ABSTRACT
Ibn Khamīs al-Tilimsānī (d. 1309 CE) was arguably one of the two greatest premodern poets of al-maghrib al-awsaṭ (the Central Maghrib, roughly modern-day Algeria), the other being Bakr ibn Ḥammād al-Tāhartī (d. 908). During the Marīnid siege of Zayyānid Tlemcen (1299–1307), Ibn Khamīs fled to Ceuta in 1305 before settling in Naṣrid Granada, after short stays in Algeciras and Malaga. In Granada, the Tlemcenian poet-scholar lived as a protégé of the reviled vizier Ibn al-Ḥakīm al-Rundī, until their murder in 1309 by an enraged mob. While living in exile, Ibn Khamīs never forgot about his waṭan (homeland/hometown) which he most fondly, albeit obsessively, recalled and memorialized in a plethora of nostalgic poems (Tilimsānīyyāt) among which a ḥāʾiyya (poem rhyming on the letter ḥ) stands out as the finest example. After presenting an English translation of the ḥāʾiyya and other relevant verses, I argue that the Tilimsānīyyāt abound in an operatic recollection that unconventionally braids a nostalgic portrait of Tlemcen with a fixation on the past and a suppression of the present. 1
