ABSTRACT
The departure of the court poets, for whom the eclipse of the great city was cause for grief. Their lamentation in verse is a literary monument to the disaster, couched in the conventional language and imagery of poetry. Employed to evoke the actual event that imagery served to pitch the disaster at cosmic heights. It is certainly fitting that in the lament for the city there should be no mention of the departure of Mu'izz as the occasion for the sack, and hence of his immediate responsibility for the disaster. From the poetry in conjunction with this Andalusian literature, two images of Qayrawan appear, discernible in the final trope of the lament of Ibn Rashiq. The construction put upon the city by Ibn Sharaf and Ibn Rashiq was simply poetic, and correspondingly hyperbolic. The palace city of al-Sabra al-Mansuriyya was certainly pillaged, ruined, and abandoned. Qayrawan itself was never again a large capital city.
