Abstract
Addressing, and indeed challenging, powerfully simplistic (mis)appropriations of imagined pasts is an ongoing concern for contemporary historians. Numerous modern groups and figures react to, or wish to emulate, exaggerated narratives of various mediaeval histories which are viewed in parallel to contemporary issues and events, in order to promote contemporary socio-political agendas. With this in mind, the focus of Eric Calderwood's On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus is not mediaeval al-Andalus, nor its history. Rather, Calderwood combines mediaeval, cultural, memory and literary studies to explore the ‘afterlife’ of al-Andalus in the centuries since it was lost.
The name ‘al-Andalus’ refers to Muslim-ruled Iberia. Andalusian history began in 711 CE when the Umayyad Caliphate began its conquest of Christian Visigothic Hispania. After the Caliphate was toppled in 750, surviving Umayyads fled from their Syrian heartlands to their former Iberian territories, where they established the Emirate, and then Caliphate, of Córdoba. By 1031, the caliphate had crumbled into independent taifa kingdoms. These were conquered and ruled by two Berber powers: the Almoravid Empire, and then the Almohad Caliphate. They then split once more into taifa kingdoms, which fell to the Christian Reconquista. The final Iberian Muslim polity, the Nasrid Emirate of Granada, was lost to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. The forced expulsion of Iberian Jews, and forced conversion of Iberian Muslims, soon followed, spelling the end of al-Andalus. Compared to the injustices and fanaticism of the inquisition in newly expanded Aragon and Castile, the convivencia – that is, peaceful interfaith co-existence – which had allegedly existed in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus has been celebrated, as have Andalusian cultural, intellectual and scientific developments. In short, al-Andalus is feted for having been a multicultural, peaceful and refined paradise.
Yet Andalusian history spanned seven centuries, in which numerous Arab- and Berber-ruled polities rose and fell across the Iberian Peninsula. The demographics, cultural developments, and quality of interfaith relationships across these polities varied. Calderwood notes, therefore, that al-Andalus is somewhat of a ‘moving target’, and its legacy differs between different modern regional, ethnic and political groups. He asks: how do contemporary (and near-contemporary) authors, artists and public figures imagine al-Andalus, and their relationship with it – and how does this translate into action in the present, and aspirations for the future? Calderwood answers such questions thematically, and divides On Earth or in Poems into five chapters, which concern Arab, Berber, Feminist, Palestinian and Harmonious legacies of al-Andalus – and how these are expressed in music, politics, art, museums and literature.
Chapters one and two, the ‘Arab al-Andalus’ and ‘Berber al-Andalus’, respond to debates concerning ethnic and religious identity in the Arab world and Maghreb. Chapter one opens with a 1966 concert given by Fayruz at Kuwait's Cinema al-Andalus, at which a rendition of her Andaloussiyat album was given, and poetry by the Granadian polymath Ibn al-Khatib (1313–1375) was read. Fayruz, Calderwood notes, is Christian and Lebanese, her audience was primarily Kuwaiti and Muslim, and the subject of her concert was al-Andalus, which existed centuries ago, some 6000 km away. What linked Fayruz, her audience, and her subject was not, then, nationality, religion or geography, but a sense of shared Arab identity. The ensuing chapter concerns how numerous Arab writers associate the famed cultural splendour and convivencia of al-Andalus with the Arab Umayyads – and not with the later taifa kingdoms, or the Berber Almoravids and Almohads. This association first surfaced with the Andalusian poet Ismail ibn Muhammad al-Shaqundi, who, writing under the Almohads, wistfully recalled the splendour of al-Andalus under the Arabs. It resurfaced during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Nahda, when the Lebanese writer Jurji Zaydan composed a series of historical novels which presented the cultural refinement and religious tolerance of Umayyad Córdoba in contrast with the greed and violence and of the Arabs’ Berber troops. Similar imagery was likewise employed in the twenty-first century Syrian Saqr Quraysh TV series, which highlighted links between al-Andalus and the Umayyad Syrian heartlands, and which associated convivencia and culture with Arab rule, and fanaticism and uncouthness with their Berber troops.
The ‘Berber al-Andalus’ contrasts such representations with North African presentations of post-Umayyad Andalusian convivencia and cultural splendour. Such representations link al-Andalus not with the Arab East, but with the Maghrebi South, whose relationship with Iberia both predated and outlasted Umayyad rule. The chapter begins with a discussion of Granada's 2019 Zirid Granada and the Berber Universe exhibition, which presented Almoravid and Almohad al-Andalus as a place of artistic, cultural and scientific renaissance, and as the last bastion of Islam in Iberia. The exhibition arose from longstanding Moroccan efforts to rehabilitate the legacy of Berber-ruled al-Andalus, beginning with those of early twentieth-century Moroccan intellectuals like Ahmed Balafrej, Muhammad al-Fasi and Abd’ Allah Gannun, who presented al-Andalus as an Arabic-Berber-Moroccan-Islamic project. As Calderwood notes, more recent figures like Driss Chraïbi and Sa’id al-Nasiri – responding to scathing representations of Berber rule by Arab and European writers – have tended to bridge the Andalusian past with the Moroccan present and sidestep Umayyad contributions, whilst contemporary proponents of the Amazigh Culture Movement like Mohammad Shafiq have presented Berber al-Andalus as the zenith of Andalusian culture and convivencia.
In his third and fourth chapters, Calderwood discusses how the famed cultural splendour of al-Andalus has been appropriated by modern emancipatory movements. Chapter three, the ‘Feminist al-Andalus’, concerns how Middle Eastern and global women's rights movements have presented al-Andalus as a site of historical female empowerment, freedom, and cultural contributions. Since the Nahda, numerous feminist figures, including Zaynab Fawwaz, Warda al-Yaziji, Salma al-Haffar al-Kuzbari, Labiba Hashim, Radwa ‘Ashur and Saliha Ghabish have stressed the talents, refinement, and achievements of female Andalusian writers, scholars, warriors, rebels, artists, doctors, grammarians and politicians, such as the poets ʿĀʾisha bint Aḥmad and Buthaina, the regent Subh, the palace secretary and mathematician Lubna, and the malika Zaynab an-Nafzāwiyyah. The Moroccan feminist Khanatha Binnuna, for example, named Casablanca's Lycée Wallada after the Andalusian poet Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, whose poetry also appears on Melbourne's 2016 I Am My Own Guardian mural, which protested Saudi guardianship rules. In emphasising examples of female empowerment in al-Andalus, such activists have contested associations made between Islam and female oppression, and have developed a distinctly Middle-Eastern women's rights movement with global influence.
Chapter four, the ‘Palestinian al-Andalus’, concerns how Palestinian writers have compared the loss of al-Andalus with the realities faced by contemporary Palestinians. The works of twentieth-century writers Yusuf al-’Isa and ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Karmi linked the loss of Palestinian lands to the expulsion of Muslims after the fall of Granada, while those of Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Muhammad ‘Abd Allah al-Ju’aydi and Burhan al-Din al-’Abboushi presented the loss of al-Andalus as a warning of the potential loss of all Palestinian territory. In later Palestinian literature, such as the writings of Mahmoud Darwish, al-Andalus also symbolises nostalgia, cultural memories, possibility, resistance, and return. Such symbolism is also employed by liberal Israelis such as Yael Lerer – the founder of Andalus Publishing – Abraham Sharon Yahuda, and Salim Sha'shu’, who have presented al-Andalus as a golden age of Muslim-Jewish convivencia, which, they hope, could happen once more between Palestinians and Israelis.
In his final chapter, Calderwood moves onto the ‘Harmonious al-Andalus’, which explores how music is used to convey Andalusian sound, spirit, culture and convivencia. Numerous Moroccan, Arabic, Spanish and international artists, including Ronnie Malley, Patricia Álvarez, ‘Abd al-Sadiq Shaqara, José Heredia Maya, Manuel de Falla, Federico García Lorca, Amina Alaoui, Tuhami al-Dad al-Qasri, Clara Eugenia Sabarezi, and Enrique Morente, have fused flamenco, North African Andalusian and other varied musical traditions, styles and performance spaces to emulate the multiculturalism and splendour of al-Andalus. More recently, Moroccan and Spanish artists including ToteKing, H-Kayne, Oum, Elena Vargas, Haze, Sayflhak and Khaled have fused flamenco with hip hop and trap, and Spanish lyrics with Daraja and Arabic, to emulate a shared Andalusian past which reaches across postcolonial ethnic, cultural, class, and religious divides in Spain and Morocco.
Calderwood ends with a return to contemporary Córdoba. Modern tensions between the Catholic cathedral chapter and liberal local groups regarding the religious history and character of the city's famous mosque-cathedral exemplify that disputes over Andalusian history and heritage continue, even in the very heart of historical al-Andalus.
On Earth or in Poems’ great strength lies in the varied and rich body of sources Calderwood consults – literature, art, architecture, film, music, exhibitions and academic works, composed in an impressive range of styles and languages, from eighth-century Arabian poetry to twenty-first-century rap – in order to explore different distinct legacies of al-Andalus. This approach has its drawbacks: representations of al-Andalus which cross-pollinated or developed in reaction to one another are treated as entirely separate, as a result of which there is some necessary repetition between discussions of the ‘Arab’, ‘Berber’ and ‘Harmonious al-Andalus’. Yet a non-chronological, thematic structure allows Calderwood to masterfully emphasise – as Darwush, referring to his own fascination with al-Andalus, once said – that ‘the present bleeds into the speaker's vision of the past, just as the past hovers over and shapes the speaker's present’: how complex historical contexts and grievances are portrayed in response to contemporary anxieties and conflicts, but also how cultural, scientific and political achievements of historical peoples – particularly subaltern groups – can be emphasised to dismiss modern justifications of inequality and oppression.