The Lost Garden of Al-Andalus: Islamic Spain and the Poetic Inversion of Colonialism

Abstract

In 1933, the Urdu and Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938) became the first Muslim to worship in the mosque of Cordoba since its conversion into a cathedral after the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492. Iqbal had gone to London as a delegate to the third roundtable conference on the political future of India. On his return, he was invited to lecture in Madrid by the Orientalist Asin Palacios, and took the opportunity to visit the monument. Dramatizing the symbolic significance of his visit to the mosque, Iqbal swooned upon entering and uttered verses that presumably came to be included in his celebrated Urdu poem “Masjid-i Qurtubah”. Some years before, in 1919, the Egyptian Arabic poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) ended his five-year exile in Spain with a similar visit to the Andalusian monuments, albeit with less dramatic fanfare. Nevertheless, Shawqi as well was accompanied by his muse. In the introduction to his own famous poem about Islamic Spain, the “Siniyyah”, Shawqi recounts how the embryonic verses of this poem came to him as he toured the mosque and the Alhambra of Granada.