New Information on the Qiy?n of al-Andalus Although a number of articles and at least one book (Casewell, The Slave Girls of Baghdad, 2011) have surveyed the institution of “singing slave girls” in the Eastern Mediterranean, information about the role of the qiy?n in al-Andalus has remained fragmentary and has been drawn from a limited number of well-known sources, primarily al-Maqqar?. This presentation attempts to survey the buying and selling of qiy?n and their role in Andalusian society in three large periods defined by where the ‘center’ for their education and training was located: first, in the East (primarily in Medina and Iraq), then in Cordoba; and, finally, in Seville. This research is based upon materials culled from a much broader array of sources than used by earlier authors, and highlights information about qiy?n who, by various means, managed to play an active role in shaping their own destiny. One such new source is the series of eighteen biographies of Andalusian singers, most of them qiy?n, found in the 14th-century encyclopedic work by Ibn Fa?l All?h al-‘Umar?, Mas?lik al-ab??r. Al-‘Umar? drew the materials for the first seventy-five biographies in his volume on music (Vol. X) from al-I?bah?n?’s Kit?b al-Agh?n? and then quoted the now lost Agh?n? al-mu?dath?n by Ibn N?qiy? for the biographies of singers in the late 10th and 11th centuries. But it has remained virtually unnoticed by scholars that he also included biographies of Andalusian singers from two specific periods: the first decades of the 9th century (the rule of al-?akam I) and the final decades of Umayyad rule in the early 11th century. Using this and other new sources provides a rather different picture than that found in earlier academic writing and allows us to move towards answers to two critical questions: 1) Did the institution of “singing slave girls” develop differently in al-Andalus than it did in the East?; and, 2) Given that historians often portray free women in al-Andalus (such as Wall?da) as enjoying a greater amount of agency and liberty than their counterparts in the East, is this also true for the qiy?n of al-Andalus?