Recent historiographical trends are witnessing a rise of an ‘emotional turn’ in the discipline of history. Including emotions in their frameworks offers scholars a separate analytical category for interpreting the past and its textual representations of narrative forms. Moving beyond the universalist and relativist dichotomy of the elusive nature of emotions, historians have focused on how they function as agents of history, appearing, changing and continuing as components of the human condition across ages and communities. However, despite its potential, this analytical category remains relatively understudied in pre-modern Arabic literature. The present study attempts to apply the emotional perspective to the Mat̲h̲ālib genre, an inherently emotionally charged type in Arabic literature. Mat̲h̲ālib literature, characterised by its oppositional and reactionary tendencies, emerged as a response to the sectarian and partisan divides within the Islamic world. Among diverse texts in this genre addressing political and religious themes, Mat̲h̲ālib al-Nawāṣib (Shortcomings of the Nawāṣib), authored by Ibn Shahrāshūb (d. 588/1192) - an influential Shīʿī scholar- stands out as a notable example. The work reveals the ‘emotional styles’ of the Mat̲h̲ālib literature, showcasing how writers perceived and portrayed emotions and what narratives they crafted to evoke specific emotional responses. By employing a close reading approach and comparing this text with its religious and political counterparts in the Mat̲h̲ālib genre, this paper seeks to ask the following questions: (1) Which emotions frequent the Mat̲h̲ālib literature, and where are they located? (2) To what extent do these emotions represent lived experiences? (3) What role do these emotions play in constructing the narrative? Finally, (4) how Mat̲h̲ālib texts contribute to forming ‘emotional communities’, as conceptualised by Barbara Rosenwin, wherein shared values foster collective social identities. Consequently, the study underscores the significance of the Mat̲h̲ālib genre and Ibn Shahrāshūb’s text as an avenue in the landscape of Arabo-Islamic emotion history. Secondly, by focusing on Ibn Shahrāshūb’s arrangement of vignettes, his voice as an author and agency as an editor, and the paratext he provides, it highlights emotions as an essential element of the narrative. Lastly, it identifies the text as a site from whence nuanced emotions are created and transferred within a community. While the study encounters limitations, such as challenges in translation that hinder the rendering of exact emotive meaning, it examines how emotions manifest within social contexts through their literary depictions and will pave further paths for considering the interplay between lived and literary emotions.