In his poignant maqamah penned for Baghdad, Ẓahīr al-Dīn Ibn al-Kāzarūnī (611 – 697/1214 - 1298) memorializes the urban culture of the Abbasid capital in the thirteenth-century before its loss to the Mongols. The city’s architectural ruins provide the skeleton that Ibn al-Kāzarūnī utilizes as a literary device to bring the city back to life. His poetic prose reminisces on the ways that public officials upheld the Abbasid bureaucracy and how the populace marked distinctive occasions, such as the annual pilgrimage, fasting, major holidays, death, and the arrival of spring. In this work, Ibn al-Kāzarūnī celebrates the cosmopolitanism and preeminence of the Abbasid caliphs in both worldly and religious terms. They are celebrated rulers, protectors of Islam, guardians of the Muslim community, political inheritors of the blessed Prophet, and his blood relatives. And he simultaneously highlights the moral dangers that laced the Abbasids’ power and wealth, leading to extravagance, decrepitude, and ultimately divine retribution. The path forward, that Ibn al-Kāzarūnī and his contemporaries envisioned, lay in sincere repentance and embodied acts of piety – even as they cast a longing glance back to the urban life and culture of thirteenth-century Bagdad now lost to them forever.