2 - Challenge: The al-Andalus Experience

Summary

Who silenced the poet's voice

With treacherous nightly bullets?

O Lorca, the adored features

O soul, the clearest of mirrors

Vanished from the lands of al-Andalus.

– Fu’ād al-Khashin

1. INTRODUCTION

Al-Andalus, the medieval Arab state in the Iberian Peninsula, acquired a legendary status in Arab culture—its literary trajectory in time and place contains a utopian vision, similar to the dream of the homeland in modern exile literature. It is viewed as a golden age, or a paradise lost, or the hunt for the hidden treasure. When contemporary Arab authors, artists, and intellectuals recall the cultural achievements of the Arab heritage in al-Andalus during nearly 800 years of Muslim rule, they do so to remind their audience that their present bitter state is only a transitory period, a temporary clouding of the skies between a glorious past and a splendid future. And they do so and revive the Andalusian past and its achievements in order to counter those who claim that Arab culture has become excessively Westernized. Such “Arab patriotism” has infiltrated the literary texts as well. For example, in the mid-1980s, the Palestinian poet Maḥmūd Darwīsh (1941–2008), who was born in the village of Birwa, near Acre (Akka), which was destroyed by Israeli forces in June 1948 after they had expelled all its inhabitants, asks himself what he would do if he were given the chance to start his life all over again. He has no doubts:

If I were to start all over again I’d choose what I have chosen now: the roses on the fence

I’d set out again on the road that may or may not lead to Cordova.

But reaching this homeland may always remain an illusion:

I will return, if I can, to my roses, to my steps

But I will not go back to Cordova.

Andalusian Cordova here is the paradise the poet was driven from, the mythological homeland to which he is longing to return. Darwīsh is among numerous Arab authors, mainly poets, who, since the nineteenth century, have been invoking the image of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, in their writings in a conscious effort to highlight the benefits that Western civilization has gained through its interaction with Arab civilization.