Writing in the fourteenth century, the renowned literary critic al-Ṣafadī recorded a current definition of the ultimate ẓarf, “sophistication” or “elegance,” a quality highly prized and contested in Arab social and literary circles throughout premodern times. The true sophisticate is one who “wears robes of white and rings of carnelian, recites the Qurʾan according to the reading of Abū ʿĀmr, knows the sacred law according to the tradition of al-Shafii, and relates the poetry of Ibn Zaydūn” (al-Maqqarī 3:566). This recipein- a-nutshell for the attainment of social polish reflects the high aesthetic regard in which Ibn Zaydūn’s poetry has been held in the Arabic literary tradition. Often described as a master of passion and longing, Ibn Zaydūn is generally held to be the outstanding Arab poet of al-Andalus and ranks among the most illustrious love poets in all Arabic literature. His stormy love affair with Wallāda, the daughter of the Umayyad caliph al-Mustakfī, takes its place alongside the Eastern stories of Laylā and Majnūn, Buthayna and Jamīl, as a classic tale of passion and separation that lives on in the Arab imagination and figures prominently, if in bowdlerized version, in modern schoolbooks. Ibn Zaydūn’s poetry also seems to capture the essence of Andalusian poetry at large, shining in two areas considered characteristic fortes of Andalusian literature: the description of gardens and the relatively unstylized presentation of emotion and experience. In its forthrightness, Ibn Zaydūn’s work recalls that of his contemporary Ibn Ḥazm.

Less than a century after Michael Scot’s death in about 1235, Dante placed this translator and scientist, who passed his last years at the Sicilian court of Frederick II, in the Divine Comedy, where, rather than being praised for his important Arabic-to-Latin translations, he was unpleasantly consigned to punishment among the sorcerers in hell’s eighth circle (Inferno xx, 115–17) – and this is only the most vivid instance of his posthumous reputation as a magician and alchemist. Yet it was through the intensely active intermediation of such restless souls as Michael that a vast quantity of Arabic writing was made available to Latin-Christian thinkers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Indeed, just as the creative energy of the Hellenized East had flowed into Arabic civilization itself only through the intercession of a peculiar assortment of pagan, Jewish, Christian, and convert translators in the Islamic heartlands, so Arabic scholarship’s considerable impact on medieval European culture required a similar class of cosmopolitan linguists of whom Michael Scot is thoroughly representative in both his labors and his misleading posthumous fame.

Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥ ammad ibn al-ʿArabī, as he styled himself in his writings, or Muḥyī l-Dīn ibn ʿArabī, as he was known to Eastern Muslims, was born in Murcia in 560/1165, at the beginning of the Almohad reign. Following the death of the local ruler Ibn Mardanīsh, Ibn ʿArabī’s father, a high-ranking Arab official at the Murcian court, moved to Seville to take a post in the Almohad sultan’s administration. There, in the capital of the Almohad state, the young Ibn ʿArabī was schooled in the traditional Islamic sciences including the Qurʾan and Qurʾanic exegesis, hadith, jurisprudence, adab, and kalam. He studied with the best Andalusi ulama of his epoch and quickly mastered all the major fields of Arabo-Islamic knowledge.

Little is known about that early period, which Ibn ʿArabī subsequently dismissed as a mere prelude to his all-important mystical life (Austin, Sufis 24; Addas, Ibn ʿArabī 45–51). There is some evidence that he was employed as a secretary at the chancery of the governor of Seville, although the exact circumstances of his worldly career cannot be ascertained. In Ibn ʿArabī’s own words, he led the carefree life typical of wealthy young men of noble Arab stock (Addas, Ibn ʿArabī 55–56).

Ramon Llull – vir phantasticus (crazy man); doctor illuminatus (enlightened doctor); arabicus christianus (Arabic Christian); philosophus barbatus (bearded philosopher); “founder of Catalan prose and one of Catalonia’s greatest medieval writers” (Bonner in Llull, Doctor 45); “author of a vast number of works – 265 according to the latest catalogue of works – on countless subjects and in numerous literary forms” (45); “the first European to write prose novels on contemporary themes” (1); author of the million-word Book of Contemplation (written first in Arabic – all of Llull’s Arabic writings have been lost or were destroyed – then in Catalan) – was able “to elaborate a theory of the universe which, of all medieval theories, came closest to a general hypothesis which should explain all observable phenomena” (Hillgarth 17). Furthermore, Llull, who is also recognized as one of the founders of the European study of Near Eastern languages, established in 1276 an Arabic language school in Miramar on Majorca, and in 1311 he successfully petitioned the Church Council of Vienne to establish chairs of Arabic at the Universities of Paris, Louvain, and Salamanca.

If Llull is less known today than he perhaps ought to be, this fall into relative obscurity is a rather recent phenomenon. As Peers remarked concerning Llull’s fame through the eighteenth century, “there really were those who could take seriously the refrain: ‘Tres sabios hubo en el mundo, / Adán, Salomón y Raymundo’ [There have been three wise men in the world / Adam, Solomon, and Ramon], and there were even those who could quote the notorious remark, attributed to one Père Rossell, that the Old Testament was the work of God the Father, the New Testament of God the Son, and the writings of Ramon of God the Holy Spirit” (402).

The Normans seized Muslim-controlled Sicily during the eleventh century and established the “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies” (that is, the island on one hand and the southern tip of the Italian mainland on the other), a state that blended Muslim, Eastern Christian, and Western Christian institutions and cultural influences, and culminated during the reigns of Roger II (1130–54), William I (1154–66), and William II (1166–89). William II left no heir to the throne, and on his death the state was thrown into confusion as battles over succession erupted. In 1198, after nineteen years of civil unrest during which various Norman and German contenders battled for control of Sicily, four-year-old Frederick II, the son of German king Henry VI and Roger’s daughter Constance, was crowned king of Sicily.

The Norman state was strong, and many of its institutions survived the interregnum between William II and Frederick. However, cultural production in Sicily came to a temporary end. At the court of Frederick II, Sicilian culture would be brilliantly revived. The historical relationship between Sicily and the Muslim world and the prestige attached to the Arabic scientific tradition made that tradition particularly appealing to Frederick. He brought translators and learned men to Sicily from other lands; scientific texts were imported for translation, then exported to other European cities. He circulated a series of philosophical questions to Arabic scholars.

The descendants of Hispanic Jews exiled from Spain in 1492, who have retained their Spanish language and an awareness of their Iberian cultural heritage down to the present day, are, in a sense, the last representatives of the distinctive, multiethnic, trireligious society that developed and flourished in al-Andalus and later in Christian Spain during the Middle Ages. Their links to that culture and distant time can still be found in certain features of their modern heritage. Together with their continued use of the Spanish language, the religious poetry of the great masters of Golden Age Hebrew literature continues to echo, in Spanish translation, in the sacred verse of the Sephardim; the metrics of Sephardic didactic poetry and of oral lyric songs, in a number of instances, still faithfully reflect medieval Hispanic models; many Judeo-Spanish romances perpetuate, in both meter and subject matter, the verse and the narratives of medieval Castilian epics and their early balladic derivatives; and the Judeo-Spanish ballads still embody a few striking evocations of a medieval Hispanic trireligious society, whose memory has all but disappeared from similar oral poetry sung today on the Iberian Peninsula. On the following pages, I review the vernacular literature of the Sephardic Jews, stressing, wherever possible, the continuity between the Hispanic past and later literary and linguistic developments.

The Hispanic Jews who fled from al-Andalus to the Christian north after the Almoravid invasion (1091–1147) were probably bilingual, speaking both colloquial Hispano-Arabic and Mozarabic, the archaic Hispano-Romance dialect spoken throughout Muslim Spain during the early Middle Ages. Learned individuals were, of course, also conversant in Hebrew and in classical Arabic. During the early years of their residence in Christian territory, some Jews may perhaps have developed a distinctive form (or forms) of Jewish Spanish but, as Laura Minervini (Testi ) has eloquently shown, by the fifteenth century, Spanish Jews wrote and undoubtedly also spoke a language that was very similar, if not essentially identical, to that of their Christian neighbors.

TIMES OF TEARS

“We are not in times of grace, but of tears.” Thus the sixteenth-century Spanish crypto-Muslim Baray de Reminŷo sums up the emotional situation of Spain’s last Muslims prior to their final expulsion in 1609. The statement is echoed throughout the literature of these hybrid Spaniards who had to resort to transliterating the Spanish language of their oppressors with the Arabic script of the once flourishing al-Andalus. Another Morisco author, who chose to hide his identity under the pseudonym “El Mancebo de Arévalo,” depicts the Mora de Ubeda, an old Muslim woman, “weeping at the fate of the Muslims” as she relates how she lost all her relatives and possessions during the 1492 siege of Granada.

Muhammad himself is seen in Morisco literature to cry over al-Andalus’s fate. In ms 774 of the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris Ibn ʿAbbās recounts in an aljofor (prophecy) that the Prophet, after his evening prayer, looked over the setting sun and cried. Pressed to explain his sorrow, Muhammad answered: “I have wept because my Lord has shown me an island called Andalusia, which will be the most distant island populated of all of Islam, and which will be the first from which Islam will be thrown” (Sánchez Álvarez 252).

Spanish Morisco literature constitutes a collective effort to preserve the community’s Islamic identity against the overwhelming difficulties of Inquisitorial Spain. All the remnants of Muslim culture – religious ceremonies, language, personal names, regional apparel, even the festive dance of the zambra – had been strictly forbidden by a succession of official edicts throughout the sixteenth century. Many Moriscos fled to Muslim countries, while those who stayed in Spain were forcibly baptized. But some of the most adamant Muslims, now “officially” Catholic, went underground. From the midst of these crypto-Muslims came the combative yet sorrowful authors we have been quoting.

In the Muslim East, a literary intellectual of Arabic and Persian traditions might well earn the honorific dhū l-lisānayn – one who commanded the two principal languages in which Islamic culture was then conducted, preserved, and transmitted. Members of the Muslim oikoumēnē of a different order and a singular socioreligious condition, the Jews of al-Andalus also esteemed cultural literacy in two languages, one of which was Arabic. Moses Ibn Ezra’s (d. c. 1138) epistolary lyric to Abū Ibrāhīm (Isaac) Ibn Barun (eleventh century), the author of a comparative grammar and lexicon, Kitāb al-muwāzana bayn al-lugha al-ʿibrāniyya wa l-ʿarabiyya (Book of Comparison between the Hebrew and Arabic Languages), and Judah Halevi’s (d. 1141) rhymed-prose salute to Ibn Ezra, the venerable dean of Andalusi-Jewish letters, among many texts expressing similar sentiments, unambiguously set forth the Andalusi Jews’ cultural ideal valorizing Arabic as well as Hebrew learning. Other texts authored by these figures bespeak a more complex and ambivalent sense of the Jews’ multiple cultural loyalties.

The literary culture of the Arabized Jews of al-Andalus represents, among other things, a particular instance of the general development of the Jews under Islam during the Middle Ages. Afforded economic opportunity, religious freedom, and social integration in the defined role of “protected people,” Jews were also caught up in the intellectual stimulation and challenges of Islamic civilization. The principal means by which the Jews of Islam west of the Iranian plateau gained access to the economic and social domain of Islam as well as its cultural realm was their apparently swift adoption of Arabic as the language of everyday life, an accommodation that also saw them employ Arabic as their primary although not sole literary language.

THE ARABIC MAQAMA

Few classical Arabic literary phenomena have achieved as much fame, both inside and outside the Arabic world, as the maqama. The maqamat are collections of short independent narratives written in ornamental rhymed prose (sajʿ) with verse insertions, and share a common plot-scheme and two constant protagonists: the narrator and the hero. Each narrative (maqama) usually chooses one familiar adab-topos for elaboration; each tells of an episode in which the hero, a vagrant and mendicant who is also a man of letters and eloquence, appears in some public place (a market, mosque, cemetery, public bath, traveling caravan, etc.) in different guises, and tricks people into donating money to him by manipulating their feelings and beliefs. Usually the narrator witnesses the hero’s adventures, and at the end of each episode, the narrator exposes the hero’s identity, the hero justifies his behavior, and the two part amicably. This scheme appears in many variations, depending on the author and his age.

The maqama appeared on the Arabic literary scene in the tenth century, when the literary system was already well established, when bodies of knowledge constituting the core of Arabic education and learning had crystallized in the form of adab literature. Favored by the courts and scholars attached to the courts, of whose activity it was a product, adab was the alma mater of the maqama genre, serving as a literary fund from which the maqama drew practically everything, from literary models to particular themes, motifs, situations, verses of poetry, figures of speech, clichés, and ready-made rhymed-prose formulas.

Though celebrated as the outstanding composer of zajal – the strophic form that uses vernacular Arabic of al-Andalus – Ibn Quzmān has by and large remained an enigmatic and neglected poetic figure. We know little about his life: what has been passed on to us is a series of fragmented references found primarily in his diwan. At the outset, this is quite ironic, because Ibn Quzmān’s presence haunts almost all of his 149 zajals, regardless of their themes. Unexpectedly and frequently his voice breaks through the poetic frame, alerting the reader to his proximity. Ibn Quzmān enters a poem sometimes as its character and sometimes as his “real” self, further distracting the reader from an empathic response.

Ibn Quzmān’s life spans the period of Almoravid domination of the peninsula. In a panegyric dedicated to Almoravid leader Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn for the victory gained against the Christian forces at the battle of Zallaka in 1086, he mentions himself in a satirical reference to the great event. Although the reader at first experiences a sense of awe before a crucial military victory, Ibn Quzmān disrupts this sensation by drawing attention to himself through a facetious autobiographical remark:

Abū Bakr ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185/6) was born in Guadix, northeast of Granada, in the early twelfth century. He was trained in medicine and studied philosophy in the tradition of the iconoclastic Muslim thinker Ibn Bājja, although he never met this founding figure of Andalusian philosophy. His work as a physician placed him in court circles, and he became secretary to the governor of Granada and then to the governor of Ceuta and Tangier, a son of ʿAbd al-Mutammim, who had been the lieutenant and chief military commander of Ibn Tūmart, the founder of the Almohad dynasty. Ibn Ṭufayl became court physician to the Almohad sultan Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (r. 1163–84) and may have served as a qadi under Abū Yaʿqūb’s regime. The ruler was a lover of learning who gathered books in unprecedented numbers from all parts of his dominions and sought out scholars and thinkers as ornaments to his court. He genuinely enjoyed the philosopher’s company, and they spent hours, sometimes days, together in conversation. Ibn Ṭufayl is even named in one source as a vizier, or chief minister. He probably did not hold that rank, but his influence with the sultan was immense.

Beginning with the fitna (civil war) (c. 1010), early Taifa literary and visual culture directly engage the Cordoban court, through either emulation or manipulation of topoi. Surviving palatial spaces date largely to a second period, however, which begins around 1040. These later Taifa spaces can be divided into two categories: settings for official events that affirmed the ruling dynasty through traditional displays of riches and “marvelous things,” and spaces that served as the backdrops against which sovereign and nudamāʾ (drinking companions) indulged in the arcane excesses of the royal majlis (chamber). No complete official spaces survive, but the majlis is represented in the central zone of the Aljafería at Saragossa.

In accounts of official and private palatial spaces, two distinct visual languages might be seen as paralleling the two Taifa approaches to space. In a description of a complex of pavilions and rooms constructed by al-Maʾmūn of Toledo, Ibn Jabir communicates the orchestrated nature of the celebration in a matter-of-fact tone. The features that most attracted the author’s attention were the lavish ornamentation and textiles in salons and pavilions, and their formality and exclusivity. Accounts of “lifelike” ornament and opulent use of rare and luxurious materials – carefully listed in texts along with their provenance and ostentatiously displayed – are characteristic of the ornamental idiom used to address the conservative audience (quwwād,fuqahāʾ, and other upholders of the Maliki school) for which these official spaces were created.

THE GENRE

Of all the forms known to Arabic literature in al-Andalus, only strophic poetry is known to have originated on the peninsula. Despite certain characteristic thematic features, the Andalusian qasida and maqama remained principally products of the Muslim East, but strophic poetry is a quintessentially Andalusian creation and the most complete literary embodiment of the multiethnic and multilingual fabric of Andalusian society. The pride that Andalusians and Maghribis took in these genres is echoed well into the fourteenth century by Ibn Khaldūn, whose survey of Arabic literature culminates in an account of Andalusian strophic poetry. In both its varieties, the muwashshah – the prosodically more complicated form, employing classical language in all but its concluding couplet – and the zajal – which is simpler in form and vernacular throughout – Andalusian strophic poetry is indeed the most distinguished contribution of the Muslim West to the history of Arabic poetry, and its forms are most explicitly involved with the universe of incipient Romance lyrics.

But which form came first? The muwashshah – of which the earliest examples to have reached us date from the eleventh century – or the zajal – which appears as a literary form a little more than a hundred years later? Was one derived from the other? Or were these cognate forms both derived from an earlier type, the traces of which have vanished? Are those modern critics who follow Ibn Khaldūn right in considering the zajal to be the popularization and hybridization of the muwashshah? Or are those critics who see the muwashshah as the product of the literary elevation of the zajal correct? These questions are treated briefly below, in the survey of scholarship. Our present discussion is limited to the muwashshah.

Medieval Islamic Spain bequeathed to Europe and the Middle East a rich and enduring heritage in architecture, belles lettres, philosophy, poetry, religious thought, and science. This is no less true in the realm of music. The musical traditions of al-Andalus were celebrated in their own day, influenced the musical traditions of their northern neighbors, eventually relocated to and flourished in North Africa, and also spread to eastern Arab lands where they rapidly took root and thrived. At the easternmost boundaries of the Arabic-speaking world, however, their diffusion stopped; few traces of Andalusian poetic or musical forms are to be found in Persian or Turkish culture.

Along with the Ottoman and Persian classical music traditions, the Arabo-Andalusian musical legacy constitutes one of the great art music traditions of the Middle East, and indeed ranks as one of the oldest continuously performed art music traditions in the world. Arabo-Andalusian music (al-mūsīqā al-andalusiyya) subsumes a variety of historically distinct subtraditions that can be briefly identified as follows.

Iberian: These include the Arab musical traditions that originated in medieval Islamic Spain, specifically, the muwashshah and zajal, the two strophic vocal genres that emerged uniquely in Muslim Spain, and their associated instrumental genres. Although sometimes portrayed as a courtly tradition of the Muslim elite, the medieval song tradition of muwashshahs and zajals extended across sectarian and social boundaries.