The Ritual of the Gift Exchange Between the Poem of Ibn Al-Abbar and the Army of the Sultan of Tunisia The subject of lamenting the lost land of Andalusia flourished during the period of the petty kings as a result of political instability. The Andalusian poets used to follow different passive and active methods to lament their lost land. One of these active methods was to call on other kings to help them fight their enemy. Ibn Al-Abbar (1199 – 1260), for example, was one of the rare poets who succeeded in using the panegyric ode, his “Adrik bi-Khaylik, Rescue by your horses,” to persuade the Sultan of Tunis to send his huge army to help Ibn Al-Abbar’s city of Valencia. The aim of my paper is to present how Ibn Al-Abbar employed the structure of the classical Arabic panegyric ode to negotiate with the Sultan. The main purpose of this negotiation was to initiate the ritual exchange in which the poet gives his poem as a gift to the Sultan emphasizing his political legitimacy with the aim of having the Sultan reciprocate by sending his army to protect Valencia. The subject will be analyzed generally in light of Marcel Mauss’s formulation of gift exchange and specifically as recent scholarship in classical Arabic poetry method has applied the ritual of gift exchange to the courtly exchange of qasida for prize.