In an effort to provide a critical link between medieval works of adab and contemporary notions of parody, this paper will offer a preliminary literary historical account of the first print edition of the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 1008 AD), which was compiled, annotated, and published by Muhammad Abduh in 1889. Despite having rescued the text from relative obscurity and bowdlerizing it so as not to offend his contemporary readership, Abduh’s contribution to the formation of a modern corpus of Classical Arabic literature has received less scholarly attention than his writings on Islamic law and education reform. By offering a close reading of the passages that Abduh bowdlerized, I hope to bring together aspects of Abduh’s larger project of reform, his conceptualization of modernity, and his method of manuscript selection, annotation, and elision in order to elucidate some of the assumptions regarding parody that informed his reading of the Maqāmāt. To properly situate this argument, I will first discuss the 1889 edition of the Maqāmāt within its immediate historical context: Abduh’s biography, his other major writings, and the intellectual milieu in Egypt during the first decades of British colonial rule. I will then take a closer look at the numerous redacted passages, including the entire Maqāma Shāmiyya, that “the reader (adīb) may have been ashamed to read,” as Abduh wrote in the introduction to the 1889 edition. These censored selections are a rich source for understanding how Abduh read parodic, obscene, and subversive passages of a pre-modern text as a threat to the morality of the modern Egyptian reader. This is an influential moment in the reception history of the maqāmāt, one that can enrich our understanding of the distinctly modern concerns that influenced the curation of an ostensibly Classical canon in print. For medieval Arabists, understanding what was at stake for Abduh may help to identify and put aside some of the assumptions of the modern reader in order to better ground a hermeneutics of pre-modern parody.