The lost garden of al-andalus: Islamic Spain and the poetic inversion of colonialism

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 237-254

  Noorani, Yaseen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0345917302     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743800054039     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. ⊂y, 1994), 232-37, for a detailed description of this episode. For a biography of Iqbal, see Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel's Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 1989).
2. ⊂y, 1994), 232-37, for a detailed description of this episode. For a biography of Iqbal, see Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel's Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 1989).
3. ⊂Alī Makkī, "Al-Andalus fī Shi⊂r Ahmad Shawqī wa Nathrih," in Fusūl 3, no. 2 (1983): 200-34.
4. ⊂Alī Makkī, "Al-Andalus fī Shi⊂r Ahmad Shawqī wa Nathrih," in Fusūl 3, no. 2 (1983): 200-34.
5. ⊂Alī Makkī, "Al-Andalus fī Shi⊂r Ahmad Shawqī wa Nathrih," in Fusūl 3, no. 2 (1983): 200-34.
6. ⊂Alī Makkī, "Al-Andalus fī Shi⊂r Ahmad Shawqī wa Nathrih," in Fusūl 3, no. 2 (1983): 200-34.
7. ⊂Alī Makkī, "Al-Andalus fī Shi⊂r Ahmad Shawqī wa Nathrih," in Fusūl 3, no. 2 (1983): 200-34.
8. ⊂ālam-i naw hai abhī pardah-yi taqdīr men / meri nigāhon men hai us-kī sahar be-hijāb / pardah uthā dūn agar chihra-yi afkār se / lā na sakegā firang merī navāon kī tāb; Kulliyyāt-i Iqbāl, 100th ed. (Aligarh: Educational Bookhouse, 1993), 392, lines 59-61. Verses of this poem will be henceforth cited by line number only. All translations in this essay are my own, except where otherwise noted. For a full translation of the poem, see V. G. Kiernan, Poems from Iqbal (London: Murray, 1955), 68-71.
9. ⊂ālam-i naw hai abhī pardah-yi taqdīr men / meri nigāhon men hai us-kī sahar be-hijāb / pardah uthā dūn agar chihra-yi afkār se / lā na sakegā firang merī navāon kī tāb; Kulliyyāt-i Iqbāl, 100th ed. (Aligarh: Educational Bookhouse, 1993), 392, lines 59-61. Verses of this poem will be henceforth cited by line number only. All translations in this essay are my own, except where otherwise noted. For a full translation of the poem, see V. G. Kiernan, Poems from Iqbal (London: Murray, 1955), 68-71.
10. ⊂atnī ilayhi fī -l-khuldi nafsī; Al-Shawqiyyāt, vol. 1, part 2, 46, line 13. To be cited henceforth by line number only.
11. ⊂abdi shamsī [49] Shawqi's poem is modeled on a celebrated ekphrastic poem by the Abbasid poet al-Buhturī (d 897).
12. ⊃assi [110]
13. On the classical Arab nasīb, see Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arab Nasib (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
14. "Poetic sublimation" is a poetic structure or strategy rather than a psychic process revealed by poetry. It bears a structural resemblance to Freud's theory of sublimation, to which I return later.
15. ⊂Umdah (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1981), 2:294, and Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 69. Modern critics usually limit the term "ekphrasis" to description of works of art; I treat "wasf" as its equivalent for the purposes of this essay, even though the Arabic term is not usually limited to this sense.
16. ⊂Umdah (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1981), 2:294, and Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 69. Modern critics usually limit the term "ekphrasis" to description of works of art; I treat "wasf" as its equivalent for the purposes of this essay, even though the Arabic term is not usually limited to this sense.
17. Concentration on the inner meaning of an ekphrastic object with little or no reference to its outward appearance is actually an important strand in the history of ekphrasis, as has been shown by Jean H. Hagstrum, who characterizes it as "sacramental pictorialism" (Byzantine) or "emblematic." See Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 44-56, 94-100. Iqbal's poem belongs to this strand much more than Shawqi's, which displaces the present image not with meditation on its meaning but with "absent" images evoked by it.
18. Simon Goldhill has emphasized that "the self-conscious and self-reflexive dramatisation of viewing - seeing oneself seeing - is a fundamental element of Hellenistic ecphrasis" in his essay "Ecphrasis and the Culture of Viewing," in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205. In the poems I am discussing, a similar specular subjectivity forms the basis of political subjectivity.
19. Page Dubois has emphasized the way in which ekphrasis creates an icon that encapsulates history and narrative. See Page Dubois, History, Rhetorical Tradition and the Epic (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 4, 7. In these poems, as in the epics Dubois discusses, ekphrasis "clarifies the relationship between individual and community" (p. 3).
20. Partha Chatterjee has made precisely this point: "the problematic in nationalist thought is exactly the reverse of that of Orientalism. That is to say, the 'object' in nationalist thought is still the Oriental, who retains the essentialist character depicted in Orientalist discourse. Only he is not passive, non-participating. He is seen to possess a 'subjectivity' which he can himself 'make'. . . . At the level of the thematic, on the other hand, nationalist thought accepts and adopts the same essentialist conception based on the distinction between 'the East' and 'the West.'" From Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), 38.
21. ⊃an itself demonizes "Pharaoh," the enemy of Moses (e.g., 20:62-71). Those who disregard this religious antagonism must still find a principle of unity or continuity. Religious difference is exacerbated by the common association of the Egyptian Copts with preIslamic Egypt, and of the Muslims with the Arab invaders. Moreover, many intellectuals who seek to direct Egyptian culture toward the West or modernity, thus infuriating conservative religious elements, have made the emphasis of Egypt's pharaonic past part of their project, thereby associating the two. The unity that Shawqi seeks to effect therefore bridges a number of rifts in modern Egyptian culture.
22. ⊂Īsā al-Bābī al-Halabī, 1936), 24-25.
23. I have treated the rise of the new "bourgeois" audience in Egypt and its literary implications more fully in Yaseen Noorani, "A Nation Born in Mourning: The Neoclassical Funeral Elegy in Egypt," Journal of Arabic Literature 28 (1997): 38-67.
24. It was the year of the "1919 Revolution," mass demonstrations and strikes in protest of the persistence of British occupation. For an account, see P. J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chap. 12.
25. ⊂Arabī al-Klāsīkī," Fusūl 7, no. 1-2 (1987): 12-29. Stetkevych discusses the historical position of the "Sīniyyah" in the tradition of Arabic poetry and provides an analysis of its departure from al-Buhturī's model, making the observation from which my own argument proceeds: "the greater experience of Ahmad Shawqi's poem is not the subjective-aesthetic one of al-Buhturi so much as it is a national experience before history, and hence, a communal, national, loss of paradise" (p. 20).
26. The word "homeground" is suggested as a translation for the classical poetic watan by Stetkevycn in Zephyrs, 181.
27. hawā-yi kū-yi tū az sar namīrawad ārī / gharīb-rā dil-i sar-gashtah bā watan bāshad; Dīvān, ed. Khanlari (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i īrān, 1980), ghazal no. 156.
28. ⊃assī [4]
29. ⊂atan wa lam yakhlu hissī [15]
30. ⊂ran / wa tajarradna ghayra tawqin wa saisī [25-27]
31. W. J. T. Mitchell discusses the feminizing of the ekphrastic object in his essay "Ekphrasis and the Other," in Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 151-81. I return to the implications of this issue later.
32. Al-Shawqiyyāt, vol. 1, part 2, 44.
33. anzimu -shsharqa fī -l-jazīrati bi -l-ghar-/ bi wa atwī -l-bilāda haznan li-dahsī [50]
34. ⊂uqūli min kulli darsī / qudusan fī -l-bilādi sharqan wa gharban / hajjahu -l-qawmu min faqīhin wa qassī [55-61]
35. sinatun min karan wa tayfu amānin / wa sahā -l-qalbu min dalālin wa hajsī / wa idhā -ddāru mā bihā min anīsin / wa idhā -l-qawmu mā la-hum min muhissī [64-65]
36. ⊂ūbi wa marrat / sinatan hulwatan wa ladhdhata khalsī [3]
37. ⊂ārif, 1989) 2: 484.
38. ⊂addat li khamsī [70-72]
39. ⊂r Shawqī wa Nathrih," 222. As I have argued, what is important in the poem is not the physical appearance of the monument per se, but the nostalgia for the past that it evokes. The associative connections to which this gives rise indeed appear at times to be forced.
40. ⊂si [40-41]
41. ⊃attā / li-jabānin wa lā tasannā li-jibsī / wa idhā mā asāba binyāna qawmin / wahyu khulqin fa-innahū wahyu ussī [101-102]
42. ⊂alā balā-bilihi -ddaw-/ hu halālun li -ttayri min kulli jinsī / kullu dārin ahaqqu bi -l-ahli illā / fī khabīthin mina -l-madhāhibi rijsī [7-10]
43. ⊃ (Cairo: Mustafā al-Bābī al-Halabī, 1973), 152.
44. The Spanish critic Pedro Martinez Montavez argues that the "Andalusian" element of the "Sīniyyah" is submerged by the stronger presence of the poet's nostalgia for Egypt and his attachment to the Arab-Islamic heritage. Montavez regards the lack of balance he sees in the poem as the inevitable result of the poem's plurality of motives. See Pedro Martinez Montavez, Al-Andalus, España, en la literatura arabe contemporanea: la casa del pasado (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992), 46-48. I hope to have shown that the "Siniyyah" structures al-Andalus as the fully integrated culmination of its development. According to my reading, al-Andalus is not the short-changed subject of the poem, but the site whose sacred geography enables the Egyptian self, the poem's actual subject, to reach self-awareness.
45. ⊂ulā binyānah; Al-Shawqiyyāt, vol. 1, part 1, 251, lines 1-2.
46. ⊂alā -l-warā rūmānah [p. 253]; The first part of this verse can also be read, "Even if you blot out the nights with [black garments of] mourning . . ."
47. Quoted in Boudot-Lamotte, Ahmad Shawqī, 42.
48. ⊂jizah-yi fann kī hay khūn-i jigar se numūd [17-18]
49. naqsh hayn sab nā tamām khūn-i jigar ke bi-ghayr / naghmah sawdā-yi khām khūn-i jigar ke bighayr [64]
50. ⊂ishq hay asl-i hayāt mawt hay us-par harām [9-10]
51. tera jalāl o jamāl mard-i khudā kī dalīl / wo bhī jalīl o jamīl tū bhi jalīl o jamīl [25]
52. terī fazā dil-firoz meri nawā sīnah-soz / tujh-se dilon kā huzūr mujh-se dilon kā kushūd [20]
53. hay tih-i gardūn agar husn men terī nazīr / qalb-i musalmān men hay aur nahīn hay kahīn [42]
54. ⊂ishq khud ek sayl hay sayl ko leta hay thām [11]
55. ⊂asr-i rawān ke sawā / aur zamāne bhī hayn jin kā nahīn koī nām [12]
56. jin kī nigāhon ne kī tarbiyat-i sharq o gharb / zulmat-i yūrup men thī jin kī khirad rāh-bīn [45]
57. dekh chukā almanī shaurish-i islāh-i dīn / jis ne na chhore kahīn naqsh-i kuhan ke nishān . . . / chashm-i farānsīs bhi dekh chukī inqilāb / jis se digar gūn huwā maghribiyon kā jahān [51, 53]
58. ⊂ahd-i shabāb [58]
59. In this way the mosque, through its reflection in the poet's thought, becomes for Europe what Ernst Gombrich has termed an "apotropaic image," - that is, an image that induces horror and paralysis. To comprehend the meaning of the mosque is to foresee the demise of European hegemony.
60. ⊂amal kā hisāb [63]
61. ⊂Ajam, in Kulliyāt-i Iqbāl: Fārsī, ed. Javid Iqbal (Lahore: Shaykh Ghulam Ali and Sons, 1985), part 1, ghazal no. 48. This work has been rendered into English by A. J. Arberry, Persian Psalms (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1961).
62. See his essay "Ekphrasis and the Other," where he argues that ekphrastic poetry typically posits a gulf between the visual image and its linguistic self, which it maps onto various types of social and political difference, such as gender. Such poetry then tries to breach this gulf (ekphrastic hope) or finds it unbreachable and hence threatening (ekphrastic fear). The poems under discussion here are perfect examples of the "utopian" nature of ekphrastic hope, and indeed of the limits to which it can be pushed.
63. Iqbal first elaborated his philosophy of "selfhood" in his Persian didactic poem "Asrār-i Khudī" (1914), available in translation by R. A. Nicholson, The Secrets of the Self: A Philosophical Poem (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1978). For an exposition of his ideas, see Schimmel, Gabriel's Wing, and B. A. Dar, A Study in Iqbal's Philosophy (Lahore, 1944). have discussed the poetic logic and implications of "selfhood" in Chapter 4 of my dissertation: Yaseen Noorani, "Visionary Politics: Self, Community and Colonialism in Arabic and Persian Neoclassical Poetry" (University of Chicago, 1997).
64. Iqbal first elaborated his philosophy of "selfhood" in his Persian didactic poem "Asrār-i Khudī" (1914), available in translation by R. A. Nicholson, The Secrets of the Self: A Philosophical Poem (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1978). For an exposition of his ideas, see Schimmel, Gabriel's Wing, and B. A. Dar, A Study in Iqbal's Philosophy (Lahore, 1944). have discussed the poetic logic and implications of "selfhood" in Chapter 4 of my dissertation: Yaseen Noorani, "Visionary Politics: Self, Community and Colonialism in Arabic and Persian Neoclassical Poetry" (University of Chicago, 1997).
65. Iqbal first elaborated his philosophy of "selfhood" in his Persian didactic poem "Asrār-i Khudī" (1914), available in translation by R. A. Nicholson, The Secrets of the Self: A Philosophical Poem (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1978). For an exposition of his ideas, see Schimmel, Gabriel's Wing, and B. A. Dar, A Study in Iqbal's Philosophy (Lahore, 1944). have discussed the poetic logic and implications of "selfhood" in Chapter 4 of my dissertation: Yaseen Noorani, "Visionary Politics: Self, Community and Colonialism in Arabic and Persian Neoclassical Poetry" (University of Chicago, 1997).
66. Iqbal first elaborated his philosophy of "selfhood" in his Persian didactic poem "Asrār-i Khudī" (1914), available in translation by R. A. Nicholson, The Secrets of the Self: A Philosophical Poem (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1978). For an exposition of his ideas, see Schimmel, Gabriel's Wing, and B. A. Dar, A Study in Iqbal's Philosophy (Lahore, 1944). have discussed the poetic logic and implications of "selfhood" in Chapter 4 of my dissertation: Yaseen Noorani, "Visionary Politics: Self, Community and Colonialism in Arabic and Persian Neoclassical Poetry" (University of Chicago, 1997).
67. For Freud's account, see "The Ego and the Id," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 19:35-36 (formation of the "super-ego"); "Group Psychology," in ibid., 18:105-10 ("identification"); and "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in ibid., 14:74-78 ("ego and object libido").
68. For Freud's account, see "The Ego and the Id," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 19:35-36 (formation of the "super-ego"); "Group Psychology," in ibid., 18:105-10 ("identification"); and "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in ibid., 14:74-78 ("ego and object libido").
69. For Freud's account, see "The Ego and the Id," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 19:35-36 (formation of the "super-ego"); "Group Psychology," in ibid., 18:105-10 ("identification"); and "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in ibid., 14:74-78 ("ego and object libido").
70. This type of transformation is observed by James A. W. Heffernan in his analysis of Wordsworth's poem "Peele Castle," in Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 105. He also points out that Edmund Burke associated the "sublime" with masculinity and the "beautiful" with the female body (p. 215, n. 32), a perfect fit for the poems I am discussing.
71. The association of sublimation with both masculinity and social subjectivity is present in Freud, as well. "Women represent the interests of family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable": Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents," in Standard Edition, 21:103. Freud goes further than the kind of poetry under discussion by making "masculine" characteristics intrinsic to men and inaccessible to women - that is, by fully biologizing them.
72. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1989), 31.