East winds and full moons: Ramal al-Māya and the peregrinations of love-poetry images

Abstract

The Moroccan poetic-musical genre known as al-Āla, also commonly referred to as ‘Andalusian music’, illustrates the mytho-historical travels of love images from classical and post-classical Arabic poetry, preserving and re-presenting examples of them as part of Moroccan public culture in the twenty-first century. This tradition preserves a substantial number of poems, which clearly echo both the strophic and non-strophic facets of Arabic verse in their forms and contents, and which Moroccans regard, by virtue of their association with al-Āla, as part of an authentic cultural-historical heritage deriving from the Islamic period in Spain and Portugal (al-Andalus). Although the history of interchange between al-Andalus and North Africa would seem to make this attribution plausible, the idea that these songs derive from al-Andalus is problematic; none of the music and very little of the poetry can be traced to that era. Careful study of the love-poetry (ghazal) images in the nūba Ramal al-Māya – a suite of songs within the tradition ostensibly devoted to praise of the Prophet Muḥammad – shows that al-Āla in fact represents a distillation of major uses of such themes in Arabic verse deriving from contexts well beyond the Iberian Peninsula of the Islamic period. In fact, the poetry of Ramal al-Māya preserves poetic images and themes stemming from the classical Islamic period and in so doing serves as a means by which these images and themes are kept alive in contemporary Moroccan culture.