“Stopping by the ruins” – wuquf ‘ala al-atlal – was one of the primary themes of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry: the poet visits the ruins of a spot where he once camped with his beloved, now lost to him. The trope was already being mocked as a cliché and parodied by the eighth century CE, but it held on, and today a new generation of writers and other artists is using the imagery of the ruins to address the devastation caused by wars and violence in the Arab world.