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Abstract
The Moroccan poetic-musical genre known as al-Āla, also commonly referred to as ‘Andalusian music’, illustrates the mytho-historical travels of love images from classical and post-classical Arabic poetry, preserving and re-presenting examples of them as part of Moroccan public culture in the twenty-first century. This tradition preserves a substantial number of poems, which clearly echo both the strophic and non-strophic facets of Arabic verse in their forms and contents, and which Moroccans regard, by virtue of their association with al-Āla, as part of an authentic cultural-historical heritage deriving from the Islamic period in Spain and Portugal (al-Andalus). Although the history of interchange between al-Andalus and North Africa would seem to make this attribution plausible, the idea that these songs derive from al-Andalus is problematic; none of the music and very little of the poetry can be traced to that era. Careful study of the love-poetry (ghazal) images in the nūba Ramal al-Māya – a suite of songs within the tradition ostensibly devoted to praise of the Prophet Muḥammad – shows that al-Āla in fact represents a distillation of major uses of such themes in Arabic verse deriving from contexts well beyond the Iberian Peninsula of the Islamic period. In fact, the poetry of Ramal al-Māya preserves poetic images and themes stemming from the classical Islamic period and in so doing serves as a means by which these images and themes are kept alive in contemporary Moroccan culture.
Notes
1 A note on the terms Andalusi, Andalusian and al-Āla, as used in this paper. Following the current convention, Andalusi applies specifically to people, ideas and artefacts deriving from the Islamic period in the Iberian Peninsula. Although the adjective Andalusian is usually reserved these days for the modern Autonomous Region of Andalucía in Spain, the convention among scholars of the North African poetic-musical traditions has been to use this term. This seems all the more appropriate because, as I argue in this paper, their actual connections with al-Andalus are not entirely clear – it is almost impossible to demonstrate that they are in fact unambiguously Andalusi. The name al-Āla (‘instrument’) refers to the fact that instruments accompany the songs, which distinguishes this tradition from a similar one that is normally performed a cappella.
2 The definitive work comparing the various Andalusian music traditions at the level of structure and performance practice is Guettat (Citation2000).
3 The conception of Ramal al-Māya specifically as madīḥ nabawī seems to have some basis in oral tradition, but none of the modern scholars cites a source for it.
4 Ziryāb is said to have established his own school in Cordoba for training singers, principally artiste slaves (qiyān), but it does not seem to have superseded the influence of the Madinan and Baghdadi schools in al-Andalus, for al-Maqqarī's Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb tells us that a generation or two after Ziryāb's passing, Ibrāhīm b. al-Ḥajjāj (d. 298/911), the erstwhile master of Seville, bought at least one female slave singer from Baghdad at great expense (1968 vol. 3, 130–131, Beirut edition edited by IḥsānʿAbbās). On Ziryāb's career as a product of the larger Mediterranean world, see Davila (Citation2009).
5 The quotation is from Aḥmad al-Tīfāshī (d. 650/1253), a Tunisian who wrote an encyclopaedia (now mostly lost) that contained a chapter devoted to the songs of al-Andalus of that time (al-Mutʿat al-asmāʿ fī ʿilm as-samāʿ in al-Ṭānjī's edition, 115).
6 On the schools of elite music in this era, see Farmer (Citation1929), especially chapters IV and V. On Ziryāb and Ibn Bājja as the founding-father figures for the Andalusian music traditions of North Africa (Davila Citation2013, chapter 2).
7 Rosen (Citation2000) provides an excellent discussion of what is known about the origins of these forms, especially the role of strophic forms of the Mashriq, like the musammaṭ.
8 See, for example, the discussions of the evidence for this, from contrary perspectives, in Gorton (Citation1974) and Boase (Citation1977).
9 On Abū l-Ṣalt Umayya, see references inal-Tīfāshī's al-Mutʿat al-asmāʿ and also in Sumaia Hamdani's article ‘Words apart? An Andalusi in Fāṭimid Egypt’ in this volume. Of course, numerous individual Andalusis migrated across the straits, in addition to those with strong connections to poetry and/or music.The religious scholar and poet al-QāḍīʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149) was born in Sebta on the North African coast, but had strong links to Granada; the well-known Sufi Abū Madyan (d. 594/1197) was born near Seville but received his mystic avocation in Fez and settled in Bougie; the two great mystics Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and Abū l-Ḥasan al-Shushtarī (d. 666/1269) hailed from al-Andalus, travelled across North Africa, and died in the Mashriq; and the great author and political figure, Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 776/1375), was born in the Kingdom of Granada and died in Tlemcen. A number of these men contributed verses to songs found in al-Āla.
10 Concerning the later migrations of Andalusis to North Africa, see Razzūq (Citation1996); on the refounding of Tetouan, see Latham (Citation1965).
11 The Middle Eastern polymaths Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq al-Kindī (d. after 256/870) and Abū Naṣr Muḥammad al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) each developed a system of notation in the ‘Abbāsid period, but they were descriptive, theoretical tools that were never widely adopted by musicians for everyday use. The Kitāb al-Aghānī of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 355/967) included verbal descriptions of musical meters and a kind of tablature that expressed notes in terms of ʿūd fingerings for the songs he presented. Al-Iṣfahānī does refer to what appears to have been a precise method of musical notation. On two occasions, the singer–composer Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī ‘wrote’ a song to his rival, Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī, who the Aghānī says performed the song just as Isḥāq created it (1927 Cairo edition vol. 10,105 and 110).
12 For example, Guettat's works (both 1980 and 2000) demonstrate these similarities and stand upon the assumption of this common origin.
13 al-Mutʿat al-asmāʿ fī ʿilm al-samāʿ (114, al-Ṭanjī’s 1968 edition); see the discussion of the nūba in Davila Citation2013, 28–34.
14 However, the manuscript traditions that lie behind the modern anthologies are diverse, and even those that are most similar to IM and IJ do not correspond particularly well with them. Less than a third of the ṣanāʾiʿ in the manuscript versions of the nūba Ramal al-Māya has survived in the modern canon, and those represent only about half of the modern canon (Davila Citation2006). In chapter 5 of History, Society and Text (2013), I argue that much of the material in the modern canon that is not documented in the manuscript traditions in fact derives from local oral or quasi-oral versions of the tradition.
15 This overlapping of structure between the tawshīḥ and the zajal also occurred in al-Andalus. The differences identified by Stern (Citation1974) and others did not hold throughout the medieval period. Later poets of al-Andalus wrote strophic poems that blurred the structural distinctions between the two formats.
16 Unlike the ‘classical’ zajal of al-Andalus, those performed in the Āla tradition are entirely devoid of non-Arabic expressions. For the problematics of identifying ‘an Andalusi colloquial language’ in the sources, see the extensive work on the subject by Corriente (1977, 1997 and the introductory notes to 2002).
17 My figures do not necessarily challenge Cortés García's estimate for the whole tradition. The religious theme of this particular nūba might lend itself more readily to ṣanʿa composers' making use of well-known poems as song texts.
18 In fact, this might overstate the case, because these figures include several ṣanāʾiʿ of questionable attribution. In some cases, authorship is claimed by IM or IJ, but the verses do not appear in the poet's dīwān or other published sources. Sometimes a known poet may be associated with just one verse in a ṣanʿa, the rest being of unknown or dubious attribution. In other cases, such as that of al-Shushtarī, modern scholarship has cast doubt upon many of the poems attributed to a poet within the tradition (al-Nashshār 1960 commentary of al-Shushtarī's dīwān).
19 The entry on al-Sakhāwī is found in vol. 3, 340–341.
20 The classic work on the subject is Bichr Farès (Citation1932).
21 [6] It is the second dawr of the zajal, Ṣāḥḥa ʿindī l-khabar, 165 in Nashshār's dīwān [7] is the second dawr from the muwashshaḥ, Ṭābat awqātī, 356 in dīwān, though Nashshār questions the attribution to al-Shushtarī in this case.
22 al-Namarī, Sharḥ dīwān, 375.
23 The problematic word here is maḥabbatihi, which preserves the meter. The printed version in IM is most likely a transposition of letters (IM is not vocalised).
24 Gibb 1963, 60f, cited in Hamori (Citation1990, 207).
25 Bauer's (Citation1998) extensive catalogue of Abū Nuwwās' solar and lunar references, especially 212–213 and 218–227.
26 As well one might also see influence specifically from the so-called ‘Sunni revival’ of the eleventh–thirteenth centuries, which may have encouraged more specifically Sunni-oriented expressions of devotion. For a good summation of this period, Berkey Citation2003, chapter 20.
27 Perhaps incorrectly; these verses do not appear in Cornell's (Citation1996) collection of his works.
28 Especially the work of John Miles Foley (Citation1995) on traditional referentiality. For a full exposition of this argument Davila Citation2013, chapter 7.