6
The Lost Kingdoms of the Arabs: Andalusia
The peculiar charm of this dreamy old palace is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and the imagination.
Washington Irving, The Alhamhra
Arab and Berber armies crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 711. They went on to inflict a series of defeats on the Vandal rulers of Spain and by 720 the Muslims were in occupation of almost all of the Iberian peninsula, as well as a large part of the south of France. The north-west corner of Spain, Galicia, remained Christian. Muslims advanced further into France and in 732 a Muslim army encountered a Frankish army under Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers. Edward Gibbon speculated that, had the Muslims won, perhaps ‘the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcized people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed’. In fact the Muslims were defeated and after their defeat the Muslim leaders abandoned attempts to advance further into Europe. The Arabs were to rule over a large Christian and Jewish population, many of whom became Arabized in their culture and some of whom converted to Islam. In the early eighth century Muslim territory in Spain was, theoretically at least, subject to the Umayyad caliphs ruling from Damascus, until, in the mid-eighth century, the Umayyads in the eastern Islamic lands were deposed and hunted down by the ‘Abbasids. The ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur (reigned 754-75) eventually established a new capital for the Islamic empire at Baghdad. However, one Umayyad prince escaped the general slaughter, and fleeing westwards in 756 established an emirate in Spain in opposition to the ‘Abbasid caliphate. 'Abd al-Rahman I (reigned 756-88) made Cordova the capital of the territory of Andalusia. (The Arabic toponym ‘Al-Andalus’, which probably originally meant ‘Of the Vandals’, subsequently came to refer to Muslim Spain.)
‘Abd al-Rahman I was himself a poet. The poem which follows was written at Rusafa, his Spanish palace, which he had named after one of the Umayyad palaces in Syria where he had grown up.
A palm tree I beheld in Ar-Rusafa,
Far in the West, far from the palm-tree land:
I said: You, like myself, are far away, in a strange land;
How long have I been far away from my people!
You grew up in a land where you are a stranger,
And like myself, are living in the farthest corner of the earth:
May the morning clouds refresh you at this distance,
And may abundant rains comfort you forever!
Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with
the Old Provençal Troubadors, p. 18
‘Abd al-Rahman I was himself a poet. The poem which follows was written at Rusafa, his Spanish palace, which he had named after one of the Umayyad palaces in Syria where he had grown up.
Despite the power and wealth of the early Umayyad rulers in Spain, little of any literary worth has survived from the first century and a half or so. For a long time Andalusian writers were accustomed to imitate literary forms which had been pioneered in the eastern Arab lands and a ‘cultural cringe’ in the direction of Baghdad was often in evidence. 'Ali ibn Nafi' ZIRYAB(789-857) arrived in Spain in the reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman II (reigned 822-52). At the gates of Cordova Ziryab received a reverential reception, for he came from the East and he had been trained as a musician, poet and courtier at the ‘Abbasid court in Baghdad. Ziryab had studied as a musician under Ibrahim al-Mawsili (see Chapter 4). But then, allegedly driven out by Ibrahim’s jealousy, Ziryab left Baghdad to look for patronage in the first instance in North Africa, before ending up in Spain in 822. Like most nadims, Ziryab was blessed with an extraordinary memory for anecdotes, proverbs and historical lore and he was good company at the royal soiréees, which were devoted to conversation and the drinking of palm wine. He was also reputed to know over a thousand songs by heart.
Ziryab was an innovative singer and lute-player. He used to claim supernatural inspiration for his songs. According to al-Maqqari:
They relate that Ziryab used to say that the Jinn taught him music every night, and that, whenever he was thus awakened, he called his two slave-girls, Ghazzalan and Hindah, made them take their lutes, whilst he also took his, and that they passed the night conversing, playing music, and writing verses, after which they hastily retired to rest.
Ziryab added a fifth string to the lute and pioneered the use of eagles’ talons as plectra. He founded an ‘Institute of Beauty’. He introduced a new style in clothes and got people to part their hair down the middle. He introduced underarm deodorants, made from litharge or lead monoxide. He improved the recipe for the detergent used for washing clothes. He set a new fashion for changing dress to match all four seasons of the year. (Previously the only change had been from summer to winter garments.) He also introduced asparagus into Spain, as well as a special recipe for fried meatballs cooked with coriander. At table, he urged the use of crystal rather than the ostentatiously vulgar gold and silver vessels which had previously been the fashion. Leather trays replaced dining-tables, since Ziryab pronounced that leather was more hygienic, being easier to wash. As far as literature was concerned, Ziryab introduced Andalusian poets to the ornate eastern forms of the badi. So the backwoodsmen of Spain were much more civilized by the time Ziryab had finished with them; nevertheless, he made a number of enemies among the local poets and courtiers.
Andalusia reached its political and military apogee during the reign of 'Abd al-Rahman III (reigned 912-61) who declared himself to be caliph, thereby underlining his opposition to the new Shi‘ite Fatimid caliphate in North Africa. In 942 ‘Abd al-Rahman invited the distinguished philologist ‘Ali al-Qali (901-65) from Baghdad. Qali wrote the Kitab al-Amali, a belles-lettres compilation which chiefly focused on lexical issues, and in which he picked out difficult words in famous fragments of poetry and prose and explained them.
It was also during the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Rahman III that the most famous work of Andalusian belles-lettres was produced. Al-‘lqd al-Farid (‘The Unique Necklace’) was written by Abu Umar Ahmad ibn Muhammad IBN ‘ABD AL-RABBIH(860-940). Ibn ‘Abd al-Rabbih was a Cordovan who served the Umayyad rulers as a courtier and panegyric poet. Although he was a poet in his own right, he is most famous for a literary anthology of other men’s flowers. He was at pains to include material by and about local authors, but his book looked to the East and was quite closely modelled on Ibn Qutayba’s ‘Uyun al-Akhbar (see Chapter 4). It drew heavily upon ‘Abbasid authors, including Ibn Qutayba, Ibn al-Muqaffac‘, Jahiz and others. When Ibn ‘Abbad, the Buyid vizier in the East, read Al-‘lqd al-Farid, he remarked: ‘This is our merchandise. Give it back to us!’ Each of the twenty-five chapters of the anthology is named after a different precious stone. It was an expression of ‘chancery culture’ in that its contents embodied the adab, which a scribe working in the royal chancery might be expected to possess – a knowledge, above all, of the cream of past speeches and wisdom, as they had been transmitted from generation to generation. However, despite Ibn ‘Abd al-Rabbih’s close attention to the literary lore of the past, he was also firmly convinced that modern writers were in all respects superior to the ancients. In his anthology, he junked the chains of transmission because he (rightly) thought that they made compilations prolix and dull. The chapters cover a wide range of subjects, including statecraft, the arts of war, oratory, lives of the famous, sayings of the prophets, proverbs, religion, poetry, songs, women, geography, the Muslim rulers of Spain, and so on.
Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the
Medieval Arabic World, pp. 91–3
COMMENTARY
Although live theatre was not an important art form in the medieval Arab world, nevertheless fairly simple dramas were sometimes staged, as can be seen from this account of a performance before the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi (reigned 775–5) of a trial of the caliphs by God. The heavy politico-religious content of this performance is probably unusual. Most dramas seem to have been bawdy and vulgar.
The command to ‘enjoin what is right and prohibit what is disapproved’ (al-amrbi-’l-ma'rufwa-’l-nahy'an al-munkar) is a phrase found at several points in the Qur’an. It was and is the watchword of Muslim rigorists. It was also the basis of the authority of the muhtasib (market inspector).
The reed served as a kind of hobby-horse used by this Lord of Misrule.
Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (reigned 632-4) became caliph after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. He was succeeded by ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (reigned 634-44), who was succeeded by ‘Uthman (reigned 644-56).
‘They mixed a good deed with another evil. It may be that God will turn towards them’: a quotation from the Qur’an, sura 9, verse 103.
‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (reigned 656-61) was the last of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’.
The umma is the Muslim community.
Mu‘awiya (661-80) was the first of the Umayyad caliphs and as such abhorred by Shi’ites.
The Sunna is the practice of the Sunni Muslim community as established by precedent.
Yazid, Mu‘awiya’s son, was caliph from 680 to 683.
‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-Aziz (reigned 717-20) was the Umayyad caliph with the greatest reputation for piety – but there does not seem to have been much competition.
The Umayyad caliphate found itself in difficulties from the opening of the eleventh century onwards. Between 1017 and 1030 a series of puppet caliphs pretended to rule, while insubordinate generals and armies contended for real power. In 1013 Cordova was sacked by Berber armies and the fiction of a continuing Ummayad caliphate was abandoned. The palace complexes of Madinat al-Zahra and Madinat al-Zahira outside Cordova were also sacked. The princely libraries were dispersed. The ruin of Cordova was a favourite subject for poets in the centuries that followed. For example, Ibn Shuhayd (see pages 261–5) wrote of his birthplace:
A dying hag, but her image in my heart is one
of a beautiful damsel.She’s played the adulteress to her men,
yet such a lovely adulteress!
A friend of Ibn Shuhayd’s, the Cordovan writer IBN HAZM,wrote:
A visitor from Cordova informed me, when I asked him for news of that city, that he had seen our mansion in Balat Mughith, on the western side of the metropolis; its traces were well-nigh obliterated, its way-marks effaced; vanished were its spacious patios. All had been changed by decay; the joyous pleasaunces were converted to barren deserts and howling wildernesses; its beauty lay in shattered ruins …
Ibn Hazm went on to relate how he remembered the beautiful youths and maidens of his youth (now all in exile, if not dead) and how he saw in his mind’s eye that his noble house had become a ruin fit only for habitation by owls. Ibn Hazm lived through the ruin of the Umayyad caliphate and his masterpiece, The Ring of the Dove, can be read as a commemoration of the courtly ways of old Cordova. Abu Muhammad ‘Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Sa’id ibn Hazm was born in 994 and raised in the harem of the palace of Madinat al-Zahira until the age of fourteen. Possibly this harem upbringing gave him a lifelong interest in female psychology. His father maintained a lot of concubines and Ibn Hazm was taught the Qur’an and poetry by harem women. After the political disgrace of his father who had held the office of vizier, Ibn Hazm moved from Madinat al-Zahira to Cordova, but then, after the sacking of Cordova by Berbers in 1013, he had to adopt a peripatetic existence. Having abandoned an early abortive career as a politician, he wrote Tawq al-Hamama, or The Ring of the Dove, in 1027. It is therefore a young man’s book. In this book (whose title alludes to the fact that messenger-pigeons were used by lovers, as well as by husbands and wives, to communicate with one another), Ibn Hazm expounded the code of love. After a preface in which he condemned traditional ways of writing about love, he went on to discuss signs of love, falling in love with a person seen in a dream, other more common modes of falling in love, means of communicating with the beloved, concealment of the secret one’s love, revealing the secret, compliance or resistance of the beloved, and so on. ‘Love, my friends, begins jestingly, but its end is serious.’ In keeping with this maxim, the final chapters of The Ring of the Dove are moralistic and are entitled ‘The Vileness of Sinning’ and ‘The Virtue of Continence’.
These last sections do not sit easily with earlier parts of the treatise in which Ibn Hazm looks back at his own amorous affairs and those of people he has known or heard of. Admittedly these dalliances were not with women of his own class. A slave-girl was the most favoured object of affection for a courtly lover (and he liked his slave-girls to be blondes, if possible). ‘Humiliation before the beloved is the natural character of a courteous man.’ The lover was exalted and refined by abasing himself and by suffering the agonies of unrequited love. To some extent, Ibn Hazm tried to break away from the Eastward-looking traditional formulations of unrequited love. ‘Spare me those tales of Bedouins and of lovers long ago! Their ways were not our ways.’ But despite his effective, even enchanting, use of autobiographical material, he also drew on more traditional sources and wrote within a conventional genre. In his approach to the ennobling power of love, even when – especially when – the object of that love was unworthy of it, he was following in the path of that arbiter of taste in the ‘Abbasid period, Ibn Washsha. Some of the figures Ibn Hazm wrote about, such as the reproacher, the spy and the trusted confidant, had routinely featured in Arabic love poetry for centuries. Moreover, Ibn Hazm tended to illustrate the propositions in his philosophy of love with supporting verses, many of which were of Eastern origin.
Ibn Hazm’s philosophy of love was, like that of its Eastern exemplars, Neoplatonic. According to him, ‘true Love is a spiritual approbation, a fusion of souls’. He mingled traditional Islamic teachings with Platonic myths. Thus he could cite a saying of the Prophet in favour of elective affinities: ‘Spirits are regimented battalions: those which know one another associate familiarly together, while those which do not know one another remain at variance.’ On the other hand, Ibn Hazm also knew of the Greek myth that humans were originally created as perfect spheres, before being split into sexually differentiated halves. Love is the quest of the sundered sexes to find oneness again (or ‘The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole’, as the novelist Baron Corvo was later to term it).
Ibn Hazm was quite literally interested in the ‘code’ of love and his book includes chapters entitled ‘Of Allusion by Words’, ‘Of Hinting with the Eyes’, ‘Of Correspondence’ and ‘Of Concealing the Secret’. (Incidentally, The Thousand and One Nights tale of Aziz and Aziza contains fascinating examples of the sign language used by lovers. The mysterious lady loved by Aziz communicates in gestures which have to be interpreted by his sister Aziza: ‘As to the putting of her finger in her mouth, it showed that thou art to her as her soul to her body and that she would bite into union with thee with her wisdom teeth. As for the kerchief, it betokeneth that her breath of life is bound up in thee. As for the placing her two fingers on her bosom between her breasts, its explanation is that she saith: The sight of thee may dispel my grief.’)
As can be seen from the extracts which follow, Ibn Hazm’s style was brisk and unadorned:
One of the wonderful things that occur in Love is the way the lover submits to the beloved, and adjusts his own character by main force to that of his loved one. Often and often you will see a man stubborn by disposition, intractable, jibbing at all control, determined, arrogant, always ready to take umbrage; yet no sooner let him sniff the soft air of love, plunge into its waves, and swim in its sea, than his stubbornness will have suddenly changed to docility, his intractability to gentleness, his determination to easy-going, his arrogance to submission. I have some verses on this.
Shall I be granted, friend,
To come once more to thee,
Or will there be an end
Of changeful destiny?The sword (O strange to tell!)
Is now the baton’s page,
The captive, tame gazelle
A lion full of rage.These verses tell the same story.
Though thou scoldest me, yet I
Am the cheapest man to die,
Slipping swiftly like false gold
Through the tester’s fingers rolled.Yet what joy it is for me
To be slain for loving thee!
Marvel, then, at one who dies
Smiling pleasure from his eyes.I have still another trifle on this topic.
Were thy features shining fair
Viewed by critics Persian,
Little would they reck of their
Mobedh and their Hormosan!Sometimes the beloved is unsympathetic to the manifesting of complaints, and is too impatient to listen to tales of suffering. In those circumstances you will see the lover concealing his grief, suppressing his despair, and hiding his sickness. The beloved heaps unjust accusations on his head; and he is full of apologies for every fault he is supposed to have committed, and confesses crimes of which he is wholly innocent, simply to submit to what his loved one says and to avoid resisting the charge. I know a man who was afflicted in just this way; his beloved was continually levelling accusations against him, though he was entirely blameless; he was evermore being reproached and scolded, yet he was as pure as driven snow. Let me quote here some verses which I addressed once to one of my comrades; though they do not exactly fit this context, still they come very near to the topic under discussion.
Once thou wouldst greet me with a smile,
Delighted at my near approach,
And if I turned from thee awhile
Thy features registered reproach.My nature is not so averse
To listen to a little blame:
White hairs are ugly, but no worse,
Yet they are always called a shame.A man, when looking in the glass,
May think himself uncommon plain;
But moles and spots for beauty pass,
And do not need to give such pain.They are an ornament, when few,
And only count for ugliness
When they exceed a measure due:
And who has ever praised excess?A little later in the same poem I have the following verse.
O come thou to his succour, then;
By so great cares his soul is gripped
That 10, he moves to tears the pen,
The ink, the paper, and the script!Let no man say that the patience displayed by the lover when the beloved humiliates him is a sign of pusillanimity: that would be a grave error. We know that the beloved is not to be regarded as a match or an equal to the lover, that the injury inflicted by him on the lover should be repaid in kind. The beloved’s insults and affronts are not such as a man need regard as dishonouring him; the memory of them is not preserved down the ages; neither do they occur in the Courts of Caliphs and the salons of the great, where endurance of an insult would imply humiliation, and submission would lead to utter contempt.
Sometimes you will see a man infatuated with his slave-girl, his own legal property, and there is nothing to prevent him from having his way with her if he so desires; what point would there be then in his revenging himself on her? No; the real grounds for being angered by insults are entirely different; anger is fully justified when the insults are offered as between men of high rank, whose every breath is studied, whose every word is examined closely for its meaning, and given a most profound significance. For such men do not utter words at random, or let fall remarks negligently; but as for the beloved, she is at one time an unbending lance, at another a pliant twig, now cruel, now complaisant, just as the mood takes her and for no valid reason. On this theme I can quote an apposite poem of mine.
It is not just to disapprove
A meek servility in love:
For Love the proudest men abase
Themselves, and feel it no disgrace.Then do not marvel so at me
And my profound humility;
Ere I was overthrown, this state
Proud Caliphs did humiliate.No peer is the beloved one,
No parfit knight, no champion,
That it should shame to thee procure,
Her hateful insults to endure.An apple falling from the tree
Struck and a trifle injured thee:
Would it be triumph worth thy pain
To cut the apple into twain?Abu Dulaf the stationer told me the following story, which he heard from the philosopher Maslama ibn Ahmad, better known as al-Majriti. In the mosque which lies to the east of the Quraish cemetery in Cordova, opposite the house of the vizier Abu ‘Umar Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Hudair (God have mercy upon him!) – in this mosque Muqaddam ibn al-Asfar was always to be seen hanging about during his salad days, because of a romantic attachment which he had formed for 'Ajib, the page-boy of the afore-mentioned Abu 'Umar. He gave up attending prayers at the Masrur mosque (near where he lived), and came to this mosque night and day on account of 'Ajib. He was arrested more than once by the guard at night, when he was departing from the mosque after praying the second evening prayer; he had done nothing but sit and stare at the page-boy until the latter, angry and infuriated, went up to him and struck him some hard blows, slapping his cheeks and punching him in the eye. Yet the young man was delighted at this and exclaimed, ‘By Allah! This is what I have dreamed of; now I am happy.’ Then he would walk alongside of ‘Ajib for some minutes. Abu Dulaf added that he had been told this story by Maslama several times in the presence of ‘Ajib himself, when observing the high position, influence and prosperity to which Muqaddam ibn al-Asfar had attained; the latter had indeed become most powerful; he was on extremely intimate terms with al-Muzaffar ibn Abi ‘Amir, and enjoyed friendly relations with al-Muzaffar’s mother and family; he built a number of mosques and drinking-fountains, and established not a few charitable foundations; besides all which he busied himself with all the various kinds of benevolent and other activities, with which men in authority like to concern themselves.
Here is an even more outrageous example. Sa’id ibn Mundhir ibn Sa‘id, who used to lead the prayers in the cathedral mosque of Cordova during the days of al-Hakam al-Mustansir Billah (God be merciful to his soul!), had a slave-girl with whom he was deeply in love. He offered to manumit and marry her, to which she scornfully replied – and I should mention that he had a fine long beard – ‘I think your beard is dreadfully long; trim it up, and then you shall have your wish.’ He thereupon laid a pair of scissors to his beard, until it looked somewhat more gallant; then he summoned witnesses, and invited them to testify that he had set the girl free. But when in due course he proposed to her, she would not accept him. Among those present was his brother Hakam ibn Mundhir, who promptly said to the assembled company, ‘Now I am going to propose marriage to her.’ He did so, and she consented; and he married her then and there. Sa’id acquiesced in this frightful insult, for all that he was a man known for his abstinence, piety and religious zeal. I myself met this same Sa’id; he was slain by the Berbers, on the day when they stormed and sacked Cordova. His brother Hakam was the head of the Mu‘tazilites of Andalusia, their leader, professor and chief schoolman, as well as the most famous among them for his piety; at the same time he was a poet, a physician and a lawyer. His brother ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Mundhir was also suspected of belonging to the same sect; in the days of al-Hakam (God be well pleased with him!) he was in charge of the Office for the Defence of the Oppressed, but was crucified by al-Mansur ibn Abi ‘Amir on the charge, preferred against him and a whole group of Cordovan lawyers and judges, of secretly swearing allegiance to ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Ubaid Allah, grandson of Caliph al-Nasir (God be well pleased with them!) as lawful Caliph. ‘Abd al-Rahman himself was executed, ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Mundhir was crucified, and the entire faction accused of the conspiracy were liquidated. The father of these three brothers, the Lord Chief Justice Mundhir ibn Sa‘id, came under the same suspicion of holding Mu‘tazilite opinions; he was a most eloquent preacher, profoundly learned in every branch of knowledge, of the utmost piety, and withal the wittiest and most amusing of men. The son Hakam afore-mentioned is still living at the time of writing this epistle; he is now very advanced in years, and quite blind.
A wonderful example of how the lover will submit to the beloved is provided by a man I knew who lay awake for many nights, endured extreme suffering, and had his heart torn asunder by the deepest emotions, until he finally overcame his beloved’s resistance, who thereafter refused him nothing and could no more resist his advances. Yet when the lover observed that the beloved felt a certain antipathy towards his intentions he forthwith discontinued relations, not out of chastity or fear but solely in order to accord with the beloved’s wishes. For all the intensity of his feelings, he could not bring himself to do anything for which he had seen the beloved had no enthusiasm. I know another man who acted in the same way, and then repented on discovering that his beloved had betrayed him. I have put this situation into verse.
Seize the opportunity
As it opens up to thee;
Opportunities depart
Swiftly as the lightnings dart.Ah, the many things that I
Might have done, but let slip by,
And the intervening years
Brought me naught but bitter tears.Whatsoever treasure thou
Findest, pounce upon it now:
Wait no instant: swoop to-day
Like a falcon on thy prey.This very same thing happened to Abu ‘I-Muzaffar ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad ibn Mahmud, our good friend: I quoted to him some verses of mine which he leapt upon with the greatest joy and carried off with him, to be his guiding star ever after.
When I was living in the old city at Cordova I one day met Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Kulaib of Kairouan, a man with an exceedingly long tongue, well-sharpened to enquire on every manner of subject. The topic of Love and its various aspects was under discussion, and he put the following question to me: ‘If a person with whom I am in love is averse to meeting me, and avoids me whenever I try to make an approach, what should I do?’ I replied, ‘My opinion is that you should endeavour to bring relief to your own soul by meeting the beloved, even if the beloved is averse to meeting you.’ He retorted, ‘I do not agree; I prefer that the beloved should have his will and desire, rather than I mine. I would endure and endure, even if it meant death for me.’ ‘I would only have fallen in love,’ I countered, ‘for my personal satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure. I should therefore follow my own analogy, guide myself by my personal principles, and pursue my habitual path, seeking quite deliberately my own enjoyment.’ ‘That is a cruel logic,’ he exclaimed. ‘Far worse than death is that for the sake of which you desire death, and far dearer than life is that for the sake of which you would gladly lay down your life.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘you would be laying down your life not by choice but under compulsion. If it were possible for you not to lay down your life, you would not have done so. To give up meeting the beloved voluntarily would certainly be most reprehensible, since you would thereby do violence to yourself and bring your own soul to its doom.’ Thereupon he cried out, ‘You are a born dialectician, and dialectics have no particular relevance to Love.’ ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘the lover will certainly be unfortunate.’ ‘And what misfortune is there,’ he ended, ‘that is greater than Love?’
The following extract comes from the chapter on the vileness of sinning.
She was a pearl most pure and white,
By Allah fashioned out of light;
Her beauty was a wondrous thing
Beyond all human reckoning.If on the Day of Judgement, when
The trumpets sound for sinful men,
I find, before the Throne of Grace,
My deeds as lovely as her face;Of all the creatures Allah made
I shall most fully be repaid,
A double Eden to reside,
And dark-eyed virgins by my side.She came of a family in which good looks were hereditary, and had now herself developed into a shape which beggared description; the tale of her youthful loveliness ran through Cordova. I passed three successive nights under the same roof with her, and following the customs with persons who have been brought up together she was not veiled from my view. Upon my life, my heart was well-nigh ravished, the passion which I had so rigorously banished almost repossessed my bosom, the forgotten dalliance of youth was within an ace of returning to seduce me. Thereafter I forbade myself to enter that house, for I feared that my mind might be too violently excited by the admiration of such beauty. Certainly, she and all the members of the household were ladies upon whose respectability amorous ambitions might not hope to trespass; but … no man is secure from the vexations of Satan.
Arberry, The Ring of the Dove, pp. 87–94, 236-7
The Ring of the Dove is a classic work of great charm which deserves to be even better known than it already is. Ibn Hazm also wrote a very different book, the Kitab al-Fisal fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa al-Nihal (‘The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects’), which is the earliest Arabic treatise on comparative religion and which deals with all the varieties of monotheism, polytheism, atheism and scepticism that Ibn Hazm could discover anything about. Despite the originality of ‘The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects’, it entirely lacks the charm of The Ring of the Dove. Indeed, to a twentieth-century Western sensibility the book has rather a rancorous feel. Ibn Hazm reveals himself to be a religious bigot. A fierce hater of Christianity and Judaism, he had an even greater hatred of those ‘heretics’ who deviated from what he took to be the one correct version of Islam. Thus he denounced the Sufis and Asharites, as well as all sorts of Shi’ites and esotericists. Theologically Ibn Hazm was a Zahirite – that is to say he was a dogmatic literalist, who relied on an extremely narrow interpretation of the Qur’an and the Sunna and who opposed all speculative additions. The primacy of revelation over reason was absolute.
Ibn Hazm came to despise love poetry as effeminate and conducive to immorality. He had strong views about what poets should and should not write about. Among the reprehensible topics were poems about nomadism, vagabonds, war, death and the afterlife, as well as satires and descriptions of deserts. The perils of poetry notwithstanding, it had to be mastered, because ‘learning the language necessitates the memorization of poetry’.
Viewed from the outside at least, Ibn Hazm was a creature of paradox. This author of a classic work of gentle eroticism also composed letters which preached the importance of the renunciation of pleasure and the need for a spiritual education. Not only did he preach the virtue of continence in a manual devoted to amorous affairs, but elsewhere he wrote letters in praise of brotherhood and friendship even though he was known to be a fierce misanthrope. His early adventures in politics failed and his later books on religion were burned as heretical. He seems to have adopted a reclusive life until his death in 1064.
Ibn Hazm wrote The Ring of the Dove at the request of a friend. It is possible that this friend was the poet Abu ‘Amir IBN SHUHAYD (992-1035). Like Ibn Hazm’s father, Ibn Shuhayd’s father had served as a vizier in Cordova. Although a friend of Ibn Hazm, Ibn Shuhayd had a reputation as a hedonist and a buffoon. His Risalat al-Tawabi wa al-Zawabi (‘Epistle of Inspiring Jinns and Demons’) is a curious piece of fantasy, composed by Ibn Shuhayd in order to demonstrate his superiority to such great poets of the past as Imru’ al-Qays, Abu Nuwas and Mutanabbi; it is a manifesto of emulation. The work has not survived in its entirety. In what has survived, Ibn Shuhayd describes how he was transported to the Valley of the Jinns, where he meets with the jinns who inspired famous poets of past centuries. Ibn Shuhayd, who competes with these literary spirits in composing poetry, is everywhere acclaimed and given ijazas to recite and interpret the works of particular poets. (The ijaza, a crucial feature of the Islamic literary and academic worlds, was a certificate of proficiency, attesting to the student’s success in mastering a particular poem, book or subject and licensing that student in his turn to teach what he had mastered.) It would appear that Ibn Shuhayd thought of both poetry and physical beauty as expressions of an inner beauty. One implication of this was that ugly people could not write beautiful poetry.
Having engaged in a series of poetical debates, Ibn Shuhayd went on to encounter jinns who had inspired some famous prose authors. Those early masters of a limpid style, ‘Abd al-Hamid, al-Katib and Jahiz, were allowed to fulminate against the newfangled craze for the ornate and metaphor-laden rhymed prose. Ibn Shuhayd himself says that he hated the use of obscure vocabulary and artful displays of philological erudition. However, although he claimed to prefer Jahiz’s style, he said that the literary climate in Andalusia forced him to follow the more mannered fashion. Indeed, Ibn Shuhady’s descriptions of a flea and of a fox are set-piece demonstrations of the new ornate style. He was consciously trying to outdo Hamadhani, who was the acknowledged master of this sort of stuff; in fact the whole business of poets and their familiars may derive from his Maqamat. After his encounter with the spirits of prose, Ibn Shuhayd sat in on a meeting of jinns who were examining various literary compositions, before he passed on to adjudicate in a poetry contest for asses and mules. Doubtless these asses and mules were standing in for literary rivals of Ibn Shuhayd in Cordova.
The ‘Epistle of Inspiring Jinns and Demons’ was a work of self-advertisement and self-justification. It not only laid out Ibn Shuhayd’s literary wares, but it also sought to justify his practice of pastiche, or making wholesale borrowings of verses and themes from earlier poets. But setting Ibn Shuhayd’s personal arrogance aside, his book can also be read as an attack on the notion that Andalusian poets had to follow literary models furnished by precursors in Syria or Iraq.
Ibn Shuhayd‘s fantasy of the afterlife preceded by a few years that of Ma’arri and may have inspired the latter. However, one should note that whereas Ma’arri gave accounts of conversations with dead poets, in Ibn Shuhayd’s fantasy only the jinns who inspired them are encountered. One or both of these Arab fantasies may have indirectly inspired Dante’s famous Divine Comedy and its vision of an afterlife (in which, of course, dead poets make a prominent showing). The great Spanish scholar Miguel Asin Palacios suggested as much in his Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Commedia, which appeared in 1919, but the matter remains controversial. Like Ma’arri’s vision of the afterlife, Ibn Shuhayd’s version is interesting and inventive, but also florid and quite taxing to read, as is suggested by the boastful opening address to his friend Abu Bakr Yahya ibn Hazm (not the famous Ibn Hazm discussed earlier).
COMMENTARY
Farqad, Suha and Zuban are all stars.
The phrase ‘it showered its ripe dates upon him’ is from the Qur’an, sura 19, verse 25.
The phrase ‘the waterskin of knowledge had found its cover’ is a proverbial expression.
The Risala is full of abstruse references to dead poets and forgotten controversies, for Ibn Shuhayd has designed his text to show off his mastery of such matters. In the scene which follows he demonstrates his mastery of conceits – elaborate metaphors which compare apparently dissimilar objects.
J. T. Monroe, Kisalat al-Tawabi wa’l-Zawabi: The Treatise of Familiar
Spirits and Demons (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 51, 77-9
COMMENTARY
‘It is the Clement who taught the Koran, created man, and instructed him in eloquence’ is from the Qur’an, sura 55, verses 1-4.
(‘Amr ibn al-‘ As was a cunning general and counsellor of Mu–awiyya (reigned 661-80), the first of the Umayyad caliphs.
Hudhaifa ibn Badr was a pre-Islamic chieftain murdered by Qays ibn Zuhayr after a quarrel arising out of a horse race.
Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 370 B.C.) was the most celebrated of all Greek physicians. Galen was a famous second-century Greek physician. His works were translated and were well known in the medieval Arab world.
After the collapse of the caliphate and the sacking of Cordova, Muslim Spain was divided up between the Ta’ifa or ‘party’ kings. Different dynasties ruled in Seville, Toledo, Cordova, Saragossa, Granada and elsewhere. The divided Muslim principalities were poorly placed to resist the rising power of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and in 1085 the important city of Toledo was captured by Alfonso VI of Castile. In the centuries that followed, the great Muslim cities were successively lost to the forces of the Christian Reconquista. However, the political and military weakness of the Muslims did not mean that there was a corresponding cultural decline from the early eleventh century onwards. On the contrary, it was in the eleventh century that Andalusian poetry acquired a distinctive identity. One reason for this may have been that there were an increased number of centres of political patronage and the Ta’ifa kings vied with one another to attract the services and praise of poets and prose writers. Poets in royal employment often doubled as diplomats and drafters of chancery documents.
Some of the Ta’ifa kings themselves wrote poetry and two of the ‘Abbadid kings of Seville were celebrated as being among the greatest poets Muslim Spain ever produced. AI-MU–TADID, who ruled Seville from 1042 until 1069, has been characterized as ‘a treacherous and bloodthirsty tyrant’, and indeed one of his chief treasures was a collection of his enemies’ skulls, which he kept in an enclosure beside the front door of the palace. According to the poet Ibn al-Labbana, ‘there was nothing al-Mu’tadid liked so much as to look at this enclosure, and he used to spend the greater part of his time gazing at it; he would often weep and feel compassion for his victims’. The sanguinary monarch also wrote verses celebrating his own glory, as well as love poetry in the more or less compulsory melancholy vein. The following verses are more jolly:
And I like to do what my companions like:
I divide my time between hard work and leisure:
Mornings for the state affairs, evenings for pleasure!
At night I indulge in amusements and frolics,
At noon I rule with a proud mien in my court;
Amidst my trysts I do not neglect my striving
For glory and fame: these I always plan to attain.
Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with
the Old Provençal Troubadors, p. 132.
Mu–tadid’s so al-MU–TAMID (b. 1039), succeeded as ruler of Seville in 1069 and governed it until his deposition in 1091. According to Ibn Khallikan, al-Mu‘tamid was ‘the most liberal, the most hospitable, the most munificent and the most powerful of all the princes who ruled in Spain. His court was the halting-place of travellers, the rendezvous of poets, the point to which all hopes were directed, and the haunt of men of talent.’ He also enjoyed an even greater reputation than his father as a poet. It is likely that Ibn Zaydun (see page 271) tutored him in the rules of poetry. Mu–tamid’s poems tend to be devoted to single themes (therefore they do not conform to the conventional development of the qasida) and the early ones are mostly about the pleasures of life. Many of his poems record his lifelong passion for the slave-girl I'timad al-Rumakiyya, whom he had first encountered as she washed clothes by the river. In the poems addressed to her and other women, Mu–tamid conformed to the literary convention of the sovereignty of women and compared himself to a lion pursued by a gazelle. It is reported that when one day I–timad expressed the desire to walk in mud, he had a fabulously expensive mud made from moistened camphor spread beneath her feet. Al-Muçtamid’s later poems commemorate decline, defeat and exile; an Almoravid Berber army conquered Seville and he died in one of their prisons in Morocco in 1095. As he told one of his sons, ‘The road of kings is from the palace to the grave.’
Nevertheless, there were some pleasures along that road …
Greet with my burning love the spirits who dwell
In that place, and ask if any remember me.
Say this young man still sighs for the white palace,
The Alcazar of Lattices, where men like lions,
Warriors live, as in a wild beast’s den,
And in soft boudoirs women who are beautiful.
Sheltered under the wing of darkness,
How many nights I spent with girls there.
Slender at the waist, hips round and abundant,
Tawny hair or golden, deeper than a sword blade
Or black lance their charms would run me through.
How many nights, too, in the river’s loop I spent
With a graceful slave girl for my companion;
The curve of her bracelet imitated the river.
She poured out for me the wine of her eyes;
Or again the wine of her nook she poured for Ole;
Another time it was the wine of her lips she poured.
When her white fingers played among lute strings,
I felt a thrill as when a sword hits and clips
Clean through the sinews of a foe in combat.
When with a languid look she’d shake off her robe,
Like a ray of light surrendering her body was.
The very air around her shivered with desire.
It was a rose opening out of a rosebud.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, p. 17
COMMENTARY
This is a ra’iyya – that is to say, a poem rhyming in the letter ra. Mu–tamid was governor of Silves before succeeding to the throne. It is addressed to the poet Abu Bakr whom he had just nominated as governor of the place. This is a poem of nostalgic reminiscence, for before ascending the throne, Mu–tamid, aged only thirteen, had been appointed governor of Silves. Ibn ‘Ammar had been his youthful companion there. Some time after this poem was written they fell out and in 1086 Mu–tamid cut off Ibn ‘Ammar’s head with an axe.
The next poem is addressed to the slave-girl Ftimad al-Rumakiyya:
passion is large and does not hide:
tears come down like drops of rain;
the body is scorched and turns yellow:
if this is it when she is with me,
how would it be if we’re apart?
By her indifference I am broken:
dark-eyed gazelle among her leafage,
stars that burn on her horizon,
depth of night shining moon,
rock, then jonquil in her garden,
bushes too that spread perfume,
all know me downcast, wasted as a man,
and are concerned by my appearance,
how it mirrors my state of mind;
they ask if I may not be well,
flaming desire might burn me out.
Woman, you do your lover wrong
that he should look as you’ve been told.
You say: ‘What hurts? What’s going on?
What do you want but cannot wait for?
You’re less than just to doubt my love,
everyone knows it, here or distant.’
God! I am sick, sick with love
that makes, beside you, others puny.
My body frets. Give thought to this:
I want to see you and I cannot.
Injustice calls to God for pardon:
ask him to pardon your injustice.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, p. 18
The next poem was presumably written in prison, far from his beloved Seville:
in those gardens, by that pond,
amid olive-groves, legacy of grandeur,
the cooing of the doves, the warbling of birds;
in the palace of Zahir, in the spring rain,
winking back at the dome of Zurayya,
as the fortress of Zahi, with its Sud al-Su–ud,
casts us the look of the waiting lover.
Oh that God might choose that I should die in Seville,
that He should there find my tomb when the last day comes!
Jayussi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 139–40
Besides writing poetry themselves, the ‘Abbadids naturally patronized poets and they maintained a register of those who were pensioned. Al-Mu’tadid had established a ‘House of Poets’ (Dar al-Shuara) headed by a chief poet (Ra’is al-Shuara).’ Abd al-Jabbar Abu Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr IBN HAMDIS was one of the most distinguished poets to have written under the patronage of(Abbadids of Seville. Ibn Hamdis was born in Muslim Sicily, where he seems to have led a rather jolly, party-going life. However, he emigrated to Spain after the Norman conquest of that island and found precarious patronage with al-Mu’tamid, for whom he produced a series of elaborate panegyrics. Eventually, though, the two poets fell out and wrote satirical poetry against each other. Ibn Hamdis, who modelled himself on eastern poets like Mutannabi, favoured the fashionably ornate bad’i style. Nostalgia is the prevailing mood in his poetry. He outlived his unfortunate royal patron by many years and died in 1133 at an advanced age.
In the poem which follows one must envisage Ibn Hamdis and his companions sitting in a garden which is surrounded by a stream. Their cup-bearer sends their wine floating round to them.
[wine],
Each silver cup in it filled as though it contained the soul of the sun
in the body of the full moon.
Whenever a glass reached anyone in our company of topers, he
would grasp it gingerly with his ten fingers.
Then he drinks out of it a grape-induced intoxication which lulls
his very senses without his realizing it.
He sends [the glass] back in the water, thus returning it to the
hands of a cupbearer at whose will it had [originally] floated to
him.
Because of the wine-bibbing we imagined our song to be melodies
which the birds sang without verse.
While our cupbearer was the water which brought [us wine] without
a hand, and our drink was a fire that shone without embers,
And which offered us delights of all kinds, while the only reward
[of that cupbearer] for [giving us those delights] was that we
offered him the ocean to drink.
[It is] as if we were cities along the riverbank while the wine-laden
ships sailed [the stretch] between us.
For life is excusable only when we walk along the shores of pleasure
and abandon all restraint!
Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology, p. 204
The proliferation of courts encouraged the movement of poets from patron to patron. The most famous of the eleventh-century Andalusian poets, Abu’l-Walid Ahmad IBN ZAYDUN (1003-71), came from an old Cordovan family, but he pursued a turbulent career in the service of several courts; in the course of his peripatetic career, high office alternated with prison or exile. As a politician-poet, Ibn Zaydun specialized in panegyric and satire, but his best and most personal work was on the theme of lost love. As a young man, Ibn Zaydun fell in love with a beautiful blonde princess, Wallada (see page 274). The two at first exchanged letters of mutual devotion, but when later their relationship deteriorated Wallada composed poems of rejection, while Ibn Zaydun responded with poems of desperation and reproach. His case was hopeless and Wallada began to consort with his former friend and chief rival, Ibn ‘Abdus, a prominent politician. Ibn ‘Abdus was eventually successful in having Ibn Zaydun cast into prison. On his release, Ibn Zaydun sought employment as a politician and poet elsewhere. He ended up in Seville, as vizier first in the service of Mut’adid and then of Mu’tamid.
until the marks of dawn appeared on the night;
The stars of dawn came to strike the darkness
and the stars of night fled, for night was conquered.
When we attained the best of all delights
no care weighed on us, and no sorrow irked us.
Had this but remained, my joy would have endured
but the nights of union fell short.When we met in the morning to say goodbye,
and the pennants fluttered in the palace court
And the proud horses gathered and the drums rolled
and the hour signalled depart,
We wept blood – as if our eyes
were wounds from which the red tears flowed.
We had hoped to come again after three days
but how many more have been added to them!
Bernard Lewis (trans.), in TR (Reading, Berks., 1976), I, ii, p. 47
The next poem was written at the al-Zahra, site of the caliphal palace outside Cordova.
I remember you.
Horizon clear, limpid
The face of the earth, and wind,
Corne twilight, desists,
A tenderness sweeps me
When I see the silver
Coiling waterways
Like necklaces detached
From throats. Delicious those
Days we spent while fate
Slept. There was peace, I mean,
And us, thieves of pleasure,
Now only flowers
With frost-bent stems I see;
At my eyes their vivid
Centres pull, they gaze
Back at me, seeing me
Without sleep, and a light
Flickers through their cups,
In sympathy, I think.
The sun-baked rose-buds in
Bushes, remember
How their colour had lit
Our morning air; and still
Breaths of wind dispense
At break of day, as then,
Perfume they gather up
From waterlilies’
Half-open drowsy eyes.
Such fresh memories
Of you these few things
Waken in my mind. For
Faraway as you are
In this passion’s grip
I persist with a sigh
And pine to be at one
With you. Please God no
Calm or oblivion
Will occupy my heart,
Or close it. Listen
To the shiver of wings
At your side – it is my
Desire, and still, still
I am shaking with it …
Pure love we once exchanged,
It was an unfenced
Field and we ran there, free
Like horses. But alone
I now can lay claim
To have kept faith. You left,
Left this place. In sorrow
To be here again,
I am loving you.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, pp. 14–15
WALLADA bint al-Mustakfi (d. 1091/2), the object of Ibn Zaydun’s passion, was the daughter of one of the last Umayyad caliphs of Cordova, Mustakfi (whose reign and murder took place in 1025). Wallada was one of a relatively large number of women who wrote poetry in Muslim Spain. She maintained a literary salon which was probably where Ibn Zaydun first encountered her.
The superbly arrogant verses which follow were inscribed on the sleeves of her robe, the first couplet on the right sleeve and the second on the left. The custom of adorning the embroidered sleeves of garments with pious invocations, declarations of political allegiance or poetry was common throughout the Muslim world.
And am going my way, with pride!Forsooth, I allow my lover to touch my cheek,
And bestow my kiss on him who craves it!
Nykl, Hispano-Arabie Poetry and its Relations with
the Old Provençal Troubadors, p. 107
The four poems which follow were all addressed to her ultimately rejected lover. They trace the trajectory of a heart’s affections.
Wait for me whenever darkness falls,
For night I see contains a secret best.
If the heavens felt this love I feel for you,
The sun would not shine, nor the moon rise,
Nor would the stars launch out upon their journey.2
Must separation mean we have no way to meet?
Ay! Lovers all moan about their troubles.
For me it is a winter not a trysting time,
Crouching over the hot coals of desire.
If we’re apart, nothing can be otherwise.
How soon just the very thing I feared
Was what my destiny delivered. Night after night
And separation going on and on and on,
Nor does my being patient free me from
The shackles of my longing. Please God
There may be winter rains pelting copiously down
To irrigate the earth where you now dwell.3
Had you any respect for the love between us,
You would not choose that slave of mine to love.
From a branch flowering in beauty you turn
To a branch that bears no fruit.
You know I am the moon at full,
But worse luck for me
It’s Jupiter you have fallen for.4
They’ll call you the Hexagon, an epithet
Properly yours even after you drop dead:
Pederast, pimp, adulterer,
Gigolo, cuckold, cheat.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, p. 16
After the fall of the caliphate of Cordova and the dispersal of its courtiers and littérateurs, the taste for poetry became more widely diffused throughout Muslim Spain. Some of the poetry produced in provincial centres seems to have been written in conscious rejection of the urban, Arab and elitist values of the old Cordovan court, and some was inspired by Shu’ubi sentiments as the non-Arab peoples of Spain (Ibero-Latins, Visigoths and Jews, as well as Berbers) disputed the Arabs’ claims to religious and cultural superiority. Christian converts to Islam (muwalladun) made a major contribution to Arabic literature, as did musta’riba, or mozarabs, Arabized Christians who had mastered the Arabic language and absorbed much of Islamic culture without actually converting to the Islamic faith.
Strophic poetry (that is, verses arranged in stanzas) first appeared in Spain in the ninth century. Examples of a particular form of strophic verse, the muwashshahat (sing. muwashshah), start to appear as early as the ninth or the tenth century. The full sense of the word is not clear, though it appears to be related to the word for a certain type of ornamental belt, the wishah, with a double band. Interpretations differ. According to one authority, ‘Since it was held together by the concluding line as by a belt, and written down the visual effect was of a chain belt, it was called muwasbsbab‘girdled’ [poem]’. The muwashshah was a multi-rhymed strophic verse form written in classical Arabic. When the fourteenth-century North African philosopher-historian, Ibn Khaldun, came to discuss the form, he had this to say:
The muwashshah consists of branches and strings in great number and different metres. A certain number [of branches and strings] is called a single verse [stanza]. There must be the same number of rhymes in the branches [of each stanza] and the same metre [for the branches of the whole poem] throughout the whole poem. The largest number of stanzas employed is seven. Each stanza contains as many branches as is consistent with purpose and method. Like the qasida, the muwashshah is used for erotic and laudatory poetry.
Ibn Khaldun went on to suggest that such poems were popular both with the court and with the populace at large because they were easy to understand.
Usually the muwashshah consisted of five stanzas. It was customary to open with one or two lines which matched the second part of the poem in rhyme and metre, but then, in the first part of the poem proper, there was a sequence of lines which rhymed within the stanza. However, the rhyme changed from stanza to stanza, before reverting in the second part of the poem proper to the opening rhyme and metre. Although the main body of the poem was in classical Arabic, the final line, the kharja (literally ‘exit’), was written in colloquial Arabic or in some other vernacular tongue. The kharja, the punch-line of the poem, was a ‘quotation’ in direct speech. As often as not it took the form of a slave-girl’s dismissive response to the poet’s amorous proposal. The failure of the muwashshah to conform more than occasionally to the strict metrical forms of the classical qasida meant that many did not consider it to be poetry at all.
The muwashshah was intended to be sung, and was often performed at banquets. Glorification of a ruler or the loving address to a girl (often a Christian slave-girl) were its most usual themes, though other topics were employed. Ibn al-’Arabi (see page 297) and others made use of the form to express mystical themes. Although the muwashshah form was first developed in Spain it subsequently spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East and it was particularly popular in Mamluk Egypt. The following muwashshah is by Abu Bakr IBN ZUHR. Although his father was a famous physician, Ibn Zuhr was a less distinguished medical practitioner and littérateur. His one dubious claim to fame is that when the Almoravid ruler Ya–qub ibn Mansur decided to have all books on philosophy and logic destroyed, Ibn Zuhr was put in charge of the bonfires.
| |
My heaving sighs proclaim | Love’s joys are bitterness. |
My heart has lost her mentor,
She spurns my anguished cry
And craves for her tormentor;
If I hide love, I die.
| When ‘Oh heart!’ I exclaim | My foes mock my distress. |
O tearful one who chantest
Of mouldering ditch and line,
Or hopefully decantest,
I have no eyes for thine.
| Let yearning glow aflame, | Tears pour in vain excess. |
Mine eye, love’s attribute venting,
Expended all its store,
Then its own pain lamenting
Began to weep once more.
| My heart is past reclaim | Or sweet forgetfulness. |
I blame it not for weeping
My heart’s distress to share,
As, weary but unsleeping,
It probed the starry sphere.
| To count them was my aim | But they are numberless. |
A doe there was I trysted
(No lion is as tough.)
I came, but she insisted
‘Tomorrow’, and sheered off.
| Hey, folks, d’you know that game? address? |
And what’s the gal’s |
Gibb, Arabic Literature. An Introduction, pp. I T1-12
The zajal was similar to the muwashshah, but it was written in colloquial Arabic and it might even contain a sprinkling of non-Arabic words. The noun derives from the verb zajala, ‘to utter a cry’. (Arabic dictionaries also define zajal as ‘the soft humming sound made by the jinn at night’). Again according to Ibn Khaldun, people ‘made poems of the type in their sedentary dialect, without employing vowel endings. Thus they invented a new form, which they called zajal. They have continued to compose poems of this type down to the present time [the late fourteenth century]. They achieved remarkable things in it. It opened the field for eloquent poetry in dialect, which is influenced by non-Arab speech habits.’
Although the earliest surviving examples of the zajal seem to date from the twelfth century, it may well have developed in tandem with the muwashshah. Because of the nature of Arabic script and syntax, which make it peculiarly difficult to register the colloquial, zajal poems were different to transcribe; perhaps for this reason we find examples of the form only in manuscripts of a relatively late date. The zajal was likely to have more lines than the muwashshah. Like the muwashshah, the zajal had a concluding kharja and the whole poem was composed to be sung.
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn ‘Isa IBN QUZMAN (d. 1160), the great poet of Hispano-Arabic colloquial, was certainly the most famous composer of zajah. He led the life of a goliard, wandering from town to town in search of patronage. In his poems he celebrated the delights of wine, women and song. However, bitterness and sarcasm alternate with hedonism in Ibn Quzman’s poetry. He was unhappily married and he claimed that he was constantly accompanied on his travels by the Qird, the Ape of Evil Fortune. Ibn Quzman was a keen observer of everyday events in the streets. In his poems he presents himself as a low-lifer, dissolute, ugly and hard-drinking. A literary cult of the low-lifer and criminal had flourished among the educated elite in tenth-century Iraq (see Chapter 5), and it may be that the disparaging self-image that Ibn Quzman presented to his audience was in part a literary affectation, although he did spend time in prison for immorality and impiety. He made use in his zajah of Romance words as well as vernacular Arabic.
May God, instead, give me contentment:
Kisses, embraces and the rest.
(If you ask any further, you prove yourself nosy.)
A. Hamori (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: 'Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 212
Though you be of a mind to do love wrong,
Believe rne, moonlight is the stuff whereof
My lady’s limbs are made. I offer proof.Something I saw, full moon in her, alive,
Cool in her balanced body, took me captive;
Her beauty, young, her anklets, with a thrill
They pierced my heart, to cause my every ill.A lover is a man amazed. Desire
Can drive him mad the moment he’s on fire;
Heartsick, when he has had the thing he wants;
Worse, if he’s deceived by what enchants.A lover knows he’s not the only one.
His lady’s garden gate, she keeps it open:
A challenge – passion hurts him even more.
Whom will she choose? Whom will she ignore?I’m of a kind a woman’s body charms
So to the quick, it’s Eden in her arms:
Absolute beauty being all we seek,
We can be melted by a touch of magic.As for the moon, so for the sun: from both
She draws her power; moon pearls grace her mouth,
Solar fire crimsons her lips, and yet
She’s not ambiguous when her heart is set:Burning in my reflections, day by day,
In every act of mine she has her say;
Even when, if ever, she’s at peace,
You’ll never find her supine in the least.Such is my proven moon, my lady love.
Yet of myself she did once disapprove:
Pointing to the marks my teeth had made
Across her breast, then eyeing me, she said:‘Easy does it, not too quick,
I like it slow, and nothing new.
Custom knows a thing or two,
It’s to custom we should stick:
Festina lente, that’s the trick –
Come at me slow, I’ll come with you.’
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, pp. 74–5
o joy, I have begun to be a real profligate!
Indeed, it is absurd for me to repent
When my survival without a wee drink would be certain death.
Vina, uino! And spare me what is said;
Verily, I go mad when I lose my restraint!
My slave will be freed, my money irretrievably lost
On the day I am deprived of the cup.
Should I be poured a double measure or a fivefold one,
I would most certainly empty it; if not, fill then the jarrón!
Ho! Clink the glasses with us!
Drunkenness, drunkenness! What care we for proper conduct?
And when you wish to quaff a morning drink,
Awaken me before the Volcón
Take my money and squander it on drink;
My clothes, too, and divide them up among the whores,
And assure me that my reasoning is correct.
I am never deceived in this occupation!
And when I die, let me be buried thus:
Let me sleep in a vineyard, among the vinestocks;
Spread [its] leaves over me in lieu of a shroud,
And let there be a turban of vine tendrils on my head!
Let my companions persevere in immorality, to be followed by
every beloved one.
And remember me continuously as you go about it.
As for the grapes, let whomsoever eats a bunch,
Plant the [leftover] stalk on my grave!
I will offer a toast to your health with the large cup;
Take your bottle, lift it high and empty it!
What a wonderful toast you have been honoured by.
Let whatever you decree against me come to pass!
By God, were it not for a trick done to me in a matter concerning a
woman,
I would have won bliss. She said [to me]: ‘There is a certain desire
which
I will not grant you, it being a question of my honour.’
Alas! The price of that was paid out later!
I, by God, was seated, when there came to me with a garland on
her head,
A Berber girl; what a beauty of a conejo!
‘Whoa!’ [said I, ‘She] is not a sera of cardacho,
But don’t pounce [on her] for neither is she a grañón!
‘Milady, say, are you fine, white flour or what?’
‘I am going to bed.’ ‘By God; you do well!’
I said: ‘Enter.’ She replied: ‘No, you enter first, by God.’
(Let us cuckold the man who is her husband.)
Hardly had 1 beheld that leg
And those two lively, lively eyes,
When my penis arose in my trousers like a pavilion,
And made a tent out of my clothes.
And since I observed that a certain ‘son of Adam’ was dilated,
The chick wished to hide in the nest.
‘Where are you taking that polio, for an immoral purpose?
Here we have a man to whom they say: ’O what shamelessness!”,
I, by God, immediately set to work:
Either it came out, or it went in,
While I thrust away sweetly, sweet as honey,
And [my] breath came out hotly between her legs.
It would have been wonderful, had it not been for the insults that
were exchanged the next day,
For they began to squabble and to brawl:
‘Remove your hand from my beard, 0 ass!’
‘You, throw the frying pan for the toston!’
One claws at an eyelid, the other slaps;
One tears clothes to shreds, the other floors his adversary;
No matter where I throw green quinces,
I get hit only on the head by the bastont
That is the way the world is! Not that it is my style,
Yet in this way they managed to humiliate me.
As for me, 0 people, although it was a light [punishment],
Never have I suffered such shame as at present.
Indeed, my opinion is as follows: You are viewed by the eye of
reproof;
No place in this city is big enough for you to hide.
Where are the means [of departure] for one such as Ibn Quzman?
In my opinion nothing is more certain than that [I shall get them].
O my hope and my well-watched star;
My life and my beloved one:
I desire largesse and it is from you that it is desired!
I am your guarantor for your glory will be guaranteed!
Your hands have an eminent right to dispose of me,
And in your honour do I go and stop,
While your virtues are too excellent for me to describe.
Drops of water are not to be compared with bursting rain clouds.
You have shown me a path to prosperity;
You have adorned me before my enemy and my friend;
For in you my hand has been attached to a firm rope;
You who are such that all others are withheld from me.
O, Abu Ishaq, 0 lord among viziers,
Bright flower of this world and lord among emirs!
The like of you gives new life to poetry for poets,
While you make public a generosity that was hidden [before your
arrival]!
May you remain happy, achieving your aspirations,
And may you witness high rank and nobility with affability,
As long as darkness changes [to light] and the new moon shines,
And as long as a plant still grows green and branches rise high!
Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology, pp. 260–70
COMMENTARY
Ibn Quzman’s verses are interestingly similar to the ‘goliardic’ Latin poems of a secular and profane nature which were produced in western Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (On the learned vagabonds who composed verses in praise of wine, women and song, see Helen Waddell’s classic masterpiece, The Wandering Scholars (192-7)-)
jarrón is Spanish for ‘jug’. (Ibn Quzman’s Arabic has it as jurun.)
Yolcon is Spanish for ‘the emptying of cups’. (Ibn Quzman has al-bulqun.)
Conejo is Spanish for ‘rabbit’.
Sera of cardacho is conjectural and cannot be translated with any confidence.
GraÑón is boiled wheat-porridge. Ibn Quzman is here writing in a popular idiom, the sense of which has been lost.
Pallo is a chicken.
Toston is Spanish for a piece of toast fried in olive oil.
Baston is Spanish for stick.
Abu Ishaq was presumably a friend and potential patron of Ibn Quzrnan.
Wickedness of a much more serious sort was expounded in a sinister text known as the Ghayat al-Hakim, or ‘Goal of the Sage’. This was a sorcerer’s manual which was purported to have been written by a famous eleventh-century Spanish Arab mathematician, al-Majriti. This ascription, which was certainly false, was probably made in order to give the text a spurious respectability. However, the Ghayat al-Hakim does seem to have been put together in Muslim Spain in the mid-eleventh century, though nothing is certain. An abridged and bowdlerized version of the text was translated into Latin under the title Picatrix. There is also evidence that the text was translated into Spanish, though that version has not survived. The author, ‘pseudo-al-Majriti’, also wrote an alchemical manual, the Ruth a al-Hakim, ‘The Rank of the Sage’.
The lengthy text mingles high-flown esoteric speculation and practical (occasionally murderous) spells with tales of the marvellous. Much of the Ghayat al-Hakim can indeed be read as a work of entertainment, as story-telling thinly disguised as magical instruction. There are stories of legendary and fantastic kings of ancient Egypt. There is the story of the young man spirited by enchantment to his lover; of the two men who met while walking on the surface of the Red Sea; of the Kurdish sorcerer’s apprentice; of the sinister fate of red-haired men unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of Nabataean sorcerers; and many more.
As far as the spells are concerned, they rely heavily on a knowledge of astrology and the use of talismanic figures. The author was familiar with the writings of Ibn Washshiyya (see Chapter 4) and shared the latter’s enthusiasm for poisons. There is consistent stress on the marvellous powers of the human body and the usefulness of the body’s constituents for spells. Excrement was a particularly useful material with which to work magic.
The notion of correspondences and their magical efficacy played an important part in shaping the intellectual world of most medieval Muslims, Christians and Jews. As Michel Foucault put it in The Order of Things:‘It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.’ The medieval Spanish sorcerer did not conceive of magic as a box of tricks, but rather as the summation of philosophy.
Mingled in with the Ghayafs malignant spells and childish promises of wish-fulfilment are pages of high-flown mysticism and humanism. Man seeks through study of the Divine to return to his origins in the Divine. The author insists on the sublimity of the occult science, for magic is the summation of all philosophy. The following is from Chapter 6 of Book One. The Arabic is obscure and the sentence order sometimes seems to have got jumbled, so some of the translation is conjectural. (My English is, I think, somewhat clearer than the original Arabic, which arguably makes it a bad translation.) However, though the text is obscure, it also seems interesting and important.
He is capable of six movements. His backbone extends in a straight line down to his thighbones. Man dies naturally and his life is a succession of accidents. He has close-set fingers and palms and a round skull, as well as nails and an index-finger. He can master the sciences and writing and can invent crafts. He can mimic the beasts, but they cannot mimic him. He laughs, weeps and uses tears to express sadness. He possesses godlike powers as well as the capacity to govern politically. He is a statue illuminated from within. His body is a container which his soul inhabits. The line of his body runs straight. He can distinguish between what is harmful to him and what is beneficial to him. He acts purposefully, so that he can do something or refrain from it on theoretical grounds. He invents crafts and creates miraculous and wonderful talismans. He retains intellectual concepts and lets go of the mundane. God has made him the guardian of His Wisdom and the intermediary between His Soul and all of His Creation. Man is the recipient of His Inspiration and the vessel for His sciences and proclamations. Man is both the offspring of the macrocosm and its seal, in such a manner that all concepts are brought together in his construction. Although created things are totally diverse, he comprehends them within himself and he understands them, while they do not understand him. He makes use of them, without being used by them. He uses his tongue to mimic their sounds and his hand to imitate their appearance. His nature is remote from theirs. The beasts are unable to do a single thing which alters either their nature or their voice. The cock can only crow; the dog can only bark; the lion can only roar. Yet the man changes his voice and predisposition at will and mimics whatsoever he wishes and he governs both himself and others.
Since he is master of his gross body and of his subtle soul, some of him is corporeal and some of him incorporeal. The incorporeal part is alive, while the corporeal part is dead. Half of him is in movement, while the other half is motionless. Half of him is perfectly chiselled while the other is damaged. Part of him is light, part dark. Part of him is interior, part exterior …
Trans. Robert Irwin from the Arabic text published as Pseudo-Magriti,
Das Ziel des Weisen, ed. Helmut Ritter (Leipzig, 1933), pp. 42.-3
COMMENTARY
This chapter goes on to argue, among other things, that a man’s head is shaped to correspond to the dome of the heavens, before going on to speak obscurely of the importance of hidden knowledge.
Although the unknown author’s presentation of man’s capacities and near-godlike status is set out in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, I do not think it fanciful to see this meditation as a precursor of the famous oration De hominis dignitate (‘On the Dignity of Man’) by a leading author of the Italian Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola (1463-94). Pico, after remarking that he had ‘read in the records of the Arabians, reverend Fathers, that Abdela the Saracen, when questioned as to what on the stage of this world, as it were, could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: “There is nothing to be seen more worthy of wonder than man.” ’ Pico went on to set out man’s special status in the universe, and his role as God’s intermediary and as a ruler of the lower creation. Later, of course, Pico’s themes were picked up by Shakespeare in the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!’
However, there is a dark side to the curious specimen of eleventh-century Andalusian humanism translated above, for its high-flown rhetoric was used as part of a theoretical justification for using hair, excreta and other substances in magical spells.
Although I have translated hikma as ‘wisdom’, it sometimes has the special sense of esoteric wisdom.
The notion of the ‘Perfect Man’, or al-lnsan al-Kamil, who combines the powers of nature with divine powers, also plays a leading role in the thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’ and of numerous philosophers and Sufis.
The ‘six movements’ are presumably forwards, sideways, left, right, up and down. But why the author wishes to stress this attribute is not clear – among much else.
After Alfonso VI of Castile captured Toledo from the poet-king of Seville in 1085, the Ta'ifa kings, led by Mu'tamid, panicked, and sought the help of the Almoravids in resisting the Christian Reconquista. In so doing, they sealed the doom of their dynasties. The Almoravids (or, more correctly, the al-Murabitun) were adherents of militant, literalist Islam, and by the late eleventh century they had taken control of a large part of the Maghreb. Summoned by the temporarily united Ta'ifa kings, and led by Yusuf ibn Tashfin, they crossed over into Spain and in 1086 won a great victory over Alfonso VI at the Battle of Zallaqa. However, in the years that followed, the Almoravids showed themselves to be more active in annexing the territories of the remaining Ta'ifa kings than they were in resisting the Christian advance. (As has already been noted, Mu'tamid was to die in a North African prison in 1095.) The Almoravids were Berber puritans who had no interest in the courtly games and literary heritage of Muslim Spain, and civilizing them proved to be a slow process. Nevertheless, despite the Almoravids’ lack of interest in literature, poets continued to address panegyrics to them in the hope of securing their attention and their money.
Even before the coming of the Almoravids, there had been a perceptible turning away from a literature that embodied the luxurious values of the Cordovan court and, in reaction to the old ways, many turned to religion and adopted more austere fashions. Some poets rejected the fairy-tale elegance of the court and chose instead to devote themselves to the beauties of nature. Abu Ishaq Ibrahim IBN KHAFAIA (1058-1138/9), nicknamed ‘the Gardener’, was one of those who composed poetry in praise of the Almoravids and in particular of Ibn Tashfin, who had reconquered Ibn Khafaja’s native city, Valencia, from the Christians. But as his nickname suggests, Ibn Khafaja was much more famous for his compositions about gardens and flowers. Although he chose his subject matter from the natural world, this does not mean that there was anything particularly ‘natural’ about his poetry. He was fond of rare words and paradoxes, and his poems are ornate and make great play with antitheses. His landscapes and flowers are subject to human emotions. His poetry was immensely popular and much anthologized. Ibn Khafaja appears to have been an eccentric and solitary figure. In old age, he used to walk out of his village of Shuqr until he reached the solitude of a ravine. There he would stand and shout repeatedly at the top of his voice ‘Ibrahim, you will die!’ until he fell unconscious.
The two very different poems which follow give some idea of Ibn Khafaja’s range.
This is the turbulent sea of your night seething, cross over.
On your night journey take nourishment
from drops of the pure light of stars;
wrap yourself in the green leaves of darkness;
wear the robe of the sword, embroidered with
drops of blood under swirling smoke;
throw good deeds against bad and sip
the purity of life from turbulent clouds of dust.
Salma Khadra Jayussi (trans.), in Jayussi (ed.),
The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 383–4
|
With gazelle glances, with her antelope neck, with lips of wine and teeth like bubbles, |
|
She glided along in her gown embroidered with gold like shining stars entwined around the moon; |
|
The hand of love enveloped us by night in a robe of embraces which was torn away by the hand of dawn. |
Bellamy and Steiner, Ibn Said al-Maghribi’s ‘The
Banners of the Champions’, p. 181
In the course of the early twelfth century, the Almoravids’ power base in North Africa was eroded by a new militant religious movement. In 1125 IBN TUMART raised the standard of revolt and declared himself to be the Mahdi, the Expected One, whose coming heralded the end of the world. Ibn Tumart expressed his claim to be the Mahdi in language which is possessed of a menacing rhythmical eloquence:
Madeleine Fletcher (trans.), in Jayussi (ed.),
The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 241–2
Ibn Tumart’s followers were known as the Almohads (or, more correctly, al-Muwahhidun, ‘the proclaimers of the unity of God’). The Almohad movement was, like its Almoravid precursor, a militantly puritanical Berber religious movement which sought to return to a more pristine form of Islam. However, the Almohads drew most of their support from a different Berber confederacy and their puritanism had a somewhat different stamp from that of the Almoravids. For example, whereas the Almoravids had persecuted Sufis, the Almohads were fierce partisans of the sort of Sufism expounded by al-Ghazzali (see Chapter 7). By 1147 the Almoravids were in effective control of Morocco. (Ibn Tumart had died in n 30 and his deputy, ‘Abd al-Mu’min, had assumed the leadership.) In 1145 an Almohad army had entered Spain, and in the course of the next decade the Almohads took control of most of the remaining Muslim territory and established their capital at Seville.
Abu Bakr ibn ‘Abd al-Malik IBN TUFAYL (C. 1116-85) served the Almohad ruler Yusuf ibn ‘Abd al-Mu’min (reigned 1163-84) both as physician and vizier. He also served as a propagandist for their jihad. After attending the Almohad court in Granada, he subsequently moved to Morocco, where he died. Ibn Tufayl wrote on medicine as well as practising it. However, he is most famous for his philosophical fable about a man stranded on a desert island, Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Ibn Sina had previously written a philosophical fable with the same title (see Chapter 5), but Ibn Tufayl develops his story in quite a different way. Hayy ibn Yaqzan (his name means ‘Living Man, Son of the Vigilant’) was abandoned at birth and cast ashore on an uninhabited desert island. There he was suckled and looked after by a doe. In Ibn Tufayl’s fable, Hayy, since he has no contact with human beings, has to teach himself about the world through observation, experiment and reason. Not only does he learn how to survive and even to discover how the universe works, but he also attains to a vision of the Divine.
Only after Hayy has completed his intellectual and spiritual self-education is the island visited by another man, Absal, a devout person who is seeking a spiritual truth within himself. Absal’s and Hayy’s views on religion and the world turn out to agree perfectly and together they set off on a joint mission to the civilized island where Absal grew up. Their aim is to convert the islanders to their spiritually enlightened perception of the Truth. However, they soon come to realize that such a perception can only be shared by a spiritual elite, while ordinary men must be content with esoteric truths of Islam as they are revealed by the Prophet Muhammad. Hayy and Absal returned to the desert island to meditate on the higher mysteries of the Divine. The surface sense of this subtle text – that it is possible to understand this world and the next through the unaided powers of reason – is not its real meaning. Ibn Tufayl boasted that an esoteric veil concealed the true meaning of his book. He was actually concerned to stress the need for men both to study books and to seek instruction from spiritual masters. (Simon Ockley published an English translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan in 1708, and it may be that Ibn Tufayl’s spiritual fable was one of the sources of inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s more earthy adventure yarn, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.)
Goodman (trans.), Ibn Tufayl’s ‘Hayy ibn Yaqzan\ pp. 109–14
COMMENTARY
Having cut open the heart and searched in vain for the source of life, Hayy is about to leave the doe’s body to rot, when he sees a raven burying another raven. Thus inspired, Hayy gives his foster-mother a decent burial before resuming his investigations into the nature of existence. He discovers fire, experiments with vivisection, dresses himself in animal skins, and so on.
Sufi themes infuse the text of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan. From at least the eleventh century onwards, Sufis made a major contribution to Arabic literature. The writings of al-Hallaj have already been discussed in previous chapters and those of al-Ghazzali and Ibn al-Farid’s poetry will be discussed in Chapter 7. Muhyi al-Din Abu Bakr Muhammad IBN AL-’ARABI (1165-1240) was perhaps the most influential as well as one of the most prolific of Sufi writers. His honorific name, Muhyi al-Din, means ‘Reviver of the Religion’. Ibn al-’Arabi was born in Murcia in southern Spain where his father had been in the service of the ruler, but after the place was conquered by the Almohads, the family moved to Seville. Ibn al-’ Arabi was educated in Seville, but subsequently he extended his education by travelling from teacher to teacher (for this was the age of the wandering scholar). At first he pursued his peripatetic studies in Spain and the Maghreb, but in 1201 he went on the hajj to Mecca. There he met and fell in love with a young girl from a family of Persian Sufis – or so he claimed, but one should bear in mind that falling in love with a woman seen on the hajj had long been a stock theme in Arabic prose and poetry. Although Ibn al-’Arabi’s love for this girl was never consummated, it was to inspire him for the rest of life, in much the same way that the vision of Beatrice was to inspire Dante. After a sojourn in Mecca, Ibn al-‘Arabi travelled more widely in the Middle East, encountering many other famous Sufis. At some point in his travels he received a special initiation by al-Khidr, ‘the Green Man’, a supernatural figure who served God as the guardian of the Spring of Eternal Life. In 1223 he settled in Damascus and devoted his time to prayer, meditation and writing until his death in that city. His tomb there remains an important centre of pilgrimage.
In his writings Ibn al-‘Arabi set out the elements of an immensely complex spiritual psychology and cosmology. He described visions he had been granted of such marvels as the invisible hierarchy which governed the universe, and of the Divine Throne resting on a pillar of light. The perception of the transcendent unity of Being was central to his thinking. This doctrine brought him perilously close to what was, in Muslim terms, the heresy of pantheism and his enemies did indeed accuse him of this. However, Ibn al-’Arabi was careful to support his position with quotations from the Qur’an and the haditbs. Indeed, he actually claimed to be a Zahirite – that is, a strict literalist of the same stamp as Ibn Hazm. Al-lnsan al-Kamil, ‘the Universal Man’, a macrocosmic figure who was simultaneously the guide and model of the universe, played a key role in Ibn al-’Arabi’s thinking, as did the concept of al-Alam al-Mithal, the world of similitudes or images. In Ibn al-’Arabi’s cosmology, man sought to return to his origin by achieving union with the Divine. Despite their superficial differences, he held that all religions were fundamentally one, as these lines from the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq indicate:
Pasture for deer, a monastery for monks,
Temple for idols, pilgrim’s Ka’bah,
Tables of Torah and book of Qur’an.
My religion is love’s religion: where turn
Her camels, that religion my religion is, my faith.
Martin Lings (trans.), in Ashtiany et al.(eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 252
Ibn al-’Arabi was a prolific author who wrote on many subjects (though it is certain that much of what has been ascribed to him – over 900 titles – is not by him). Divine forces drove him to write. As he put it, ‘influxes from God have entered upon me and nearly burned me alive. In order to find relief … I have composed works, without any intention on my own part. Many other books I have composed because of a divine command given during a dream or unveiling.’ (Ibn al-’Arabi’s way of creating literature does not seem so very far removed from the automatic writing espoused by the Surrealists in the 1920s.)
Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah, ‘The Meccan Revelations’, is his most substantial work on metaphysics and mysticism. It is an esoteric encyclopedia in which the hidden meaning of everything is expounded. Special stress is placed on the power of Divine Names. In a chapter entitled ‘The Alchemy of Happiness’ Ibn al-’ Arabi describes a journey into Hell and then an ascent through the heavens. Although Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah is essentially a prose work, it nevertheless contains hundreds of poems. Fusus al-Hikam, ‘Bezels of Wisdom’, is a mystical treatise which Ibn al-’ Arabi first saw in a dream in the hand of the Prophet. Each chapter is a ‘bezel’, or jewel of sacred wisdom. In Shajarat al-Qawm, or ‘Tree of Existence’, Ibn al-’ Arabi described the Prophet’s night journey through the seven heavens, and his encounters with tutelary prophets of these heavens. To Ibn al-’ Arabi, the Prophet’s night journey is an allegory of the journey of the mystic’s heart.
Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, ‘The Interpreter of Desires’, is Ibn al-’ Arabi’s poetic masterpiece. It is a small collection of sixty-one qasidas, addressed to that young daughter of a Persian Sufi friend, whom Ibn al-’Arabi had encountered in Mecca. The girl is called by various names in the poems (presumably to meet the exigencies of rhyme and metre). ‘Virtuous, learned, devout and modest, she was a feast for the eyes and bound in chains all who beheld her. Were it not that pusillanimous minds are ever prone to think of evil, I would dwell at greater length upon the qualities with which God has endowed both her body and her soul which was a garden of generous feeling.’ Although Ibn al-’Arabi formally dedicated these love poems to her, as far as he was concerned there was no sensual content in them. They were allegories; the girl’s beauty was an exteriorization of divine beauty and the poet’s fervent devotion was actually directed to God. ‘If, to express these lofty thoughts, I used the language of love, it was because the minds of men are prone to dally with such amorous fancies and would thus be more readily attracted to the subject of my songs.’
Ibn al-Arabi was the first mystic to turn the traditional imagery of the qasida, with its deserted campsite, lament for lost love and so on, to mystical purposes. In doing so, he borrowed lines and themes from earlier secular poets. (This process of creative stealing, or allusion, was accepted in the Arab literary world and known as muarada.) The mystical purport of the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq was not obvious to everyone and some of the “ulama accused him of having produced a collection of poems dedicated to profane love. Stung by this, Ibn al-’Arabi produced a commentary entitled The Treasury of Lovers’. In this he expounded his obscure allegories: the young girl signified the perfect soul, the flash of lightning signified a centre of manifestation of the divine essence, the camels were spiritual transports, and so forth. The poet’s journey by camel through the wasteland ended in annihilation in the Divine.
Gone, even they, tenants of mine inmost heart!
I asked where the riders rest at noon, was answered:
“They rest where the shih and ban tree spread their fragrance.’
So said I to the wind: ‘Go and o’ertake them,
For they, even now, in the shade of the grove are biding,
And give them greetings of peace from a sorrowful man,
Whose heart sorroweth at severance from his folk.’
Martin Lings (trans.), in Ashtiany et al.(eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 252
Besides the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, Ibn al-’Arabi also produced a Diwan, a large collection of mystical poetry, including over 900 poems. Quite a few are drearily didactic efforts, in which verse and metre are firmly in the service of education. These poems are devoted to such matters as the chapters of the Qur’an, the Names of God and the letters of the alphabet. There is a lot of esoteric word-play. In other, more interesting poems, Ibn al-’ Arabi sought to render in words the ineffable experience of ecstasy; but as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break under the burden’. In other poems again, Ibn al-’Arabi reveals a certain amount about his own life and there are verses on such topics as troublesome disciples, burying a young daughter, and the pains of old age. In some poems he made use of the muwashshah, and indeed he did a great deal to make this verse form respectable.
Although Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Musa ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi (121386) was a poet in his own right, he is best known for an anthology of Spanish Arabic poetry which he produced in Cairo in 1243, after having left his native Granada. The Kitab Rayyat al-Mubarrizin, The Book of the Banners of the Champions’, is a collection of extracts, mostly from qasidas.(The lines from Ibn Khafaja quoted on page 289 were extracted in Ibn Sa'id's anthology.) Ibn Sa'id included specimens of his own verse in the collection. His aim in compiling the collection seems to have been to show that poetry produced in the West was as good as anything the East had to offer (and that stuff by Ibn Sa'id and his family was especially good).
Pass round your cups for there’s a wedding feast on the horizon – although it would be enough for us just to feast our eyes on your beauty.
The lightning is a henna-dyed hand, the rain, pearls, and, like a bride, the horizon is led forth to her husband – and the eyes of the dawn are lined with kohl.
2
If you had only been with us at the wedding-like battle, when red saffron blood was the perfume of heroes.
The sun was a flower, the evening, crescent moons, the arrows were rain, and the swords were lightning flashes.
3
How fine were the warriors whose banners hovered overhead like birds around your enemies!
And lances punctuated what their swords had written, the dust of combat dried it, and the blood was its perfume.
Bellamy and Steiner, Ibn Said al-Magbribi’s ‘The
Banners of the Champions’, pp. 7, 152, 153
After the Almohads suffered a massive defeat at the hands of an alliance of the Christian kings of Spain at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, their power in Spain and North Africa declined very rapidly. The Almohads withdrew from Spain and Cordova was lost to the Christians in 1236; Seville followed in 1248. Eventually Muslim power was confined to the southernmost part of the Iberian peninsula. From 1232 until the expulsion of the last of its rulers in 1492 the Nasirid dynasty ruled this region from their capital in Granada. Their palace-citadel in Granada, which was in practice a series of interlinked palaces, came to be known as the Alhambra, ‘the Red’. The Nasirid kingdom was vulnerable to Christian attacks and for much of their history the Nasirids paid tribute to their neighbours in the north. Nevertheless, the Nasirids presided over a splendid literary and intellectual culture.
Although Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunisia, he was of Andalusian stock and he was briefly to serve the Nasirids of Granada as a diplomat. ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad IBN KHALDUN (1332-1408) is one of the towering geniuses in the history of Arab thought (indeed his writings remain influential today, not just in Arab countries, but throughout the world). Ibn Khaldun spent most of his life in the service of various rulers in Spain, North Africa and Egypt. His political career was chequered and it was during a period of political disgrace and temporary retirement in a North African castle in the years 1375—9 that he wrote the greater part of his masterpiece, the Muqaddima (‘The Prolegomena’). The Muqaddima was designed as a lengthy historico-philosophical introduction to an even longer but more conventional historical chronicle, the Kitab al-Tbar, ‘The Book of Examples’. From 1382 onwards Ibn Khaldun sought to pursue an academic career in Cairo, then the capital of the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria. When Timur invaded Mamluk Syria and briefly occupied Damascus in 1400, Ibn Khaldun went to meet him and was welcomed by the great Turco-Mongol warlord as one of the world’s most renowned scholars. Ibn Khaldun wrote up his debates with Timur in a brief history-cum-autobiography, the Ta’rif. Ibn Khaldun died in Cairo.
He initially intended his big history-book, the Kitab al-lbar, to be an account of the Maghreb and al-Andalus only. Although he subseq uently expanded its coverage to the rest of world, Ibn Khaldun’s treatment of the histories of China, India and Christian Europe is perfunctory and ill-informed. As the title, ‘The Book of Examples’, suggests, he designed it as a historical narrative from which one should take lessons. The past contains lessons for the present and the future, for – as he put it – ‘the past resembles the future more than one drop of water does another’.
The lessons of history are spelt out more explicitly in his theoretical preface, the Muqaddima. Much of Ibn Khaldun’s thinking about the cyclical nature of history and the rise and fall of dynasties was shaped by his observation of the successive fortunes and misfortunes of the Almoravids, the Almohads and then the Merinids in North Africa. Study of the history of these and other dynasties led him to elaborate a theory of history in which successive empires are created by vigorous nomads who, fired by religion and bonded by the rigours of tribal life in the desert, are able to conquer settled lands. However, in time the nomads settle and adopt the civilized manners of the cities they have conquered. They become urbanized and they acquire wealth and high culture. Leisure and culture are conducive to decay and the settled conquerors become in their turn vulnerable to defeat and conquest by a new wave of tribal barbarians.
It is a pessimistic vision of a historical process in which dynasties have their youth, maturity and senility. Moreover, Ibn Khaldun, depressed by the vanished grandeurs of past Islamic dynasties, by the continuing successes of the Christians in Spain and by the ravages of the Black Death in the Middle East and North Africa in the late 1340s, thought of himself as a historian writing near the end of time. Although the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties furnished the template for Ibn Khaldun’s interpretation of the past, as he continued to write his interests became wider and the last part of the Muqaddima is an encyclopedic survey of the arts and sciences. He was and is an exciting thinker, but he was not a great stylist. His prose is somewhat flat and sometimes also a bit obscure. He hated the fancy flourishes which had become fashionable among the chancery officials of his day.
Franz Rosenthal (trans.), Ibn Khaldun, ‘The Muqaddimah’:
An Introduction to History (London, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 369–70
Although the Muqaddima is mostly consulted by historians, it is also a major source on literary developments and, in particular, on the poetry of Andalusia and North Africa.
The Muqaddima praised Ibn al-Khatib as one of the great masters of classical Arabic and one of the best poets in Muslim Spain: ‘… he recently died a martyr’s death as the result of denunciation by his enemies. He possessed an unequalled linguistic habit. His pupils followed in his footsteps’. Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad IBN AL-KHATIB(1313-75) subsequently acquired the honorific name Lisan al-Din, or ‘Tongue of the Religion’. He was born in a village outside Granada. His father was in the service of the sultans of Granada, and Ibn al-Khatib himself rose through the chancery to become vizier under Muhammad V. After the latter’s temporary deposition in 1359, Ibn al-Khatib followed him into exile. In 1362 the vizier returned in triumph with Muhammad to Granada. However, the antagonism of another statesman-poet, Ibn Zamrak (see page 306), forced Ibn al-Khatib to flee to the Merinid court in Morocco. The intrigues of his enemies in Spain eventually led to Ibn al-Khatib’s arrest on a charge of heresy and he was strangled in prison in Fez.
According to his biographer, al-Maqqari, Ibn al-Khatib suffered badly from insomnia and thus he was known as Dhu al-’Umrayn, ‘the Man of Two Lives’. He wrote at night, copiously and on a vast range of subjects. He wrote a history of Granada, as well as a brief history of the Nasirids. He also wrote on Sufism and philosophy, and produced poems that were widely admired. Nevertheless, he was primarily a historian. He was capable of writing in both the plain and the ornate styles. His ornate saj” style can be a bit hard to take – as in this high-flown evocation of Cordova:
Beeston, Samples of Arabic Prose in
its Historical Development, p. 39
COMMENTARY
The waterwheel on the River Guadalquivir close to Cordova’s Romano Bridge is still there to be seen, but the city, in decline from the early eleventh century onwards, was lost to the Christians in 1236 when Ferdinand III of Castile occupied it. Ibn al-Khatib has produced a conventional exercise in literary evocation, not reportage.
The ‘Amirids were a dynasty of viziers, nominally in the service of the Umayyad caliphs of Cordova, but actually in charge of them.
Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib’s political rival, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad ibn Yusuf IBN ZAMRAK (1333-92), was also a noted poet. He had indeed studied poetry, as well as statecraft, under Ibn al-Khatib. As a poet and elegant prose stylist Ibn Zamrak surpassed his master. Probably he was instrumental in engineering the downfall of his former patron; certainly he intervened to secure Ibn al-Khatib’s execution in Morocco. Ibn Zamrak specialized in ‘state poetry’, producing panegyrics, verses for official occasions and verses in praise of the Alhambra. Although his Diwan has not survived, so much of Ibn Zamrak’s was used to decorate one of the palaces of the Alhambra and its garden that the place can be read as if it was a book of poems fashioned in stone. (Some of Ibn al-Khatib’s verses are also to be found on the walls of the Alhambra.)
See my splendor, then you will know my being.
For Mohammad, my king, and in his name
The noblest things, past or to come, I equal:
Of me, a work sublime, Fortune desires
That I outshine all other monuments
What pleasure I provide for eyes to see!
In me, any noble man will take fresh heart:
Like an amulet the Pleiades protect him,
The magic of the breeze is his defender.
A shining dome, peerless, here displays
Evident splendors and more secret ones.
Gemini extends to it a touching hand,
Moon comes to parley, stars clustering there
Turn no longer in the sky’s blue wheel:
In the two courts, submissively, they linger
To be of service to their lord, like slaves.
It is no marvel that the stars should err,
Moving across their marks and boundaries,
And are disposed to serve my sovereign lord,
Since all who serve him glory in his glory.
The palace portico, so beautiful
It bids to rival heaven’s very vault;
Clothed in a woven raiment fine as this
You can forget the busy looms of Yemen.
See what arches mount upon its roof
And spring from columns burnished by the light
Like the celestial spheres that turn and turn
Above the luminous column of the dawn.
Altogether the columns are so beautiful
That every tongue is telling their renown;
Black the shadow-darkened cornice cuts
Across the fair light thrown by snowy marble;
Such opalescent shimmers swarm about,
You’d say, for all their size, they are of pearl.
Never have we seen a palace rise so high,
With such a clarity, such expanse of outline;
Never did a garden brim like this with flowers,
Fruits more sweet to taste or more perfumed.
It pays the fee required of beauty’s critic
Twice and in two varieties of coin:
For if, at dawn, an early breeze will toss
Into his hands drachmas of light galore,
Later, in the thick of tree and shrub,
With coins of gold the sun will lavish him.
What sired these kindred things? A victory:
Still none can match the lineage of the king.
Middleton and Garza-Falcon, Andalusian Poems, pp. 57–8
COMMENTARY
This qasida is to be found in the Alhambra, inscribed on one of the walls of the Sala de las Dos Hermanas in the Court of the Lions.
The general theme of poems written for the purpose of inscription on objects is a subject which has been raised earlier in the context of the ‘Abbasid adab treatise by al-Washsha. One finds poems on ceramics, make-up boxes, and so on. Some of the verses and other types of inscription have been taken from books, but many were composed for the specific objects they adorn. A special sub-category consisted of poetical graffiti composed to be scratched on walls. The wall of a ruined palace would be the most choice place of publication and ideally the poem should treat of such matters as exile, alienation or nostalgia.
The Nasirids managed to hang on in Granada for a little over two and a half centuries. At times they paid tribute to the Christians, at others they relied on their military strength as well as on exploiting divisions within the Christian ranks. In the long run, however, the union of the Christian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile in 1469 sealed the fate of the last Muslim outposts in Spain. In 1492 the last of the Nasirid rulers, Muhammad XII (known in the West as Boabdil), surrendered Granada to the Christians and went into ill-fated exile in North Africa.
Centuries later, the American author Washington Irving visited the Alhambra and spurred his horse ‘to the summit of the rock where Boabdil uttered his last sorrowful exclamation, as he turned his eyes from taking their last farewell gaze; it is still denominated El ultimo Suspiro del Moro (‘The Last sigh of the Moor’). Who can wonder at his anguish at being expelled from such a kingdom and such an abode? With the Alhambra he seemed to be yielding up all the honours of his line and all the glories and delights of life.’
A hundred years after the surrender of Granada to the Christians, Maqqari saw descendants of Muhammad XII begging for bread in the streets of Fez. Christian pledges made to Muhammad at the time to respect and tolerate the religion and language of those Muslims who chose to remain in Spain were subsequently broken and, in the centuries which followed, Muslims and books written in Arabic were thrown onto the bonfires of the Inquisition. The sixteenth-century Egyptian sorcerer and historian Ibn Zunbul gave an account he had had from a Muslim friend who had recently been travelling in Christian Spain. This friend had been taken to an abandoned and locked-up mosque in which, he was told, a vast library of Arabic books had been dumped. When he put his ear to the keyhole, he could hear the sound of the worms eating the books.
After 1492, lamentation for the vanished grandeurs of Cordova, Granada and Seville and for the sad fate of Muslim Andalusia became a recurrent theme in Arabic literature. Indeed it is still a common topic in modern Arabic poetry. However, the grandest and most influential of such works of nostalgic antiquarianism was written in the seventeenth century by al-Maqqari. Shihab al-Din Abu’l-Abbas al-MAQQARi (1577-1632) was born near Tlemcen in what is now Algeria. In 1600 he travelled west to Morocco, where he studied and taught in Fez. In 1618 he went east on the hajj and thenceforward moved back and forth between Egypt and Syria. He wrote various treatises on historical and religious issues, including one on the slippers of the Prophet. It was while he was in Syria that he wrote his great work, Nafh al-Tib min Gbusn al-Andalus al-Ratib wa-Dbikr Waziriha Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (‘The Fragrant Scent of the Tender Shoots of Andalus and the History of the Wazir Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib’). The Nafh al-Tib is in two parts. The first is a history of the Muslims in Spain, while the second part offers an extended portrait of the fourteenth-century historian and vizier of Granada, Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib. Maqqari took Ibn al-Khatib as the embodiment of the lost intellectual grandeur of Muslim Spain. The first part similarly deals with material and intellectual treasures of the caliphate of Cordova and the Ta’ifa kingdoms. The appearance of vanished palaces and gardens is summoned up through copious citation of poetry. Maqqari was particularly interested in cultural interchanges between Muslim Spain and the eastern Islamic lands and there is a great deal in his book about Easterners who came to Spain (like Ziryab) and Andalusians who travelled East. Maqqari claimed that he wrote his book at the request of certain scholarly friends in Damascus.
In the first extract, Maqqari describes setting out by sea from Algeria, heading for Morocco, and how he prayed to God to be protected from the perils of the sea:
P. de Gayangos, History of Mohammedan Dynasties
in Spain, vol. i (1840—43), pp. 2—3
But, as Maqqari goes on to point out, besides the waves, there were also infidel pirates operating out of Malta to be feared …
The following story is found in a number of Arabic histories and belles-lettres compilations. It also features in later compilations of The Thousand and One Nights (in which Toledo is renamed Labta or Labtayt). Washington Irving also included a version in The Alhambra (1832). Maqqari, having told the story of how, in ancient times, the doom of Christian Spain had been prophesied, continues as follows:
In times of old the Greek kings who reigned in Andalus were terribly afraid of an invasion on the part of the Berbers, on account of the Prophecy that we have recorded. To avoid this they constructed different spells, and, among others, one which they put inside a marble urn and placed in a palace at Toledo: in order to ensure its custody and preservation they placed a padlock at the gate of the palace, leaving instructions for every succeeding king to do the same. This injunction having been faithfully complied with, it came to pass after the lapse of a great many years twenty-seven padlocks were appended to the gate of the building, that number of kings having reigned in Andalus, each of whom had put his padlock here as ordained. Some time previous to the invasion of the Arabs, which, as is well known, was the cause of the overthrow of the Gothic dynasty and of the entire conquest of Andalus, a king of the Goths, Roderic by name, ascended the throne. Now this king, being young and full of adventure, once assembled his Wazirs, great officers of state, and members of his council, and spoke to them thus: – ‘I have been thinking a long time about this house with its seven-and-twenty padlocks, and I am determined to have it opened, so that I may see what it contains, for I am sure it is a mere jest.’ ‘It may be so, O King!’ answered one of the Wazirs; ‘but honesty, prudence, and policy demand that thou shouldst not do it; and that, following the example of thy father, of thy grandfather, and of thy ancestors, – none of whom ever wished to dive into this mystery, – thou add a new padlock to the gate.’ When the Wazir had done speaking, Roderic replied, – ‘No: I am led by an irresistible impulse, and nothing shall make me change my resolution. I have an ardent wish to penetrate this mystery, and my curiosity must be satisfied.’ ‘O King!’ answered the Wazirs, ‘if thou doest it under a belief that treasures are concealed in it, let us hear thy estimation of them, and we will collect the sum among ourselves and deposit it in thy royal treasure, rather than see ourselves and thee exposed to frightful calamities and misery.’ But Roderic being a man of undaunted spirit, stout of heart, strong of determination, was not easily persuaded. He remained deaf to the entreaties of his counsellors, and proceeded immediately towards the palace, and when he arrived at the gate, which, as we have already observed, was furnished with several locks, each of them having its key hanging to it, the gate was thrown open, and nothing else was to be seen but a large table made of gold and silver and set with precious stones, upon which was to be read the following inscription: – This is the table of Suleyman, son of David (upon whom be peace!)’ Another object, besides the table, was to be seen in another apartment of the palace, provided also with a very strong padlock, which being removed allowed Roderic to look into it. But what was his astonishment on entering the apartment when nothing was to be seen but the urn, and inside it a roll of parchment and a picture representing in the brightest colours several horsemen looking like Arabs, dressed in skins of animals, and having, instead of turbans, locks of coarse hair; they were mounted on fleet Arabian steeds, bright scimitars hung by their sides, and their right hands were armed with spears. Roderic ordered his attendants to unroll the parchment, when lo! what did he see but the following inscription written in large letters upon it: – ‘Whenever this asylum is violated, and the spell contained in this urn broken, the people painted on this urn shall invade Andalus, overturn the throne of its kings, and subdue the whole country.’ They say that when Roderic read this fatal prognostic he repented of what he had done, and was impressed with a strong belief of his impending ruin. He was not mistaken, for tidings soon reached him of an army of Arabs, which the emperor of the East sent against him.
This is the enchanted palace and the picture to which Roderic is said to have alluded afterwards, on the day of the battle of Guada-lete, when, as he was advancing upon the Muslims, he saw for the first time before his eyes the very men whose representations were on the parchment. Of this more will be said hereafter …
P. de Gayangos, History of Mohammedan Dynasties
in Spain, vol. i (1840-43), pp. 261–3
COMMENTARY
This story attached itself to the historical account of the invasion of Spain by an army of Arabs and Berbers in 711 and the defeat of Roderic, the last Visigothic king of Spain.
In Arabic, Rumi usually means ‘Greek’, but it can mean ‘Roman’. In the context of Maqqari’s story, ‘Roman’ should be preferred to Gayangos’s translation of Rumi as ‘Greek’.
Although a great deal has been written about the Crusades and the Crusader states as important channels for the dissemination of Arab culture in the West, in fact Spain and the day-to-day contacts of medieval Muslims, Christians and Jews in that peninsula were far more important. The mixing of Arabs, Berbers, Jews, Visigoths and Ibero-Latins was of fundamental importance for the history of European culture. Spanish Muslim architecture, ceramics and silkwork had an obvious visible impact on Christian art and architecture. The history of medieval European philosophy and medicine are impossible to understand without reference to what Christian scholars took from texts written in Arabic in Spain. To stick with literature, the precise extent and nature of the influence of Arab prose and poetry on later European literature is extremely controversial. However, it has been argued that literary versions of the afterlife described by Ibn Shuhayd, Ibn al-’Arabi and others influenced the composition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It has also been claimed that Ibn Hazm’s treatise on love influenced the themes and imagery of courtly love, as did muwashshah poetry. As has been noted, it has been suggested that Ibn Tufayl’s desert island fantasy was one of the intellectual sources of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It has also been suggested that the origins of the Spanish and then more broadly European genre of the picaresque are to be found in Arab tales about wily rogues (such as are to be found in al-Hariri’s Maqamat). It is certain that the version of Kalila wa-Dimna put together by Ibn al-Muqaffa’ was translated into Latin in Spain, and thereafter this collection of animal fables became one of the most popular texts in Christendom. It is also certain that many tales of Arab origin are to be found in such Latin or Spanish story collections as Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis and Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor.