In What is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed posits a geographical space, Balkan-to-Bengal complex, as a transcontinental belt of Islamicate cultures characterized by cosmopolitanism, at the center of which are habits and discourses of sociability (suhba, mu'anasa, lutf) between friends, neighbors and loved ones. This paper grounds that sociability in a culture of literary performance in salons held in homes, bookshops, chancery offices, monasteries, and gardens. Though mentions of salons in sources are legion (mujalasa, mudhakara, musamara, or muhadara), the textual evidence describing them in any detail is fragmentary at best. For this talk, I draw together literary sources - in both printed and in manuscript form - that provide rare glimpses of the mood of these gatherings, modes of collegiality and turn taking in the bubble of egalitarianism, and exchanges of affection or Bacchanalia. One manuscript source in particular, Halbat al-Kumayt (Gathering for Wine) by al-Nawaji, distinguishes between hierarchical royal salons over which a patron presides and collegial ones where friends relax decorum and scrutiny in favor of a warmer more intimate sociability. The usual approach to classical Arabic culture is one that privilege texts as a cerebral exercise, often dubbed with the misnomer belle-lettre, but here I deploy a performance approach, drawn from the study of folklore and the ethnography of communication (Bauman and Hymes). This approach theorize issue and question based on sources that construct the text as a performance event where agents of culture inhabit body, space, and time to make shared experiences and cultural memory. I argue that far from a brainy production, these classical Arabic sources illustrate a bawdy bodily culture that partakes of human aspirations while embracing the hairy toothy animality of the human.