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<font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-weight: normal">Up until the Crusades, it was <em>al-Rūm </em>who were universally seen by Arab writers and Arab poets in particular as the Other <em>par excellence</em>. Nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the sub-genre of <em>Al-Rūmiyyat </em>(poems about the Byzantines), namely as found in the <em>Rūmiyyat</em> of Abu Firas al-Hamdani(d.968), and in the poetic responses of al-Qaffal(d</span><span><strong>. </strong></span><span style="font-weight: normal">946</span><span style="font-weight: normal">) and Ibn Hazm(d.</span><span><strong> </strong></span><span style="font-weight: normal">1064</span><span style="font-weight: normal">) to what was described by several medieval Muslim chronicles as <em>Al-Qasida al-Arminiyya al-Malʿuna </em>(The Armenian Cursed Ode). By exploring the forgotten views of the Byzantines in medieval Arabic poetry, this article </span><span style="font-weight: normal">purports to demonstrate that </span><span style="font-weight: normal">contrary to the impression left after reading Edward Said&rsquo;s groundbreaking <em>Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient</em> (1978) and other postcolonial studies, Orientals have not existed solely to be &lsquo;orientalized&rsquo;. Perhaps even before this came to be so, they too had &lsquo;occidentalized&rsquo;</span><span><strong> </strong></span><span style="font-weight: normal">their Euro-Christian Other(s)</span><span><strong> </strong></span><span style="font-weight: normal">in a way that mirrored in reverse the subject/object relationship described as Orientalism.</span></font></font> <h1 style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: center" align="center"><strong></strong></h1><h1 style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: center" align="center"><strong></strong></h1>

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Ibn Rashīq's popularity in the Arab world as one of the most distinguished classical Maghribi poets owes much to what is often called in Arabic school textbooks "Nūniyyat Ibn Rashīq fī rithāʾ al-Qayrawān," or simply "Nūniyyat Ibn Rashīq." Ibn Rashīq composed his city-elegy, the nūniyyah while living in exile to lament the destruction (kharāb) and desolation (khalāʾ) of Qayrawan in the wake of the Hilālī sacking of the city in 1057 CE. A full English translation of Ibn Rashīq's printed and standardized nūniyyah follows an introductory essay that enumerates salient linguistic and rhetorical features, and offers a manuscript and publication history for the poem. The essay pivots around the lack of elegiac and nostalgic representation of Qayrawan's once majestic 'cityscape' and iconic worldly buildings in the nūniyyah, finding the mnemonic and nostalgic focus of the Maghrib's most renowned city-elegy to be rather the loss of the city's fuqahāʾ (Islamic scholars or jurisprudents).

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