Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī’s maqāmāt collection, Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn (1855), received little scholarly attention among Arab Renaissance, or Nahḍah, scholars. Due to Al-Yāzijī’s faithful emulation of al-Ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt, scholars of the Nahḍah viewed his collection as an empty repetition of the classical model, thus undermining its role in defining an Arab modernity, where literary revival coupled with innovation are considered quintessential to assess Arab literary input of the period. For example, author and literary critic Radwa Ashour expelled al-Yāzijī from her famous “possible modernity” altogether. Setting al-Yaziji side by side with the innovator Faris al-Shidyāq, Ashour contended that al-Yaziji’s collection, notwithstanding its display of language creativity, came as “empty of any innovation. It was marred by lifeless imitation of a [classical] text that had been immortalized for over eight centuries already.” This paper attempts to reappraise al-Yāzijī’s role in re-defining Arab modernity. It takes repetition as an analytical tool to reconfigure Arab enlightenment through mimesis and mimicry. Examining two of al-Yāzijī’s maqāmāt that are tellingly set in the Arabian Peninsula, which in mythic imagination is believed to be the terra prima of the Arabic language, I demonstrate that both “Of Yamāmah” and “Of Tihāmah” foreground repetition as al-Yāzijī’s way to convey a sense of skepticism over teleological narratives of an Arab nation brought together around a sense of homo-lingualism. By tracing hearing in the desert, repetition, and the production of “similar” but “distorted” poetic utterances in the deserts of Yamāmah and Tihāmah, I argue that al-Yāzijī viewed the Arab nation as an entity that is unattainable and is, like a mirage, in a condition of constant deferral.