For centuries, Urdu-speaking poets and their audiences have gathered for mushāʿirahs, literary competitions for spoken-word verse. Today the mushāʿirah is a global phenomenon, as audiences in the millions convene in person and online for hours of poetic performance. Tracing these modern gatherings back to their origins, Nathan L. M. Tabor introduces readers to the popular emergence of the mushāʿirah in eighteenth-century Delhi. Scores of poets composed two-line lyric poems, called ġhazals, that they muttered, sang, shouted, and spat out in contentious salon spaces across India’s largest metropolis. Delhi’s mushāʿirahs circulated lyrics, satires, and songs for both common and elite poets, who traded and assessed words like an urban commodity that defined hierarchy, taste, and notions of delight.

Via poets' verse exchanges and the histories they wrote about Dehli’s literary scene, City of Lyrics reconstructs the social networks the mushāʿirahs produced. By understanding the roots of this uniquely Islamic literary practice, readers will also gain insight into global popular culture today, which increasingly takes shape according to tastes and values from the Muslim world yet is enjoyed by wide audiences comprised of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Nathan L. M. Tabor is assistant professor of history at Western Michigan University.