Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- 1 The Untranslatability of the Qurʾānic City
- 2 Local Historians and their Cities: the Urban Topography of al-Azdī’s Mosul and al-Sahmī’s Jurjan
- 3 Against Cities: On Hijāʾ al-Mudun in Arabic Poetry
- 4 The Literary Geography of Meaning in the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī
- 5 “Woe is me for Qayrawan!” Ibn Sharaf ’s Lāmiyya, the Plight of Refugees and the Cityscape
- 6 In Memory of al-Andalus: Using the Elegy to Reimagine the Literary and Literal Geography of Cordoba
- 7 The Mamluk City as Overlapping Personal Networks
- 8 Citystruck
- 9 Between Utopia and Dystopia in Marrakech
- 10 Revolutionary Cityscapes: Yūsuf Idrīs and the National Imaginary
- 11 Lost Cities, Vanished Worlds: Configurations of Urban Autobiographical Identity in the Arabic Literature of the 1980s
- 12 The Sufis of Baghdad: A Topographical Index of the City
- 13 Baṣrayātha: Self-portrait as a City
- 14 Of Cities and Canons in an Age of Comparative Consumption
- 15 Everyday Writing in an Extraordinary City
- 16 Translating Cairo’s Hidden Lines: The City as Visual Text in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro
- About the Contributors
- Index
6 - In Memory of al-Andalus: Using the Elegy to Reimagine the Literary and Literal Geography of Cordoba
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- 1 The Untranslatability of the Qurʾānic City
- 2 Local Historians and their Cities: the Urban Topography of al-Azdī’s Mosul and al-Sahmī’s Jurjan
- 3 Against Cities: On Hijāʾ al-Mudun in Arabic Poetry
- 4 The Literary Geography of Meaning in the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī
- 5 “Woe is me for Qayrawan!” Ibn Sharaf ’s Lāmiyya, the Plight of Refugees and the Cityscape
- 6 In Memory of al-Andalus: Using the Elegy to Reimagine the Literary and Literal Geography of Cordoba
- 7 The Mamluk City as Overlapping Personal Networks
- 8 Citystruck
- 9 Between Utopia and Dystopia in Marrakech
- 10 Revolutionary Cityscapes: Yūsuf Idrīs and the National Imaginary
- 11 Lost Cities, Vanished Worlds: Configurations of Urban Autobiographical Identity in the Arabic Literature of the 1980s
- 12 The Sufis of Baghdad: A Topographical Index of the City
- 13 Baṣrayātha: Self-portrait as a City
- 14 Of Cities and Canons in an Age of Comparative Consumption
- 15 Everyday Writing in an Extraordinary City
- 16 Translating Cairo’s Hidden Lines: The City as Visual Text in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro
- About the Contributors
- Index
Summary
This chapter will examine the manifestation and transformation of the genre rithāʾ al-mudun (the city elegy) in the poetry of Ibn Zaydūn (d. 463/1071), a fifth/eleventh-century poet who experienced the disintegration of his home, the city of Cordoba, from afar. While Ibn Zaydūn composed numerous poems lamenting his bygone relationship with his beloved, the Umayyad princess Wallāda bint al-Mustakfī (d. 484/1091), he also wrote a number of poems elegising his beloved city. Throughout the course of his poems, his exile unfolds in temporal and spatial ways as he creates his version of Cordoba based on memories from his youth. The result is an exhaustive mapping and memorialization of Cordoba and the palace-city Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ as a Paradise Lost. By plotting the sites mentioned by Ibn Zaydūn in consultation with archaeological, art historical, and landscape architectural sources, the goal is to present an idea of the Cordoba that once was, fusing the task of the poet and historian into a single role of connecting the past city space with the patterns of a quotidian life long gone.
Ibn Zaydūn attempts to compensate for his loss of time, space, and identity through his distinctive rendition of the rithāʾ al-mudun and many of the sites, which are no longer in existence, are revivified to serve as personal repositories of memory for the exiled Cordoban. The rithāʾ al-mudun genre is traditional in form and style, utilising a series of stock tropes and patterns for a twofold purpose: as a medium for one's own mourning while simultaneously immortalising the lost city as remembered by the poet. While the city elegy provides a specific framework with which one can lament the loss of a homeland, Ibn Zaydūn reformulates the elegy's existing characteristics in his mukhammas to evoke the same feelings of mourning, remembrance, and nostalgia.
The rithāʾ al-mudun emerged in al-Andalus in the fifth/eleventh century after the fall of Cordoba in 1013 due to the Berber fitna and remained an important Andalusian form until the Capitulation of Granada in 1492.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The City in Arabic LiteratureClassical and Modern Perspectives, pp. 103 - 123Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018