The Abbasid Golden Age has been under scrutiny for some time: was it a product of the 19th-century nahḍa, or was it truly a golden age? This question is usually answered by either analyzing Abbasid literature (e.g., S. Stetkevych) or by analyzing nahḍa discourse (e.g., M. Cooperson). In this paper, I propose a different approach to tackle this issue. How did post-Abbasid but pre-nahḍa litterateurs view the Abbasid period? Did they read Abbasid literature? Was it unparalleled in their eyes? I discuss the Ottoman-era poet Manjak Bāshā’s (d. 1080/1669) muʿāraḍāt (s. muʿāraḍa, emulation/imitation) of the Abbasid poet Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī’s (d. 357/968) Rūmiyyāt (Poems on/of Rūm). Abū Firās wrote his famous Rūmiyyāt while imprisoned by the Byzantines (the people of Rūm); Manjak Bāshā finds in these poems fodder—motifs, affects, maʿānī—to convey his own estrangement from the lands of Rum. Of Turkish origin but born and raised in Damascus, he moves to Istanbul to seek patronage, but he fails. While in Istanbul, he feels estranged, uprooted, even “imprisoned,” and so writes poems echoing Abū Firās’s Rūmiyyāt. I argue that Manjak Bāshā is intimately familiar with—a close reader of—Abū Firās. What does this tell us about the role of Abbasid literature in pre-nahḍan Ottoman Syria? Is this a unique case of return to the Abbasid period in later literature? By way of conclusion, I zoom out of this example, and offer some preliminary observations about the role Abbasid literary production played in later periods, arguing for a certain degree of continuity in the literary tradition, as opposed to a break—a break that is usually attributed to a shift in the structures of literary patronage, the emergence of a new literary class, and the subsequent rise of new poetic styles. While these changes are undeniable, and left their mark on “postclassical” Arabic literary culture, I argue that “classical” Abbasid literature’s sway held firmly throughout Arabic literary history. Ultimately, this leads us to approach, with new eyes, the question of the “post” in “postclassical”: is it suggesting that later Arabic literature is supplementary or secondary to “classical” Arabic literature, or is it—or rather can and/or should it be—simply a convenient temporal marker?