Begin with Arabic/Introduction to Arabic Literature for the shelf boundary.
Quick Paths
Classical Poetry
Adab and Maqamat
- Arabic/Adab and Maqamat/The Maqamat — al-Hamadhani
- Arabic/Adab and Maqamat/The Assemblies of al-Hariri
Neighboring Arabic Sufi Texts
Reading Order
Read Arabic/Classical Poetry/The Mu'allaqat first if you want the older poetic world: tribal honor, desert landscape, praise, grief, erotic memory, and the force of Arabic before Islam.
Read the maqamat next for narrative performance: rhymed prose, verbal display, picaresque trickery, satire, learning, and the literary city-world of medieval Arabic.
Read Hallaj when you want the theological edge. Sufi/Hallaj/Kitab al-Tawasin and Sufi/Hallaj/Bustan al-Ma'rifa are Arabic texts, but they belong first to the Sufi shelf because Hallaj is part of that main lineage.
For the Arabian Nights, see Islamic/Story Cycles/The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night — Richard Burton and Islamic/Story Cycles/The Arabian Nights Entertainments — Andrew Lang. Those texts are connected to Arabic literature, but the corpus is composite and Islamicate rather than simply Arabic.
For terms, see Arabic Glossary, a shelf-specific slice of the central Good Works Glossary.