Betty Rosen earned her Ph.D. in Arabic and Hebrew Literature from the University of California-Berkeley’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Program in Critical Theory in 2023. She also holds an MA in Arabic Literature from SOAS University of London and an A.B. in Comparative Literature from Harvard College. Her doctoral dissertation, Language Marvels: Al-Badī‘ In and Beyond Arabic-Islamic Poetics, considered the conceptual, affective, and creative work done by the term and concept of al-badī‘ (that which is marvelously creative) in the Arabic and Hebrew poetics of Mamluk Egypt (1250-1517). She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the UKRI-funded project Musical Lives, based in the music department at King’s College London, in which capacity she works on poetry and poetic performance in Ayyubid Egypt and Syria viewed in a multilingual Mediterranean context.

In the early 14^th century, a new Arabic literary genre was born: the badī‘iyya, a type of long ode of praise to the Prophet Muḥammad typically accompanied by a book-length commentary in which the poet enumerates, categorizes, and theorizes about the various ways in which language can manifest its marvelously creative capabilities. This genre took its name from a key term of Arabic-Islamic aesthetics that had already had a robust life in Abbasid poetic discourse: al-badī‘, or “that which is marvelously creative.” But was the badī‘iyya primarily a “creative” kind of poetic text centered on a passionate expression of religious devotion or a didactic versification of principles from the theoretical “science of al-badī‘”—and what are the stakes of enforcing such a binary? I ask instead what it would mean to take the badī‘iyya on its own terms, focusing especially on the badī‘iyya of the remarkably prolific polymath Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) as a case study.