This publication deals with the qasida, a poetic genre of Arabic origin which has become a major vehicle for the expression of societal and religious ideals in many languages of Asia and Africa. Volume One is a collection of papers by international specialists dealing with classical and modern qasida traditions that range from those in Arabic, Persian and Turkish in the Islamic heartland to languages further afield such as Urdu, Indonesian and Hausa. The papers focus upon selected poems which are published, together with an English translation, in Volume Two. This anthology contains fifty poems in fourteen languages dating from the seventh to the twentieth centuries. In their unprecedented scope, these volumes make a unique contribution to the comparative study of poetry and literary history in the Islamic world.