Listening to Thirteenth-Century Cairo and Damascus: What's New in Late Ayyubid Poetry?

An IAIS Visiting Speaker Event with Dr Betty Rosen Join us in the online or at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies for our next visiting speaker event. One poet inserts himself into a revered literary lineage by riffing on the words of his recently-deceased friend and mentor; another transforms a friend’s elegy for a donkey into religious praise; a third remixes his own love lyrics to stage a public conversation with himself – and all of the poets just mentioned belong to the same literary and social network. In this presentation, I discuss what we can learn about the social and creative life of 13th-century Cairo and Damascus when we not only read poems on the page, but approach them with open ears, infusing philological work with practice-led methods from music and performance studies. Beyond simply fleshing out the accounts given in biographical dictionaries and historical texts, I ask how hearing this poetry as opening onto larger sonic and social worlds might help us understand this somewhat neglected period in literary and cultural history, as well as its relationship to the poetic aesthetics of the subsequent Mamluk period. Betty Rosen is a scholar of Arabic poetry and poetics focused on the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (1171-1517) as well as the modern afterlives of medieval Arabic theories of language and poetics. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London on the UKRI-Funded project Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300, in which capacity she works primarily on Arabic poetry and performance in 13th-century Damascus and Cairo. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in 2023 and is currently preparing a monograph based on her dissertation, Language Marvels: Al-Badīʿ In and Beyond Arabic-Islamic Poetics. Her publications include “Timing Critique in Arabic: The Thought of Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ṭaha in the Context of the Arabic Reception of Kant” (Cultural Critique, 2025) and “The Listening Self: Two Ghazal-Mukhammas Pairs from the Dīwān of Najm al-Dīn b. Isrāʾīl b. Siwār al-Dimashqī” (Al-ʿUṣūr al-wusṭa, 2026). In the spirit of the label ‘Majlis’ and also to make the talks even more interesting, our speakers present the topic discussed as embedded in their own journey. However, we don’t record the Q&A in order to keep the discussion free. Please come and enjoy the talks and the discussions : ) We’ll be happy to welcome you!