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The Lost Garden of Al-Andalus: Islamic Spain and the Poetic Inversion of Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Yaseen Noorani
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In 1933, the Urdu and Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938) became the first Muslim to worship in the mosque of Cordoba since its conversion into a cathedral after the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492. Iqbal had gone to London as a delegate to the third roundtable conference on the political future of India. On his return, he was invited to lecture in Madrid by the Orientalist Asin Palacios, and took the opportunity to visit the monument. Dramatizing the symbolic significance of his visit to the mosque, Iqbal swooned upon entering and uttered verses that presumably came to be included in his celebrated Urdu poem “Masjid-i Qurtubah”. Some years before, in 1919, the Egyptian Arabic poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) ended his five-year exile in Spain with a similar visit to the Andalusian monuments, albeit with less dramatic fanfare. Nevertheless, Shawqi as well was accompanied by his muse. In the introduction to his own famous poem about Islamic Spain, the “Siniyyah”, Shawqi recounts how the embryonic verses of this poem came to him as he toured the mosque and the Alhambra of Granada.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , May 1999 , pp. 237 - 254
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

NOTES

1 See al-Miṣrī, ḥusayn MujibAl-Andalus bayna Shawqī wa Iqbāl (Cairo: Dār al-Waʿy, 1994), 232–37Google Scholar, for a detailed description of this episode. For a biography of Iqbal, see Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel's Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 1989)Google Scholar.

2 Al-Shawqiyyāt (Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwdah, 1988)Google Scholar, vol. 1, part 2, 45. Although the poem is officially en- titled “al-Rihlah ilā al-Andalus” (“The Journey to al-Andalus”), the name by which it is commonly known is “Siniyyat Ahmad Shawqī” (“the poem rhyming in ‘s’ of Ahmad Shawqi”), in reference to the famous poem which inspired it, the “Siniyyah” of al-Buhturī. For a biography of Shawqi, see Khouri, Mounah A., Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971)Google Scholar, or Boudot-Lamotte, Antoine, Aḥmad Shawql: L'homme el I'oeuvre (Damascus: Institut francais de Damas, 1977).Google Scholar For an account of Shawqi's time in Spain, see Peres, Henri, L'Espagne vue par les voyageurs musulmans de 1610 a 1930 (Paris: Adrien- Maisonneuve, 1937), 100–20.Google Scholar The most exhaustive discussion of Shawqi's relationship with Spain is Mahmūd ʿAlī Makkī, “Al-Andalus fi Shiʿr Ahmad Shawqī wa Nathrih”, in Fuṣul 3, no. 2 (1983): 200–34.

3 āb-i rawān-i kabīr tere kināre koi / dekh rahā hai kisī aur zāmane kā khwāb / ʿalam-i naw hai abhī pardah-yi taqdīr men / meri nigāhoṇ meṇ hai us-ki saḥar be-ḥijāb / pardah uthā dūn agar chihra-yi afkār se / lā na sakegā firang merī navāoṇ kī tāb; Kulliyyāt-i Iqbāl, 100th ed. (Aligarh: Educational Bookhouse, 1993), 392, lines 59–61.Google Scholar Verses of this poem will be henceforth cited by line number only. All translations in this essay are my own, except where otherwise noted. For a full translation of the poem, see Kiernan, V. G.. Poems from lqbal (London: Murray, 1955), 68–71.Google Scholar

4 waṭanī law shughiltu bi -l-khuldi ʿanhū / nāzaʿatni ilayhi fi -l-khuldi nafsī; Al-Shawqiyyat, vol. 1, part 2, 46, line 13.Google Scholar To be cited henceforth by line number only.

5 waʿaẓa -l-buhturiyya īwānu kisrā / wa shafatnī -l- quṣūru min ʿabdi shamsī [49] Shawqi's poem is modeled on a celebrated ekphrastic poem by the Abbasid poet al-Buhturī (d 897).

6 wa idhā fātaka -ltifātun ilā -l-mā- / ḍi fa-qad ghāba ʿanka wajhu -ttaʾssī [110]

7 On the classical Arab nasīb, see Stetkevych, Jaroslav, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arab Nasib (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).Google Scholar

8 “Poetic sublimation” is a poetic structure or strategy rather than a psychic process revealed by poetry. It bears a structural resemblance to Freud's theory of sublimation, to which I return later.

9 The definition of “wasf” in classical Arabic rhetoric is essentially the same as the definition of “ek- phrasis” in Greek and Latin rhetoric. See al-Qayrawani, Ibn Rashiq, Kitab al-ʿUmdah (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1981)Google Scholar, 2:294, and Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 69.Google Scholar Modern critics usually limit the term “ekphrasis” to description of works of art; I treat “wasf” as its equivalent for the purposes of this essay, even though the Arabic term is not usually limited to this sense.

10 Concentration on the inner meaning of an ekphrastic object with little or no reference to its outward appearance is actually an important strand in the history of ekphrasis, as has been shown by Jean H. Hagstrum, who characterizes it as “sacramental pictorialism” (Byzantine) or “emblematic”. See Hagstrum, Jean H., The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 44–56, 94–100.Google Scholar Iqbal's poem belongs to this strand much more than Shawqi's, which displaces the present image not with meditation on its meaning but with “absent” images evoked by it.

11 Simon Goldhill has emphasized that “the self-conscious and self-reflexive dramatisation of viewing—seeing oneself seeing—is a fundamental element of Hellenistic ecphrasis” in his essay “Ecphrasis and the Culture of Viewing”, in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. Goldhill, Simon and Osborne, Robin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205.Google Scholar In the poems I am discussing, a similar specular subjectivity forms the basis of political subjectivity.

12 Page Dubois has emphasized the way in which ekphrasis creates an icon that encapsulates history and narrative. See Page Dubois, , History, Rhetorical Tradition and the Epic (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982)Google Scholar, 4, 7. In these poems, as in the epics Dubois discusses, ekphrasis “clarifies the relationship between individual and community” (p. 3).

13 Partha Chatterjee has made precisely this point: “the problematic in nationalist thought is exactly the reverse of that of Orientalism. That is to say, the ‘object’ in nationalist thought is still the Oriental, who retains the essentialist character depicted in Orientalist discourse. Only he is not passive, non-participating. He is seen to possess a ‘subjectivity’ which he can himself ‘make’. … At the level of the thematic, on the other hand, nationalist thought accepts and adopts the same essentialist conception based on the distinc- tion between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’”. From Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), 38.Google Scholar

14 This is not an easy union, because the QurDan itself demonizes “Pharaoh”, the enemy of Moses (e.g., 20:62–71). Those who disregard this religious antagonism must still find a principle of unity or continu- ity. Religious difference is exacerbated by the common association of the Egyptian Copts with pre- Islamic Egypt, and of the Muslims with the Arab invaders. Moreover, many intellectuals who seek to direct Egyptian culture toward the West or modernity, thus infuriating conservative religious elements, have made the emphasis of Egypt's pharaonic past part of their project, thereby associating the two. The unity that Shawqi seeks to effect therefore bridges a number of rifts in modern Egyptian culture.

15 Shawqī aw Ṣadāqat Arbaʿin Sanah (Cairo: ʿīsā al-Bābī al-Halabī, 1936), 24–25.Google Scholar

16 I have treated the rise of the new “bourgeois” audience in Egypt and its literary implications more fully in Yaseen Noorani, “A Nation Born in Mourning: The Neoclassical Funeral Elegy in Egypt”, Journal of Arabic Literature 28 (1997): 38–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 It was the year of the “1919 Revolution”, mass demonstrations and strikes in protest of the persistence of British occupation. For an account, see Vatikiotis, P. J., The History of Modern Egypt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chap. 12.Google Scholar

18 See Jaroslav Stetkevych, “Siniyyat Aḥmad Shawqī wa ʿIyār al-Shiʿr al-ʿArabī al-Klāsīkī”, Fuṣul 7, no. 1–2 (1987): 12–29. Stetkevych discusses the historical position of the “Siniyyah” in the tradition of Arabic poetry and provides an analysis of its departure from al-Buhturfīs model, making the observation from which my own argument proceeds: “the greater experience of Ahmad Shawqi's poem is not the subjective—aesthetic one of al-Buhturī so much as it is a national experience before history, and hence, a communal, national, loss of paradise” (p. 20).

19 The word “homeground” is suggested as a translation for the classical poetic watan by Stetkevych in Zephyrs, 181.

20 hawā-yi kū-yi tū az sar namīrawad ārī / gharīb-rā dil-i sar-gashtah bā watan bāshad; Divan, ed. Khānlarī, (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i īran, 1980), ghazal no. 156.Google Scholar

21 ikhtilāfu -nnahāri wa -llayli yunsi / udhkuraa lī -ṣṣibā wa ayyāma unsī [1] / wa salā miṣra hal salā -l-qalbu ʿanhā / aw asā jurḥahu -zzamānu -l-muʾassi [4]

22 shahida -llāhu lam yaghib ʿan jufūni / shakhṣuhu sāʿatan wa lam yakhlu hissī [15]

23 wa arā -l-jīzata -l-ḥazinata thaklā / lam tufiq baʿdu min manāhati ramsī / aktharat ḍajjata -ssawāqī ʿalayhī / wa suʾāla -l-yarāʿi ʿanhu bi-hamsī / wa qiyāma -nnakhīli ḍaffarna shaʿran / wa tajarradna ghayra ṭawqin wa salsī [25–27]

24 W. J. T. Mitchell discusses the feminizing of the ekphrastic object in his essay “Ekphrasis and the Other”, in Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar, 151–81. 1 return to the implications of this issue later.

25 Al-Shawqiyyāt, vol. 1, part 2, 44.Google Scholar

26 anẓimu -shsharqa fi -l-jazīrati bi -l-ghar- / bi wa atwī -l-bilāda ḥaznan li-dahsī [50]

27 qaryatun lā tuʿaddu fi -l-arḍi kānat / tumsiku -l-arḍa an tamīda wa tursī / ghashiyat sāḥila -l-muḥīṭi wa ghaṭṭat / lujjata -rrūmi min shiraʿin wa qalsī / rakiba -ddahra khāṭiri fi tharāhā / fa-atā dhālika -l-himā baʿda ḥadsī / fa-tajallat liya -l-quṣūru wa man fi- / hā mina -l-ʿizzi fi manāzila quʿsi / wa ka-annī balaghtu li -l-ʿilmi baytan / fihi mā li -l-ʿuqūli min kulli darsī / qudusan fī -l-bilādi sharqan wa gharban / ḥajjahu -l-qawmu min faqīhin wa qassī [55–61]

28 sinatun min karan wa ṭayfu amānin / wa ṣaḥa -l-qalbu min ḍalālin wa hajsī / wa idhā -ddāru mā bihā min anīsin / wa idhā -l-qawmu mā la-hum min muḥissī [64–65]

29 ʿasafat ka -ṣṣabā al-laʿūbi wa marrat / sinatan ḥulwatan wa ladhdhata khalsī [3]

30 jādaka -l-ghaythu idhā -l-ghaythu hamā / yā zamāna -l-waṣli bi -l-andalusī / lam yakun waṣluka illā ḥuluman / fī -l-karā aw khulsata -l-mukhtalisī; Diwān al-Muwashshaḥāt al-Andalusiyyah, ed. Ghāzī, Sayyid (Alexandria: Manshaʿat al-Maʿarif, 1989) 2: 484.Google Scholar

31 wa sawārin kaʾannahā fī -stiwāʾin / alifātu -l-wazīri fī ʿarḍi ṭirsī / fatratu -ddahri qad kasat satrayhā / ma -ktasā al-hudbu min futūrin wa naʿsi / wayhaha kam tazayyanat li-ʿalimin / wāḥidi -ddahri wa -staʿaddat li khamsī [70–72]

32 The abstractness and lack of visual precision in the descriptive passages of the “Siniyyah” have not been overlooked by previous criticism—see especially Makkī, “Al-Andalus fī Shiʿr Shawqī wa Nathrih”, 222. As I have argued, what is important in the poem is not the physical appearance of the monument per se, but the nostalgia for the past that it evokes. The associative connections to which this gives rise in- deed appear at times to be forced.

33 wa mawāqītu li-l-umūri idhā mā / balaghat-hā -l-umūru ṣārat li-ʿaksī / duwalun ka -rrijāli murtaha- nātun / bi-qiyāmin mina -l-judūdi wa taʿsi [40–41]

34 imratu -nnasi himmatun la taʾatta / li-jabanin wa lā tasannā li-jibsī / wa idhā mā aṣaba binyāna qawmin / wahyu khulqin fa-innahū wahyu ussī [101–102]

35 yā -bnata -l-yammi mā abūki bakhilun / mā lahū mūlaʿan bi-manʿin wa ḥabsī / a ḥarāmun ʿalā balā- bilihi -ddaw- / ḥu halālun li -ṭṭayri min kulli jinsī / kullu dārin aḥaqqu bi -l-ahli iliā / fī khabīthin mina -l-madhāhibi rijsī [7–10]

36 Al-Muwāzanah bayna al-Shuʿarāʾ (Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1973), 152.Google Scholar

37 The Spanish critic Pedro Martinez Montavez argues that the “Andalusian” element of the “Siniyyah” is submerged by the stronger presence of the poet's nostalgia for Egypt and his attachment to the Arab- Islamic heritage. Montavez regards the lack of balance he sees in the poem as the inevitable result of the poem's plurality of motives. See Montavez, Pedro Martinez, Al-Andalus, Espaṇ, en la literatura arabe contemporanea: la casa del pasado (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992), 46–48.Google Scholar 1 hope to have shown that the “Siniyyah” structures al-Andalus as the fully integrated culmination of its development. According to my reading, al-Andalus is not the short-changed subject of the poem, but the site whose sacred geography enables the Egyptian self, the poem's actual subject, to reach self-awareness.

38 qif bi-rūmā wa shāhidi -l-amra wa -shhad / anna li-l-mulki mālikan subhānah / dawlatun fī -l-ththarā wa anqāḍu mulkin / hadama -l-ddahru fī -l-ʿulā binyānah; Al-Shawqiyyāt, vol. 1, part 1, 251, lines 1–2.Google Scholar

39 habki afnayti bi -l-ḥidadi -llāyalī / lan taruddi ʿalā -l-warā rūmānah [p. 253]; The first part of this verse can also be read, “Even if you blot out the nights with [black garments of] mourning … “.

40 Quoted in Boudot-Lamotte, Aḥmad Shawqī, 42.Google Scholar

41 ay ḥaram-i qurṭubah ʿishq se tera wujūd / ʿishq sarāpā dawām jis meṇ nahīṇ raft o būd / rang hay yā khisht o sang chang hay yā ḥarf o ṣawt / muʿjizah-yi fann kī hay khūn-i jigar se numūd [17–18]

42 naqsh hayṇ sab nā tamām khūn-i jigar ke bi-ghayr / naghmah sawdā-yi khām khūn-i jigar ke bi- ghayr[64]

43 hay magar is naqsh men rang-i sabāt-i davām / jis-ko kiyā hay kisī mard-i khudā-ne tamām / mard-i khudā kā ʿamal ʿishq se ṣaḥib-furūgh / ʿishq hay aṣl-i ḥayat mawt hay us-par ḥarām [9–10]

44 tera jalāl o jamāl mard-i khudā ki dalīl / wo bhī jalīl o jamīl tū bhī jalīl o jamīl [25]

45 teri faza dil-firoz meri nawā sīnah-soz / tujh-se diloṇ kā huzūr mujh-se diloṇ kā kushūd [20]

46 hay tih-i gardūn agar ḥusn meṇ terī naẓir / qalb-i musalmān meṇ hay aur nahīṇ hay kahīṇ [42]

47 tund o sabuk sayr hay gar chih zamāne kī raw / ʿishq khud ek sayl hay sayl ko leta hay thām [11]

48 ʿishq kī taqwīm meṇ ʿaṣr-i rawān ke sawā / aur zamāne bhī hayṇ jin kā nahiṇ koī nām [12]

49 jin kī nigāhoṇ ne kī tarbiyat-i sharq o gharb / ẓulmat-i yūrup meṇ thi jin kī khirad rāh-bīṇ [45]

50 dekh chukā almanī shaurish-i iṣlāḥ-i dīn / jis ne na chhoṛe kahīṇ naqsh-i kuhan ke nishā… / chashm-i farānsīs bhī dekh chukī inqilāb /jis se digar gūn huwā maghribiyoṇ kā jahaṇ [51, 53]

51 sādah o pur soz hay dukhtar-i dihqān kā git / kishti-yi dil ke liye sayl hay ʿahd-i shabāb [58]

52 In this way the mosque, through its reflection in the poet's thought, becomes for Europe what Ernst Gombrich has termed an “apotropaic image”,-that is, an image that induces horror and paralysis. To comprehend the meaning of the mosque is to foresee the demise of European hegemony.

53 sūrat-i shamshir hay dast-i qazā meṇ wo qawm / kartī hay jo har zamāṇ apne ʿamal kā ḥisāb [63]

54 zawq-i huzūr dar jahān rasm-i ṣanamgarī nihād / ʿishq farīb mīdahad jān-i umīdvār-rā; Zabur-i ʿAjam, in Kulliyat-i Iqbal: Farsl, ed. Iqbal, Javid (Lahore: Shaykh Ghulam Ali and Sons, 1985)Google Scholar, part 1, ghazal no. 48. This work has been rendered into English by Arberry, A. J., Persian Psalms (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1961).Google Scholar

55 See his essay “Ekphrasis and the Other”, where he argues that ekphrastic poetry typically posits a gulf between the visual image and its linguistic self, which it maps onto various types of social and political difference, such as gender. Such poetry then tries to breach this gulf (ekphrastic hope) or finds it un- reachable and hence threatening (ekphrastic fear). The poems under discussion here are perfect examples of the “Utopian” nature of ekphrastic hope, and indeed of the limits to which it can be pushed.

56 Iqbal first elaborated his philosophy of “selfhood” in his Persian didactic poem “Asrar-i Khudi” (1914), available in translation by Nicholson, R. A., The Secrets of the Self: A Philosophical Poem (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1978).Google ScholarFor an exposition of his ideas, see Schimmel, Gabriel's WingGoogle Scholar, and Dar, B. A., A Study in Iqbal's Philosophy (Lahore, 1944).Google Scholar I have discussed the poetic logic and implications of “selfhood” in Chapter 4 of my dissertation: Yaseen, Noorani, “Visionary Politics: Self, Community and Colonialism in Arabic and Persian Neoclassical Poetry” (University of Chicago, 1997).Google Scholar

57 For Freud's account, see “The Ego and the Id”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. Strachey, James et al. , (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 19:35–36Google Scholar (formation of the “super-ego”); “Group Psychology”, in ibid., 18:105–10 (“identification”); and “On Narcissism: An Intro- duction”, in ibid., 14:74–78 (“ego and object libido”).

58 This type of transformation is observed by Heffernan, James A. W. in his analysis of Wordsworth's poem “Peele Castle”, in Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 105.Google Scholar He also points out that Edmund Burke associated the “sublime” with masculinity and the “beautiful” with the female body (p. 215, n. 32), a perfect fit for the poems I am discussing.

59 The association of sublimation with both masculinity and social subjectivity is present in Freud, as well. “Women represent the interests of family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable”: Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents”, in Standard Edition, 21:103. Freud goes further than the kind of poetry under discussion by making “masculine” characteristics intrinsic to meṇ and inaccessible to women-that is, by fully biolo- gizing them.

60 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1989), 31.Google Scholar