them enormous in scope:

  • One Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla): The most famous of the Arabic narrative traditions, a frame-story of extraordinary complexity containing fairy tales, love stories, adventure narratives, and philosophical parables.
  • Sirat Antar (The Story of Antar): The epic of Antarah ibn Shaddad, the pre-Islamic warrior-poet, whose story of love, identity, and heroism across an idealized Arabia remained in oral circulation for centuries.
  • Sirat Baybars: The adventures of the Mamluk sultan Baybars, whose cycle mixed historical memory with fantastic embellishment in the manner of all great popular epics.
  • Abu Zayd al-Hilali: An epic of tribal migration and conflict, deeply embedded in North African oral culture, still performed in parts of Egypt and the Maghreb.

Decline and Persistence

The coffeehouse hakawati largely disappeared over the course of the twentieth century, displaced first by radio, then by television. The last renowned practitioners in Damascus and Cairo performed to dwindling audiences as the culture around them shifted irreversibly toward recorded entertainment. By the 1980s, the tradition was being documented more than practiced — preserved in recordings and transcriptions as a cultural artifact.

But oral storytelling is not a relic. It has migrated. Contemporary Arab writers, filmmakers, and performance artists draw heavily on hakawati techniques: the episodic structure, the suspended ending, the direct address to an audience, the deliberate blending of high language and colloquial speech. Elias Khoury's novel Gate of the Sun is, among other things, a hakawati novel — its narrator keeps a dying man alive with stories, the way Scheherazade kept herself alive.

What the Tradition Tells Us

The hakawati tradition tells us something important about Arab culture's relationship to narrative: that stories are not entertainment in the trivial sense, but a form of social cohesion, a way of processing collective memory, of rehearsing moral questions, of keeping history alive in the absence of literacy. In a culture where writing was restricted to the educated elite, the hakawati democratized imagination.

That function has not disappeared. It has only found new vessels. The tradition lives on wherever an Arab storyteller — in a novel, a film, a poem, a WhatsApp voice message that somehow becomes a saga — holds their audience in the grip of what happens next.