Beatrice Gruendler, Ph.D. (1995), Harvard University is Professor of Arabic at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of The Development of the Arabic Scripts (1993), Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry (2003), The Life and Times of Abū Tammām (2015), and The Rise of the Arabic Book (2020).Isabel Toral, PhD (1997), Tübingen, is Professor of Arabic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published monographs and many articles on Arabic history and literature, including al-Hira (2014) and Baghdad (2022), together with Jens Scheiner.