5 - Finding the Lost Andalusia: Reading Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Tarık or the Conquest of al-Andalus in its Multiple Renderings

Summary

The creation of a ‘new woman’ was a crucial project for reforming empires and nations in the second half of the nineteenth century. An equally daunting transformation was underway regarding conceptions of masculinity, even if this has been less immediately visible to observers. Across societies and linguistic groups, this development can be seen in different venues of cultural activity, from new depictions of the Prophet Muhammad by Orientalists and Muslims alike, to the introduction of mass education for boys, the standardisation of male attire, and the cultivation of the body through sport and physical culture. These shifts happened transregionally and trans-imperially, with bureaucrats, activists and intellectuals in one locale drawing comparisons with and making reference to developments elsewhere to support their arguments. Literary works and their translation were a key venue for proposing and working through redefined notions of masculinity, just as they were crucial to the ‘new woman’ discourse.

First published in 1879, the play Tarık yahut Endülüs Fethi (‘Tarik or the conquest of Andalusia’), by the Ottoman playwright and poet Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan (1852–1937), depicted the Muslim conquest of Andalusia in the eighth century CE through the feats of its main character, Tarik, in matters of both love and war. Translations of the play into Arabic (1910, 1959), Bosnian (1915), Dari Persian (1922) and Urdu (1943) suggested its appeal to readers across imperial and national borders, amplifying ongoing local debates about social decline and renewal. This chapter asks how masculinity was construed in the play through a set of techniques tying together the question of vatan and the nation, Islam, and gender relations. Contextual, textual and paratextual elements of the play’s trans-lations all contributed to representing a new ideal of masculinity central to these contemporaneous, locally sited conversations about the present and future. If the original play offered rich material for thinking about masculinity, its translations illustrated the ongoing and nuanced salience of this concern multilingually.

In Tarık, Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan follows the fictionalised historical figure of Tarik ibn Ziyad, the eighth-century conqueror of Andalusia. Set in the ‘golden age’ of Islamic history, its emphasis on contemporary issues of nationalism, patriotism and women’s visibility gave the play popular appeal in different contexts decades after it was first published.