al-Andalus Research Articles

Masters of Dark Arts—Ibn ʿArabī’s Records on African Sorcery, Qaḍīb al-Bān and the Power Known as Himma

In 1195 AD, a celebrated Sufi scholar, poet and philosopher Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī quit Muslim Spain for Africa. There, he first became acquainted with ʿuzābīyyah, which he described as the dark arts rooted in the soul’s power over mind and matter. Ibn ʿArabī referred to this power as himma. The Sufi shaykh Qaḍīb al-Bān, as well as the North African sorcerers Ibn ʿArabī encountered, could use this power to maim and kill humans. They were also said to be capable of creating new life forms with himma. The present study examines the specific types of himma they used and determines the supposed loci of this power in the body and soul. It also describes the standard methods used in Akbarian circles and North Africa to make oneself worthy of himma and identifies advantages and disadvantages of using this power to turn dreams into reality.

Back to the future? The place of the religious ‘other’ in Ismail Gasprinsky’s Islamic utopia

ABSTRACT In 1906, Ismail Gasprinsky (1851–1914), a Crimean Tatar intellectual with ties to the Russian and the Ottoman intelligentsia published his novel The Muslims of the Land of Serenity [Darürrahat Müslümanları], one of the earliest utopian texts in a Turkic language. The narrative uncovers a secret land beyond the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia where some Muslims, having fled after the fall of Grenada in 1492, set up the ideal Muslim state preserving the memory of Islamic Spain over the centuries. This paper discusses factors in the Ottoman literary context that influenced the broad reception of the novel beyond Muslim communities and highlights influences on Gasprinsky from the Ukraine and Russia. After examining the complexities surrounding the religious ‘other’ and its relationship with the external world in Gasprinsky’s utopia, the paper concludes with reflections on the religious ‘other’ contributing to discussions on religious pluralism and freedom within utopian societies.

WILLIAM GELL'S ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAMIC SPAIN, 1808–36

The British antiquary William Gell (1777–1836) is known for his work on ancient Greece and Rome, which he based on a lifetime of Mediterranean travel and two decades of residence in Italy. This article uses a remarkable notebook held at the British School at Rome to explore his unheralded interest in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), which emerged from his Iberian travels of 1808–11 and took up much of his energy in the early 1830s, the final years of his life. As such, the notebook shows how engagement with other cultures might continue well beyond an initial encounter through travel. It brings together Gell's on-the-spot sketches and descriptions of the Alhambra, his copious later reading on the Emirate of Granada and evidence that he was teaching himself Arabic, offering a case study of early nineteenth-century scholarship that straddles the transition between eighteenth-century antiquarianism and Romantic, Orientalist approaches. The materiality and the contents of Gell's notebook chart the changing ways in which British travellers and writers incorporated al-Andalus into their understandings of Europe and the Mediterranean.

The rise (in the fall) of Cochin: Provincializing metropolitan spatiality in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

ABSTRACT Indian fiction and critical engagements with it have a metropolitan bias. The preference for representations of big cities such as Mumbai in fiction means that non-metropolitan (“provincial”) spaces in India face neglect, literary and otherwise. This article argues for provincializing Indian fiction by exploring non-metropolitan locations as imagined in works of fiction to unpack alternative spatialities. The example offered is Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. In most readings of the novel, Bombay (along with Moorish Spain) is highlighted as a metropolitan model for India. Cochin does not figure in these readings, passed over as if just a random background or setting for the characters to be launched into Mumbai. This article addresses Cochin’s marginalization through investigating the way the island city offers a provincial, alternative, non-metropolitan theorization of spatialities in Indian fiction. The larger objective is to make space for similarly marginalized non-European locales in the discourse of cosmopolitanism.

Did Ernst Herzfeld Find the Qaṣʿat Firʿawn (Pharaoh’s Bowl) in the Caliphal Palace at Samarra?

Ernst Herzfeld’s (1879–1948) papers on his excavation of the Abbasid city of Samarra, held at the National Museum of Asian Art Archives, include two maps indicating the existence of a large circular basin at the center of the square domed chamber south of the Caliphal Palace’s throne room. The details of this basin are provided in an orthographic drawing, and the captions of two photographs tersely attribute it to the palace. Now in the Madrasa al-Sharābiya in Baghdad, this basin has sometimes been identified as Qaṣʿat Firʿawn (Pharaoh’s Bowl), a large basin cited in medieval sources as having been part of the fountain of the Great Mosque of al-Mutawakkil. Strangely enough, not the slightest mention of this basin has been found in the written records of the excavations or in the published reports. A careful examination of other documents in Herzfeld’s archives and publications, as well as a number of reports of the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities, has established that the basin must have been discovered under unknown circumstances at an unspecified location in the palace several years after Herzfeld’s excavation. Furthermore, the study of medieval textual sources and other data related to the basin has shown that the latter is not Qaṣʿat Firʿawn but might well have been a similar basin. Originally a Roman labrum, the basin in question was repurposed during the Abbasid period as part of a low fountain with a unique water-circulation system that bears some similarities to the fountains of Islamic Spain.

The economic vision of the orientalist Montgomery Watt on the Arab Islamic ‎conquest in the country of Andalusia through his book on the history of Islamic Spain, a critical study

The economic vision of the orientalist Montgomery Watt on the Arab Islamic ‎conquest in the country of Andalusia through his book on the history of Islamic Spain, a critical study

Forms and Acts of Resistance in Amin Maalouf’s Leo the African

This article, which is entitled ‘Forms and Acts of Resistance in Amin Maalouf’s Leo the African’, is about the problematic power and resistance in a novel which is set in Islamic Spain. The idea behind this paper is that power relations, albeit lopsided, are not absolute in this novel but fluid. Not to mention that it is not unilateral as commonly thought of but--multilateral. Indeed, the setting of this Moorish novel is informed by religious and cultural tensions and the Spanish Inquisition in the Crescent and Christendom relation of power. It talks about an era prior to the epistemic and physical aggression on Moorish culture in 1492 and the failure of the Moor-Spaniard capitulación and convivencia. But since power and resistance figure immensely in this text, the analysis problematizes that relationship following the approach of the Foucauldian post-modern, positive conception of power. The object of analysis is treated as fiction, and the underlying methods are content analysis. The thesis concludes that power is fractured from within by other discourses. Besides, the problem of power and resistance is part of what is called centripetal and centrifugal dynamics: Power oscillates between two contending blocs and is, therefore, never static; these are a potion, a cocktail mix.

Translating al-Andalus: Medieval Muslim Spain and Urdu Modernity

Abstract This is a translation of two prefaces to Urdu translations of Arabic- and English-language histories, published in 1921 and 1922, respectively, around the topos of medieval Muslim Spain. Both translations were prepared by Maulavī Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān, who is also the writer of the first preface. The second preface is an introduction by Muḥammad ʿInāyatullāh written partly to acknowledge the immense labor undertaken by Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān, and partly to introduce the larger project of translating Islamic histories into Urdu. The first translation is of Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī at-Tilmisānī’s (d. 1632) Andalusian history, written in 1617 in Arabic and titled Nafḥ ut̤-T̤īb (The Breath of Perfume). The Urdu translation was published from Aligarh in November 1921. The second is a translation of S. P. Scott’s (1846–1929) English-language history written in 1904, The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, which was published in Lahore in 1922 under the Urdu title Aḳhbār ul-Undulus. Through these prefaces, Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān’s translations reveal a vibrant world of translational activities centered around the Department of Composition and Translation in Osmania University, Hyderabad Deccan. Both prefaces demonstrate the centrality of the practice of translation in the project of (re)claiming the history of Muslim medieval Spain specifically, and Islamic history broadly. Both prefaces take up the context of translating medieval Spain into Urdu as an opportunity to meditate on global Islamic histories and the role of translation in reviving connections lost because of colonial violence. At the same time, Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān’s translations of these voluminous works of Andalusian history are not a one-off event, but signal a much larger, concerted effort to bring (back) al-Andalus into Urdu. At the same time, even as the two prefaces together seek to bring historical knowledge into Urdu, they themselves constitute significant intellectual productions in their own right, comprising intensive research around the idea of Islamic history writing in Urdu. Both Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān and Muḥammad ʿInāyatullāh engage with multiple strands of scholarship, ranging from past Islamic scholars writing in Arabic, nineteenth-century Orientalist accounts, as well as works by Urdu- and English-language scholars contemporaneous to them. Straddling these multiple worlds, these texts together provide a meditation on the role of translation and history writing in the elaboration of a Muslim intellectual production in colonial modernity.

Pengaruh Gaya Kepemimpinan Berdasarkan Kepribadian Dan Lingkungan Kerja Terhadap Kinerja Karyawan Di PT Al Andalus Nusantara Travel Surabaya

This study aims to determine the effect of leadership style and work environment on performance for marketing employees at PT. AL Andalus Nusantara Travel Surabaya. Where two independent variables and one dependent variable are proposed, namely the work environment and work stress act as independent variables and employee performance acts as the dependent variable. This research was conducted using a survey method of marketing employees at travel service companies and analyzed by regression. The first stage tested the validity and reliability of questions for each variable. The second stage, regressing the leadership style and work environment variables on employee performance. The results showed that the leadership style variable had a significant negative effect on employee performance and was rejected. As well as the work environment variable has a significant positive effect on employee performance is rejected. However, a work environment that is at a low to medium level will create good employee performance and will make employees worse if the time period is very long and excessive.

Page Architecture of a Deluxe Arabic Dictionary from Islamic Spain

The Mukhtaṣar al-ʿAyn of Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Zubaydī (d. AD 989) is the earliest Arabic dictionary to have survived from the medieval Islamic West. This article discusses an early manuscript of the work that was copied and illuminated in AD 1124, most likely in Valencia, for the library of a wealthy patron or institution. The manuscript’s colophon casts new light on its transmission history, and a close analysis of its ‘page architecture’ reveals both how the book was used and the symbolic and aesthetic functions it fulfilled.

THE IMPACT OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY ON JEWISH PHILOSOPHY MUSA BIN MAIMON (MODEL)

Arab culture influenced Jewish intellectual life in all its aspects. It affected Hebrew literature, Arabic grammar, modern Hebrew poetry and modern Hebrew prose, but the most influential was in the field of Jewish philosophical thought. Islamic Spain was influenced by various philosophical and religious fields, and Islamic thought began to be evident in Jewish philosophical thought. A number of thinkers appeared in Spain, among them: Ibn Asra, Ibn Arabi, and Ibn Rushd, and they were credited with mixing philosophy with religion. The works of Ibn Rushd and Maimonides are the ideal picture of the so-called Arab-Hebrew thought. In the eleventh century, Jewish philosophy entered a new phase influenced by Islamic philosophical literature and Islamic ideas. Maimonides is considered one of the most important Jewish thinkers. He was famous in medicine, philosophy and astronomy and was influenced by Islamic civilization and Islamic thought. Maimonides composed many books in Arabic but wrote them in Hebrew letters. Search objective: Show the impact of Arab culture on the Hebrew culture in the era of Andalusia or in the Middle Ages. Research Structure An introduction that talks about Arab culture in general, the body of the research: The impact of Arab culture on Jewish culture, the conclusion of the research..

Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema

Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema

The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia By Charles Hirschkind

This is a curious book. It appears at times not so much as a work of scholarly history and more as a manifesto of some sort of intellectual gnosticism. The author begins: Muslim Iberia did not disappear from history with the seizure of Granada in 1492 by Christian armies, as our history books have it. Rather, forced into hiding, it continued on as an invisible warp within the fabric of Spanish society. The medieval realm of al-Andalus and contemporary Spain and Portugal, in other words, do not belong to two distant historical periods, one medieval and one modern, but cohere in a single continuous development, unbroken by the periodicities imposed by modern historiography. (p. 1) Any student of Islamic Spain is well aware that Islam here was not eradicated in 1492. Likewise, there are few (at least since the time of Américo Castro) who would not recognize that the Islamicate culture (including the Jewish culture) was essential to the development of modern Iberian culture. Not so with the suggestion (the ahistorical hyperbole) that the histories of al-Andalus and contemporary Spain and Portugal represent an ‘unbroken continuum’. Apparently, neither the mass exile of the descendants of the Peninsula’s Muslim inhabitants between 1609 and 1614, the eradication of Arabic, the colonial estrangement vis-à-vis the Maghrib of a Spanish Empire creaking towards modernity, nor the relentless historical, cultural and demographic churn of four centuries constituted a ‘disruption’.

Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain. Sarah Stroumsa. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xxii + 220 pp. $35.

Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain. Sarah Stroumsa. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xxii + 220 pp. $35.

The Contribution of the Scholar and Biblical Commentator Abraham ibn Ezra in the Transfer of Advances in Mathematics from Islamic Spain to Christian Europe

The Contribution of the Scholar and Biblical Commentator Abraham ibn Ezra in the Transfer of Advances in Mathematics from Islamic Spain to Christian Europe

Review of Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain. By Sarah Stroumsa


 
 
 Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain. By Sarah Stroumsa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxi + 220. $35, £28.
 
 

Globalism and Mediterranean Modal Musics: The Case of the Tunisian Ṭubū’

Modal musics in the Mediterranean have a resilient past and an enduring present for many people. If “the global” is defined as a set of contingent relations across multiple places, then the scalar structure, microtonal variation, and taxonomies of these modes constitute a global coherency for the region. But the performance practices of these modes are unique and challenge that coherency. How do musicians hedge interconnectedness by these practices? What does such nuanced musical interaction say about the makings of a “global history”? The Tunisian modes, called the ṭubū‘, provide a relevant case study to examine both global coherency and expressions of difference. Understood to derive from Muslim Spain in the 9th century, the ṭubū’ are sedimented structures of sound that network histories of Arab-Andalusi migration, the enslavement of Black sub-Saharan peoples, art music legacies of the Ottoman court, and expressive cultures of modern Arab identity. Today, Tunisian musicians in formal music schools qualify in not one but two modal systems: the ṭubū’ and the Eastern Mediterranean ‘maqāmāt’. As they bifurcate, fuse, juxtapose, and overlap the ṭubū’ and maqāmāt systems on stage and in classrooms, these musicians and pedagogues both promote and circumvent globalism. Based on ethnography in Tunisia (2018-2019) and also Tunisian scholarship, this paper describes and analyzes such nuanced discourses to demonstrate a variety of globalism that is non-Western, proportioned, and richly historical.

Review: Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr

Review: <i>Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr</i>

Introduction to premodern war and religions: comparison, issues and results

ABSTRACT Building and elaborating on the dossier’s five articles on East Africa, the Maghreb and Islamic Spain, Western Europe, the Aztec Mesoamerica, and the native American Northeast (plus Japanese and Byzantine history), this introduction discusses quandaries about comparison in the intertwined disciplines of History and Anthropology and suggests some hypotheses as to the relation between premodern warfare and religions. Side-switching was demonized (and punished as a quasi-religious sin) in Western Christianity, not so as a rule in the other societies here compared. It was ‘treason’. Sexual violence and rape was inhibited by religious conceptions in the same society, and among the natives of the American Northeast. Non-human powers might help or intervene in warfare, but there is no general pattern. As for the presence or absence of holy war, there may be correlation with the type of polity concerned. Established empires may be averse to the emergence of charismatic figures and sacral practices, as one sees with China and Byzantium. Central imperial elites may also dislike miracles, especially in offensive warfare. Evidently, while religion might shape this or that aspect of warfare, it was not the sole provider of ‘conditions of possibility’.

‘Abdurrahman ad-Dakhil (Superman in Islamic History: 756 CE-788 CE)

This article aims at discussing the struggle of one of the Umayyads’ descendants who was able to escape from the Abbasid army from the city of Damascus (Syria) to Andalusia (Al-Andalus). He managed to re-establish the power of the Umayyads in Andalusia after the collapse of their power in Damascus, due to the Abbasid army attack. A qualitative method with library research-based was used in conducting this study, the data were analyzed by using qualitative descriptive approach, technical descriptive analysis, and content analysis. The results showed that ‘Abdurrahman Ad-Dakhil had great talent and strong influence with the result that Islamic Spain could be united under his rule. He was very instrumental in building a government in Andalusia in such a way that the Andalusian State could compete with the influence of the Abbasid Daulahh’s power in Baghdad. Thus, he is one of the most important figures in Islamic history. He became an inspirational figure because of having persistency, intelligence, thorough struggle, and upholding Islamic law.