This course examines the relationship between political critique and the textual production of “possible worlds” distinct from the familiar, tangible world around us, taking the premodern Arabic literary canon as our example. We will read a variety of modern critical theorists in connection with premodern Arabic texts including: Qur’anic apocalyptic suras, the philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan, Sindbad the Sailor and other travel narratives, al-Maʿarri’s satirical narrative of a visit to the afterlife, and trickster tales of the maqama genre. We then turn to early modern popular narratives, concluding with a discussion of how the 19th-century novels by al-Muwaylihi and al-Shidyaq merged novelistic forms, selfhoods, and conceptions of political organization with those of the classical maqama.