Bilal Orfali is Sheikh Zayed Chair for Arabic and Islamic Studies and Chairperson of the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. He previously held the M.S. Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University. He specializes in Arabic literature, Sufism, and quranic Studies.
Nadia Maria El Cheikh is Professor of History and Dean of Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut. She is a scholar of the Abbasid Caliphate and Byzantium, with women and gender as a focal point of her research.

The aim of this volume is to raise and discuss questions about the different approaches to the study of pre-modern Arabic anthologies from the perspectives of philology, religion, history, geography, and literature.