At least in terms of sheer number of city-elegies, Ibn Sharaf al-Qayrawānī (d. 1067) should be considered one of the most prolific city-elegists of the medieval Mediterranean world. While an original dīwn has not survived, Maghribi and Andalusian sources have preserved no fewer than seven marāthī (elegies) by Ibn Sharaf to Qayrawan. In the course of his exploration of the kharāb (destruction) and khalāʾ (desolation) of Qayrawan by the Banū Hilāl in 1057, prominent Qayrawānī chronicler al-Dabbāgh (d. 1299), for example, cited in his seminal Maʿālim al-īmān fī maʿrifat ahl al-Qayraw ān (The Cornerstone of Faith in Knowing the People of Qayrawan), rather perfunctorily, two fragmented samples from Ibn Sharaf's city-elegies along with a few verses penned by Ibn Faḍḍāl (d. 1086). Al-Dabbāgh did so most likely to introduce what he judged as the most Islamically inspired of marāthī al-Qayrawan: the nūniyya of Ibn Rashīq and the tāʾiyya of ʿAlī al-Ḥuṣrī (d. 1095). However, it is the Andalusian anthologist Ibn Bassām al-Shantarīnī (d. 1147) who preserved Ibn Sharaf's elegiac/nostalgic corpus of Qayrawānīyyāt. Ibn Bassām devoted an entire section of his magnum opus Al-Dhakhīra fī maḥāsin ahl al-jazīra (The Treasury Concerning the Merits of the People of Iberia) to the Qayrawānī poets who emigrated to al- Andalus (al-wāfidīna ʿalā al-jazīra). Most suggestive perhaps is that in the lengthy chapter on Ibn Sharaf Ibn Bassām opted for an extremely suggestive subtitle for Ibn Sharaf's city-elegies: “mā akhrajtuhu min marāthīhi ilā ahli l-Qayrawān baladih/what I have collected of his elegies for the people of Qayrawan his hometown.”