Introduction: The enduring legacy of al-Andalus

There is a long history of links between Europe and the culture of the Muslim world and the way these have led to a cross-fertilization of ideas. However, the widespread perception in the west today of Muslims, and indeed all Islamic culture, as inimical to “western civilization” also dates back many centuries. The 800 years of Muslim rule in Spain, followed by the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, is central to this legacy, as is the fact that in the same year Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, an event which fuelled Europe’s imperial dreams. All this coincided with the European Renaissance, which claimed an exclusively Graeco-Roman heritage.¹ Judeo-Arab influences, which had been so important in the ferment of new ideas in Europe and the translations of Greek texts into Arabic (in both Muslim and Christian Spain), were marginalized. Europe’s new nation states were defined by, and fought over, affiliations to the Catholic or Protestant traditions. The dominance of European colonial rule across the globe led to notions of “a Kiplingesque dichotomy, with its tacit supposition of the superiority of West over East” (Menocal [1987] 2004, 2); later, in the wake of the independence of formerly colonized nations, a “reverse” process has looked to the ascendancy of Muslim culture of al-Andalus during medieval times (2). But in today’s troubled, globalized world, al-Andalus has assumed a different significance, not in terms of military might or political power, but of “the co-mingling of religious cultures (Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Olympian) and all that was lost when the religions pulled violently apart from one another” (K. Shamsie 2005, para. 8).

The concept for this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on al-Andalus developed as the direct result of two essays I wrote in 2011 and 2015 respectively. The first was a paper² presented at a conference held at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana on “The Place of Islam in European Literature”. To me, this title translated into an overview of the place forged in English literature, through use of the English language as a creative vehicle, by South Asian authors of Muslim origin. There was of course a direct link between the cultures of South Asia, Islam and Europe: in 711 the Arabs had first invaded Spain and India (i.e. Sindh, in the lower Indus region). This led to a movement of ideas, languages and literary forms, and in fact Arabic, Spanish and Sindhi still have words and musical forms in common. The influence of the bhakti poetry of India emerged in the Sufi poetry of the Muslims in India and beyond (Jalal 2001, 7), and the Hispano-Arabic poetry of Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) – the muwashshaha – influenced the earliest vernacular European poetry known as Provençal, “troubadour” or “courtly love” poetry (Menocal [1987] 2004, 30–34). (The fact that one of the great 20th-century pioneers of modernism, Ezra Pound, had translated troubadour poetry influenced the contemporary Pakistani poet Taufiq Rafat’s English translation of mystical Punjabi poetry.³)

I discovered that several South Asians – all expatriates: Agha Shahid Ali, Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali and Imtiaz Dharker – had engaged with, and portrayed, the symbiotic Euro-Arab culture of al-Andalus as a counterpoise to the imperial narratives of “the Alien Other”. These imperial narratives have lingered on in the west and are often used in the media to define migrants from the developing world and have been exacerbated by an increasingly fractious rhetoric in the west of Islam vs. Christianity,⁴ which in turn is related to the continuing, indeed growing, religious extremism in the Muslim world since the 1980s. The sense of al-Andalus as a mythical space is embodied by Dharker’s sequence “Remember Andalus (Osama bin Laden)” which appeared in her poetry collection The Terrorist at My Table. She writes: “Andalus was open doors / A conversation between equal voices / A poem made simple with words” (2006, 79).

I explored the Andalus-related works of the writers mentioned above, and several others, in my second essay “Restoring the Narration: South Asian English Writing and al-Andalus” (Shamsie 2015).⁵ The sense of al-Andalus and its lingering resonances 500 years later as an integral part of a quest for answers by expatriate Muslims to contemporary issues of migration, identity and belonging, mutation and change, emerges in the short story “Nine Postcards, Nine Extracts”,⁶ co-authored by Karachi-born Aamer Hussein and Cyprus-born Alev Adil. Two London-based expatriates, Murad and Refika, travel to Spain – the one-time al-Andalus – to “find the heart of who we were, this long lost European Muslim civilization [ … ] whose existence changed the clichés about unbridgeable civilization” (Adil and Hussein 2013, 212). At the Alcazar in Seville, Refika confesses to being “confused which parts of the palace were Islamic, which the Catholic aftermath? It didn’t seem to matter” (212).

My essay extended to a discussion of the English ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) and Shadab Zeest Hashmi. The ghazal, which reached the subcontinent via Persian – also the court language of the Mughals – and attained great sophistication in Urdu literature, dates back to pre-Islamic Arabic, although originally it was a component of the longer Arabic qasida. Both forms were written in al-Andalus until the ban on all Arabic literature and customs after the fall of Granada of 1492. Hashmi (2012) notes that “for four hundred years, there was no qasida in Europe until Lorca’s resuscitation of the form in his Divan El Tamarit” (n.p.), and adds that Lorca included “casedas” and “gacelas [ … ] inspired by the qasidas and ghazals of the Arabic language poets of al-Andalus” (n.p.). Lorca has in turn influenced Shahid Ali’s English ghazals as well as his translation (with Ahmad Dallal) of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry sequence “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” (Darwish 2002).

In this special issue on al-Andalus I wanted to take a broader look at literary texts that engage with that Euro-Arab culture, which flourished in Spain for eight centuries and reached its zenith in Granada during the Nasrid dynasty (1238–1492). Inevitably, as in any historical era, there were periods of war and violence and of great statesmen and cruel rulers; territories changed hands; kingdoms and city states fell. At the same time, Spain – the land known to the Arabs as al-Andalus and to the Jews as ha-Sefarad – was celebrated for its high regard for books, music, poetry and learning, during the Umayyad rule and in both the smaller Muslim and Christian kingdoms which emerged after the Umayyad dynasty collapsed in the 11th century. The commingling of people of three faiths, Christians, Jews and Muslims – known as convivencia – continued in these post-Umayyad kingdoms too, but in the late 12th and 13th centuries, “more puritanical versions of these cultures converged in Iberia” (Menocal [2002] 2009, loc 3732 of 4397 Kindle): “the determinedly crusading forces of Latin Christendom and equally fanatic Berber Almohads became influential parts of the landscape” (3732) and “the long term presence of two expansive religious ideologies, each originally foreign to the Andalusian ethic, transformed the nature of the conflicts at hand” (3732).

This issue begins with Amina Yaqin’s “La convivencia, la mezquita and al-Andalus: An Iqbalian vision” which explores the great Urdu poet Muhammed Iqbal’s philosophical poem “Masjid e Qurtaba” (The Mosque at Córdoba), written in 1933. The Mosque (Mezquita) was converted into a cathedral in the 10th century, following the retreat of Umayyad power in the city, but its architecture still bears the original features, a combination of Byzantine, Roman and Visigoth elements among others: it embodies the multicultural inheritance of al-Andalus.

Yaqin reveals that Iqbal received an official invitation from the Spanish authorities to pray at the Mezquita-Cathedral, although Muslim prayers are not normally allowed. Yaqin places the poem in the context of the role of Urdu poetry in subcontinental culture – it reaches large audiences through oral recitation, music and song and therefore speaks very directly to a national and political consciousness. She points out that in the 19th century, under colonial rule over Muslim territories, al-Andalus was greatly idealized and romanticized as the example of a successful, sovereign Muslim state and embodied the cosmopolitan nature of past Muslim empires, which were also in touch with the classical knowledge of ancient Greece. She writes of the influence of the Andalusi philosopher Ibn Arabi on Iqbal, and traces the history of al-Andalus to discuss the convivencia which is synonymous with Andalus. She says that, in his contemplation of the mosque, Iqbal, who was steeped in western philosophy and was engaged in India’s minority politics, sought an alternative model for society and civilization to that of European Enlightenment, one which forged a new path in-between secularism and religious traditions. Iqbal’s need to resolve issues of east vs. west, and of a minority identity in India, was also related to the quest for alternative answers to perceptions of a territorial anti-colonial nationalism – a particularly interesting comment in view of South Asia’s division into two independent nation states in 1947.

The modern concepts of statehood, and the use of classifications such as ethnic or religious purity to define and destroy the alien other, run through “Power Politics and the Duty of Self-Preservation: Tariq Ali’s Shadows of a Pomegranate Tree” by David Waterman. Ali’s novel was published in 1992, on the 500th anniversary of the Fall of Granada, and is set in the aftermath of the events of 1492. The plot revolves around the lives of the Moorish clan, the Banu Hudayl. They are Muslims who have lived in al-Andalus for centuries and have Catholic friends, but in the new nation state of Catholic Spain the Banu Hudayl must convert, migrate or join a doomed rebellion. Waterman’s article looks at Ali’s novel as a “fictional analysis of power politics”, in which Ali explores the idea that in any social upheaval, a previous coexistence, or power-sharing contract, gives way to realpolitik or rather the politics of the stronger and the more powerful which turns neighbours into enemies. Waterman points out that as a novelist, the Lahore-born Ali brings with him the awareness of Partition’s divisions and the violence between Hindus and Muslims in 1947. The essay engages in particular with Michael Ignatieff’s study of the modern conflict between Serbia and Croatia, as an example, and also Ignatieff’s reference to Hitler’s persecution of German Jews, to demonstrate how a concept, an abstract, ideological hatred can destroy a shared identity, creating the “Hobbesian trap [ … ] where perceived threats create fear, which then governs behavior [ … ] and a doomsday spiral is set in motion”. In the tension, violence and hatred that follow, former friends and neighbours are identified as the enemy within. Waterman also refers to the destruction by the Serbian National Army, in Sarajevo, in 1992, of millions of priceless Jewish and Arabic scripts. Ironically, this took place in the very year which marked the 500th anniversary of the Fall of Granada.

In her essay “Twenty Years Later: After Reading The Moor’s Last Sigh in 2015”, Shobhana Bhattacharji describes Rushdie’s novel as the last of four books that Rushdie published between 1990 and 1995, which revolve around political and religious extremism and the censorship of free speech. Her essay looks at The Moor’s Last Sigh’s portrayal of “fundamentalism-driven violence” from the Queen Isabella’s unification of Catholic Spain in 1492 to India’s communal riots in the late 1990s. The main protagonists are descended from the Jewish, Moorish and Catholic spice trader-settlers of Malabar, and represent India’s multiculturalism. Bhattacharji also points out that Rushdie cleverly sidesteps Hindu-Muslim Hindu-Christian academic debates, and enters Indian history through exiled victims of Queen Isabella’s “Reconquista”. His Europeans are not British missionaries, nor are they foreign invaders. The Zogoibys (Jews with an Arab name) and Da Gamas, descendants of the Portuguese Vasco da Gama, do not arrive as colonizers, but as spice traders, who settle in Malabar. Their family histories provide a direct link to 15th-century Spain and Portugal. Bhattacharji explores the novel in relation to Rushdie’s recent memoir Joseph Anton, which tells of his years in hiding following Imam Khomeini’s fatwa – a period during which The Moor’s Last Sigh was written and one which made him acutely aware of the rise of intolerance in India, so markedly different to the Nehruvian vision of a secular India.

I’ll tell you a secret about fear, said the Moor. It’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it [ … ] the revolution against fear [is] driven by [ … ] the simple need to get on with your life. (Rushdie 2012, 301; original emphasis)

Bhattacharji comments on Rushdie’s universalization of prejudice and bigotry and his prediction that in contemporary times it would grow worse over the years. Rushdie draws parallels between the pluralist cultures of India and al-Andalus through the imagery of a sequence of paintings that interweave and juxtapose the celebrated red stone architecture of both. Through this discourse, Bhattacharji focuses on Rushdie’s portrayal of modern India and the growing power of religious extremists which, she says, has eclipsed its hybridity

Today, discussions on al-Andalus include frequent references to the high level of independence, learning and freedom enjoyed by the women of Andalus, compared to the continuing rhetoric of orthodox Muslims and also western notions of “oppressed Muslim women”. However, Kamila Shamsie points out that much of the writing about women in al-Andalus is masked either by patriarchal narratives or by twisted Islam versus the west arguments in which al-Andalus is used to reinforce one or the other rhetoric to further political agendas. Her essay “Librarians, Rebels, Property Owners, Slaves: Women in al-Andalus” explores a literary culture where women could participate as poets and literary figures and were often clearly employed as scribes. To ascertain their role and status in society, and the extent to which it was dependent on inheritance and property rights, she looks at, and contrasts, the lives of two well-known writers: Lubna of Córdoba, who was possibly a slave or a freed slave; and Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, daughter of an erstwhile Umayyad caliph, who was not only a poet in her own right but also the subject of poems by the celebrated poet Ibn Zaydun, her onetime lover.

This issue also contains three interviews relating to portrayals of al-Andalus. In her introduction to “Highlighting the Sceptical Strain: An Interview with Tariq Ali”, Cara Cilano points out that Shadows of a Pomegranate Tree was the first of Ali’s Quintet of novels, which engage with the encounter between Islam and Christianity at crucial points in history. She adds that in Shadows Ali does not project facile images of an idealized Islamic empire; his aim is to recapture a space for historical and philosophical scepticism in Islamic culture – a concept which gathers an increasing momentum in the Quintet’s subsequent novels and which is discussed by Ali in the interview. Cilano also makes the interesting observation that in his interview with her, Ali showed little interest in discussing the convivencia usually associated with al-Andalus, whereas in an earlier interview (with Maniza Naqvi) he had suggested that his novels were mostly set in Europe “to show that there was a time when different cultures co-existed in Europe and it was normal to be a European Muslim or Jew” (Naqvi 2010). She says that in this definition the word “co-exist”, “commonly conjoined with ‘peacefully’, [ … ] has a more neutral denotation, indicating at base the simultaneity of space and time” and that “Ali’s fictions trouble mono-culturalism, claims to purity, exclusionary nativisms, and related concepts” (Cilano, citing Naqvi 2010).

The Fall of Granada in 1492 marked the end of Moorish Spain; the Jews and Muslims were both expelled; their customs and culture were banned; many preferred to live in their homeland and convert. In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, which he claimed in the name of his patron, the Catholic Queen Isabella. But the suppressed story of the Moors lingered on in Spain, entering

into the story of the American Empire, first explored and peopled by untold numbers of first-generation immigrants from all the old provinces of al-Andalus. The trunks taken to the New World were filled, necessarily, with what those Andalusian were – and what they wore and what they ate and what they assumed buildings should look like. (Menocal [2002] 2009, 3694)

Laila Lalami’s novel The Moor’s Account, set in the early 16th century, takes the narrative beyond al-Andalus to Catholic Spain’s imperial ambitions in the southern Mediterranean and the Americas. In her interview with me, “Reconstructing the Story of Mustafa/Estebanico: A Moor in the New World”, Lalami, who is a Moroccan American, discusses The Moor’s Account and the challenges of excavating the suppressed narratives of Spain and the New World to reconstruct the story of Estebanico and the Native American tribes that he and his Spanish companions encountered. He is a historical character, who is mentioned in Cabeza de Vaca’s account of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition to Florida in 1527, but referred to there only briefly, as a black slave from Azemmur, even though he was one of only five men to survive the expedition, and is regarded today as the first African American explorer of the New World.

The story of al-Andalus has many different dimensions, which emerge in Rachel Holmes interview with Robert Irwin, the noted Arabic scholar. He refers to the Alhambra as “an architectural paradise”, and comments on themes of exile and nostalgia which pervade the literature and history of Muslim Spain, including the works of Ibn Hazm and Al Maqqari. His views on western scholarship and Orientalism – which he says owed much to Arab scholars (contrary to Edward Said’s discourse on the subject) – and his comment on al-Andalus’s famous convivencia as a somewhat idealized ahistorical perception, add an interesting note of dissent to the discussions in this issue. On the other hand, he also refers to the rich cultural inheritance of al-Andalus and the profound influence of Arabic literature on European writing, particularly through The Thousand and One Nights; while Arabic fables such Kalila wa Dimna⁷ influenced European ones, such as those of La Fontaine. He also refers to the strong influence of Arabic verse forms on troubadour poetry.

In 1987, Maria Rosa Menocal (1953–2012) published her pioneering work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, which reveals that, at the time she did her postgraduate studies in Romance philology in the USA, the etymology of the word “troubadour” was largely considered to be unknown (Menocal [1987] 2004, ix–x), although in 1928 the Spanish Arabist Julian Riberia had suggested its origins were in the Arabic word taraba, which means “to sing” (Menocal [1987] 2004, xi). Menocal’s exploration of this question led her to the Arabic muwashshaha, the new popular song in the 11th century, “which embodied the symbiotic culture of al-Andalus rather than its Classical Arabic heritage” (30). This form of song in turn inspired in neighbouring Provençe the birth of Europe’s first vernacular poetry – troubadour, Occitan or courtly love poetry. The first troubadour was William IX of Aquitaine, who had had frequent contacts with the Iberian Peninsula and married a princess of Aragon.

Menocal also considers the Crusades, which were driven by a combination of military and economic imperatives and brought Europeans into further contact with the Arab world and its philosophers as well as with Greek texts translated into Arabic. All these influences contributed to the ferment in European academia and impelled the questioning and the quest for knowledge which led to the European Renaissance. She writes too of the Jewish heritage of al-Andalus and “the tripartite culture of al-Andalus, [in which] the Christians’ and the Jews’ contribution and adaptation of cultural and intellectual material was often expressed in the prestige language, Arabic” (Menocal [1987] 2004, 37). In a later book, Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, Menocal says of al-Andalus that “it was there that the profoundly Arabized Jews rediscovered and reinvented Hebrew” (Menocal [2002] 2009, loc. 267 of 4397 Kindle) beginning with the work of the gifted poet and statesman Samuel the Nagid (Shmuel HaNagid). The English translations of his poetry by Peter Cole are reproduced in this issue, together with writings from other leading Andalusi Hebrew poets, including Dunash ben Labrat, the Wife of Dunash (and the only woman poet in this early Hebrew canon), Shelomoh ibn Gabirol, Moshe ibn Ezra and Yehuda HaLevi. Cole begins his introduction to this selection as follows:

For every gall-eaten page testifying to the fruitful harmony between the different cultures of medieval Andalusia, the responsible historian or even poet-translator can, without having to hunt very hard, point to counter-claims rooted in the racialist and often vitriolic documents of the day. Nowhere, however, is the alloy of at least two and sometimes three of the period’s major civilizations on more compelling display than it is in the Arabized Hebrew poetry written by Jews in al-Andalus between the 10th and 13th centuries. Produced largely under Muslim rule, but sometimes within reconquered Christian territories, the verse of the so-called Golden Age of Hebrew Poetry explored a full range of human experience for the first time in the history of post-biblical Hebrew literature.

I would like to express my thanks to Peter Cole for permission to reproduce these translations from his celebrated book The Dream of the Poem (Cole 2007), and to the Pakistani American poet Shadab Zeest Hashmi for introducing him and his work to me.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s engagement with al-Andalus was partly inspired by Iqbal’s Urdu poem “Masjid e Qurtaba” and led to her first visit to Andalus and ultimately her poetry collection The Baker of Tarifa (Hashmi 2010), a contemplation of that brilliant culture, its demise as well as its enduring legacies. In this issue her creative memoir “Bread and the Secret/Musk of Books” describes her travels to Spain, where landscape, image, imagination and historical memory merge into her sense of self and her poetry.

In a very different creative narrative “Another Way of Saying: A Reverie on the Poetry of al-Andalus”, the Cyprus-born British poet and academic Alev Adil blurs fiction and non-fiction to tell of her journey to the Alhambra. This in turn becomes a symbolic and personal search for answers, within her own life, as the daughter of a Turkish father and a British mother. She grew up with two faiths, Islam and Christianity, and two poetic traditions, Ottoman and English, “but there was no divide, no bridge”. To resolve the complexities of such an inheritance, she explored translations of the Arab Andalusian poetry of the past including the ghazal, udhrī, hijā, khamrīyah, mujun and ritha. She “mapped the word-world” and looked for her literary ancestry in al-Andalus’s women poets, including Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, Nazhun al-Garnatiya bint al-Qulai’iya, and Hafsa bint Hajj ar-Rakuniyya. Adil’s entire narrative is linked by the messages she texts to her absent lover in distant London.

The reviews section includes a number of books which cover a wide ground but are related to Muslim literature and history. The two books that I have reviewed, The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami, and Granada: The Light of Anadalucia by Stephen Nightingale, give a further context to some of the topics discussed in the articles about al-Andalus. Lalami’s novel has been mentioned here already; Nightingale’s book describes the author’s decision to settle in Granada’s Albayzin district and his discovery of its rich inheritance. Bruce King’s review essay “Losing Paradise Now” covers a number of books by or about authors from Muslim backgrounds. Humaira Saeed looks at two significant works which take the story of the relationship between Europe and the Muslim world forward to different eras: the historian Ayesha Jalal’s erudite and thought-provoking The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics, which covers the history of Pakistan, including a strong culture of political dissent and resistance, the genesis of modern politics and the rise of global Islam today; and Claire Chambers’s Britain through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780–1988, which focuses on travelogues and travel fiction by writers of a Muslim heritage. This is the first volume in a two-book project by Chambers: the second will lead up to the present day.

As such, I hope this special issue of al-Andalus will generate a discourse on the cultural commingling of literature and the arts which has forged the world as we know it today – not the notions of exclusivity which are so frequently bandied around to reinforce ideas of dominance and power. Al-Andalus provides a particularly fascinating example of a culture which was ostensibly vanquished by a military and ideological onslaught and consigned to oblivion, but whose intellectual and creative energy lived on in other, often distant lands, albeit in many different ways, through a process of adaptation, mutation and change.

Notes on contributor

Muneeza Shamsie is the author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of a Pakistani Literature in English (forthcoming). She is a member of the international advisory board of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and is bibliographic representative (Pakistan) for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She served as regional chair (Eurasia) for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009–11. She was also a jury member for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and now serves on its advisory committee.

Notes

1. See Menocal [1987] 2004, 1–25.

2. This was published as “South Asian Muslims: Fiction and Poetry in English” (Shamsie 2011).

3. See Muneeza Shamsie (forthcoming) for a discussion of Taufiq Rafat and his translation of the Punjabi mystics Bulleh Shah and Qadir Yar.

4. Morey and Yaqin (2011) provide an informed discussion on this and related narratives in their book Framing Muslims.

5. I am grateful to Claire Chambers for suggesting I should develop the “Andalus” theme from the Notre Dame paper into this second essay.

6. This was originally a short story, “Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda” by Aamer Hussein (2007), written after the 7/7 London bombing. Subsequently, Adil and Hussein (2013) developed it into “Nine Postcards, Nine Notes”, written in two different voices.

7. See Muneeza Shamsie (forthcoming). This is a particularly fascinating example of literary transmutation since it was inspired by The Panchatantra in the 4th century BC, a collection of allegorical fables about animals, narrated by an Indian monk Bidpay to instruct an Indian prince. Over many centuries, these stories travelled eastward to China and westward to Persia, were translated into Pahlavi, became Kalila wa Dimna in Arabic and Persian which in turn reached Europe and influenced both Aesop’s Fables and the Fables of La Fontaine.