Name: Seminar on the Qasida
Start: 2026-08-25T19:00:00.000-05:00
End: 2026-08-25T20:30:00.000-05:00
Location: Beit Al Turaath

Beit Al Turaath Events

📝Join us for a Seminar on the Qasida (Long-form Arabic Poetry)

Unlike many literary forms that slowly grow into refinement, the qasida appears in Arabic tradition already elevated: ancient, intricate, and almost musical before poetry was widely preserved in writing. It is a spoken art of memory, longing, praise, grief, pride, wisdom, and performance, predating the emergence of the Prophet. In this session, we will explore the qasida across the ages and across the places in which it has lived, from the camps of the bādiya to the royal courthouses, and from public gatherings to the revolutionary streets, tracing how its sounds, structures, and themes came to shape Arabic poetry and inspired new forms over time. Through examples in Arabic and English, we will listen for rhythm, identify rhyme, explore bahr and poetic structure, and write some verse, to discover how a poem comes to be.