The poetic memorialization of the Maghribī city illuminates the ways in which exilic Maghribī poets constructed idealized images of their native cities from the ninth to nineteenth centuries CE.

The first work of its kind in English, Of Lost Cities explores the poetics and politics of elegiac and nostalgic representations of the Maghribī city and sheds light on the ingeniously indigenous and indigenously ingenious manipulation of the classical Arabic subgenres of city elegy and nostalgia for one’s homeland. Often overlooked, these poems – distinctively Maghribī, both classical and vernacular, and written in Arabic and Tamazight – deserve wider recognition in the broader tradition and canon of (post)classical Arabic poetry. Alongside close readings of Maghribī poets such as Ibn Rashīq, Ibn Sharaf, al-Ḥuṣrī al-Ḍarīr, Ibn Ḥammād al-Ṣanhājī, Ibn Khamīs, Abū al-Fatḥ al-Tūnisī, al-Tuhāmī Amghār, and Ibn al-Shāhid, Nizar Hermes provides a comparative analysis using Western theories of place, memory, and nostalgia.

Containing the first translations into English of many poetic gems of premodern and precolonial Maghribī poetry, Of Lost Cities reveals the enduring power of poetry in capturing the essence of lost cities and the complex interplay of loss, remembrance, and longing.

Nizar F. Hermes is associate professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies at the University of Virginia.

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“The Maghrib comes alive through the author’s eyes in Of Lost Cities. The book’s vast chronological scope, paired with the author’s capacity to bridge the medieval and premodern worlds, makes for a paramount contribution to the field of Arabic literary studies at large.” Nicola Carpentieri, University of Padua