al-Andalus Research Articles

Muslim-Jewish Harmony: A Politically-Contingent Reality

This paper argues that Muslim-Jewish relations are largely contingent upon politics. Through the examination of Muslim and Jewish populations and their interaction with the state, this article demonstrates that at times of constructive political engagement, day-to-day Muslim-Jewish encounters are positive. Likewise, at times of political conflict, Muslim-Jewish harmony ceases. This article juxtaposes two distinct eras, along with two opposite case studies within them: Islamic Spain in the eleventh century and Israel in the twentieth/twenty-first century. In this manner, both eras demonstrate that the political reality between Muslims and Jews is the contingent factor that determines Muslim-Jewish relations in general.

Romanceisms in the structure of Muwashshah and Zajal

Muwashshah and Zajal are important sources on the Mozarabic historical dialect. These poetic forms, unknown to classical Arabic versification, were created in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). They often contain Romance words written in Arabic script (in Alhamiado). Many muwashshahs end with harjs (couples) in the Romance language. In zajals, there are also not only individual Roman words, but also entire lines in Roman. The most famous writer of zajals is the Arab poet from Cordoba origin Ibn Kuzman (c. 1080–1160). In muwashshahs, words in Romance are found in the last couplet, called kharja, and perform a structure-forming function. In zajals (developed from muwashshah), romanticisms are found throughout the text and perform a stylistic function.

La Russie - un pays qui transcende l'Europe

Elmar HOLEN STEIN, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich : «Russia's Contribution to European Culture»
 In a paper written in 1944/45, Jakobson shows that the idea of national auto-determination is not a Western European concept, but an Eastern European one, of biblical inspiration. This idea is linked to another one : no world state has the right to hegemony. With such political ideas, Russia works as the go-between for a Byzantine philosophy. But Russia is not only, as an Eastern European country, an intermediary of Byzantine culture, but also, as a Eurasian country, a go-between of East Asian culture. According to Fernand Braudel, the civilizing role of Mongolia in Russia could be compared to the role played by Muslim Spain vis-a-vis Christian Spain.
 Trubetzkoy would probably have agreed with such a judgment, and would probably have sought evidence to back it up with.

The Most Noble of People: Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Identity in Muslim Spain, by Jessica A. Coope

As Jessica A. Coope highlights in the introduction to this, her second book, it is only relatively recently that scholarship on Umayyad al-Andalus (711–1031)—long centred on institutional and political history—has begun to explore social and cultural history. In part, this is a function of our evidence, which (at least for those of us who work with textual sources) is not especially helpful for getting at life as it was lived, rather than life as it was envisaged by elite writers and users of normative legal manuals. Valuable work has certainly been done: that of Manuela Marín on women, for example, or that of numerous archaeologists on domestic spaces and practices. But much more remains to be explored. Coope’s contribution to the field is an exploration of Andalusī identity in the ninth and tenth centuries, and in particular of how group identities shaped the lives of individuals. Following in the footsteps of the usual cultural history touchstones, such as Clifford Geertz, she examines the value systems of the textual sources to reconstruct how people in this time and place understood themselves, their society and their world. Identity in al-Andalus, she argues—whether religious, ethnic or gendered—was ‘varied, fluid and contentious’ (p. 2), for all that the texts often imagine it as fixed and distinct. The religious group to which someone belonged, for example, determined much about that individual’s legal status and life prospects. Within the still-developing body of Islamic law, Jews and Christians (the ‘Peoples of the Book’, those who shared a core scriptural tradition, albeit in an earlier and less perfect form) were classed as dhimmīs, people subject to some legal restrictions (dhimmī men could not, at least in theory, marry Muslim women) in return for religious autonomy. Nevertheless, identity could change; it was possible to move between religious groups through conversion, or to offset some of the disadvantages of difference by shifting cultural identity while remaining within one’s religious tradition. Both Andalusī Jews and Arabicised Christians (often termed ‘Mozarabs’) have been quite extensively studied in the past, but, as Coope explains in Chapter Three, we still know a great deal more about the theory of their lives than the practice. Law regarding dhimmīs, while enticingly extensive, was ‘a statement of Muslim society’s ideals rather than a reflection of its realities’ (p. 74), and for this early period other types of sources are frustratingly limited; in comparison with later medieval centuries, for example, we have very few surviving fatāwa (expert commentaries deriving from actual legal cases). We can learn a certain amount about Christians collectively in the ninth century, in the context of the martyrs of Cordoba crisis, and about (prominent) Jews individually in the tenth and eleventh, because of the role of Jewish scholars and viziers in the later caliphate and in certain taifa states; but glimpses beyond these are few and far between. Coope distinguishes very usefully between the different types of evidence, and what we can actually learn.

Iberian Moorings: Al-Andalus, Sefarad, and the Tropes of Exceptionalism by Ross Brann

Reviewed by: Iberian Moorings: Al-Andalus, Sefarad, and the Tropes of Exceptionalism by Ross Brann Michelle M. Hamilton Iberian Moorings: Al-Andalus, Sefarad, and the Tropes of Exceptionalism. By Ross Brann. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. In this study Brann explores how Muslims and Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula between the sixth and thirteenth centuries defined themselves and the place they were from as culturally and religiously exceptional. When 'Abd al-Rahmān III declared himself caliph in tenth-century Córdoba, which Brann describes as "Al-Andalus's moment of self-discovery," we witness not only "the origins of the idea of al-Andalus as a legitimate and ambitious Islamic state" but also "the historical moment in which a distinctive Andalusiness was conceived, articulated, and promulgated in the service of country" (24). Brann details what elements tenth-century Andalusi politicians and authors considered essential in making al-Andalus unique as well as the intellectual origins of these elements. In the introduction he gives a list of four themes that elites in both the Muslim and Jewish communities used to represent al-Andalus and Sefarad as unique (7). These include the idea that the peninsula is an agricultural, Edenic land of bounty, that it is a site of religious orthodoxy, and that its people are noble and excel at intellectual and religious pursuits as well as possess refined manners (adab). These themes constitute what Brann calls the trope of exceptionalism, which, as this study shows, has been articulated in various contexts from the tenth century to the present. The author argues that both the construction of Sefarad and al-Andalus "followed a similar trajectory" and, "without al-Andalus, there would have been no Sefarad" (10). Exploring the deep connection between Andalusi and Sefardi cultural production has been the subject of several of Brann's previous studies, including The Compunctious Poet (Johns Hopkins, 1991) and Power in the Portrayal (Princeton, 2009). As in his previous scholarship, in Iberian Moorings he does an excellent job of contextualizing detailed close readings of medieval Arabic and Hebrew texts in their larger historical and social contexts. In chapter 1, Brann focuses on the origins of the idea of al-Andalus and its peoples as exceptional and favored. Andalusi historians and geographers such as 'Abd al-Malik ibn Ḥabīb and Abū Bakr Aḥmad al-Rāzī developed narratives of al-Andalus, adopting to Islamic eschatology Isidore's seventh-century portrayal of Iberia as a land of [End Page 211] unique agricultural bounty, ideal clime, and favored by God. In al-Rāzī and ibn Ḥabībs accounts, the peninsula not only compared favorably to the Islamic East as a land of wonders ('ajā'ib) but also attracted religious scholars and leaders, who embodied "Islamic nobility, authenticity, and legitimacy" (33). Brann explores how the Mālikī 'ulamā' (religious authorities), in tandem with the Umayyad rulers, depicted themselves and their culture, including such material manifestation as the Great Mosque of Córdoba, as the rightful inheritors and embodiment of the Prophet Muhammad's thought and traditions. He contextualizes this self-fashioning of Andalusi orthopraxy in the Umayyads' struggles with the Fatimids in Egypt and the Abbasids in Baghdad. In chapter 2, Brann turns to tenth-century Andalusi Jewish thinkers such as Abraham ibn Daud, Dunāsh ben Labrāt, and Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ and outlines how they, like the Muslim Andalusi thinkers he studies in chapter 1, began to craft their own unique identity as the Jews of Sefarad. Brann shows how tensions between the growing spiritual authority of western Jewish communities (al Andalus and, importantly, North Africa) and the waning centers of the East, riven between Karaite and rabbinic authority, as well as the growing focus on Jerusalem as the focus of Jewish identity, worked to shape the particular forms Sephardi exceptionalism took and how it came to be expressed. He highlights how this identity both originates from and operates against the rabbinates of the East, which had long served as the intellectual and religious authority for Jewish communities in the diaspora. An important contribution of this chapter is Brann's foregrounding of the important role that intellectuals from the Maghrib, including...

Characterization of Wall Paintings of the Harem Court in the Alhambra Monumental Ensemble: Advantages and Limitations of In Situ Analysis.

Non-invasive techniques (X-ray fluorescence, XRF, and Raman spectroscopy) were used for the study of the Hispano Muslim wall paintings. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on the semi-quantitative XRF results directly provided by the in-built factory calibrations with minimum user manipulation. The results obtained were satisfactory and highlighted differences and similarities among the measurement points. In this way, it was possible to differentiate the decorations carried out on gypsum plasterwork and the wall paintings over lime plaster. The color palette, revealed by combining the results from XRF and Raman spectroscopies, comprised the pigments hematite, lapis lazuli, cinnabar (in poor conservation state), and possibly, carbon. Evidence of past interventions was also provided by PCA on XRF data, which detected the presence of Pb, Ba, and Zn in some areas. Furthermore, the preparation layers have been studied in detail on cross-sections of two microsamples. Several layers of lime plaster with a compact microstructure have been observed. The characteristic of the pictorial layer and the identification of calcium oxalate point to the use of a secco-technique. The main alteration identified was a gypsum surface layer covering the painting and signs of plaster deterioration due to gypsum migration to more internal areas. Finally, the comparison with the observations made by restorers in previous interventions on these paintings revealed the importance of the representativeness gained with the in situ study, which enabled the analysis of a high number of areas.

How Jews, Christians and Muslims related to each other in Muslim Iberia

Dr. Mònica Colominas Aparicio unravels historical relationships in the research project: The Status of Religious Minorities in Islamic Societies: Jews and Christians in Islamic Iberia (8th-15th c.). This time and place in history can help us understand how faith-based communities and cultures managed to co-exist, despite differences.

Andalus And Sefarad: On Philosophy and its History in Islamic Spain by Sarah Stroumsa

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 47, 3, 2022 © The Maghreb Review 2022 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEW / COMPTE RENDU Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com SARAH STROUMSA, ANDALUS AND SEFARAD: ON PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY IN ISLAMIC SPAIN (PRINCETON, NJ; OXFORD: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019) The traditional account of the history of philosophy in Muslim Spain begins in the late tenth century. According to the eleventh-century chronicler Ṣā‘id al-Andalusī, it was then that the Umayyad Emir of Cordoba al-Ḥakam II ordered that books on ‘the ancient sciences as well as the modern ones’ be brought from Baghdad, Egypt, ‘and other places in the East’, in the hope of reaping the fruits of the ‘Abbasid-sponsored translation movement for Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. This well-known episode from Islamic history, Sarah Stroumsa reveals in Andalus and Sefarad, her recent study of philosophy in Muslim Spain, has a lesser known yet equally important Jewish coda. When the prominent Jewish physician and political advisor Ḥasday ibn Shaprut ‘attached himself to al- Ḥakam’, the same Ṣā‘id al-Andalusī wrote, ‘he used his good offices to bring whatever he wanted of the writings of the Jews in the Orient’. As Stroumsa observes, ‘It requires little imagination to appreciate that the same ships that brought the books ordered by the caliph also carried those ordered by his vizier, and that when the ships arrived at the docks, for example in Seville, their literary cargo was not divided strictly according to religious affiliation.’ Stroumsa sees this story as emblematic of the history of Andalusian philosophy. Jewish and Muslim philosophy and theology in the Iberian Peninsula, she proposes, ought to be viewed ‘as components of a common intellectual history and as stages in a continuous trajectory’. Written with a clarity befitting a scholar of Stroumsa’s expertise, Andalus and Sefarad is a masterful demonstration of how to think about the history of Andalusian philosophy in this ‘integrative’ way. The influence of Islamic traditions on medieval Jewish thinkers living under Muslim rule and writing in Arabic is well-known. It has long been accepted, for instance, that Judah Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of medieval times and author of the famous Arabic theological treatise known as the Kuzari, drew on the Sunni Muslim theologian al-Ghazālī’s critique of Aristotelian philosophy and the Neoplatonic ideas of the Ismaili Shia. In her previous book, Maimonides and His World (2009), Stroumsa herself demonstrated that the 316 BOOK REVIEW / COMPTE RENDU great Jewish philosopher and legal authority Moses Maimonides, author of the Judeo-Arabic classic The Guide of the Perplexed, was influenced by the ideas of the Almohad dynasty that ruled North Africa and Spain in the twelfth century. If ‘Islamicate’ Jewish thought is fairly well-known (to use the concept coined by Marshall Hodgson for that which is culturally if not religiously Islamic), far less so is the impact of Jewish thought on Islamic philosophy, and it is here that Andalus and Sefarad comes into its own. In chapter one we learn that the tenthcentury Muslim Neoplatonist of Cordoba Ibn Masarra, the first Andalusian philosopher of note, was influenced by Jewish speculation on the mystical significance of the letters of the alphabet and the symbolism of the divine throne. In the following chapter, we discover that the books and ideas of the rationalist Mu‘tazilite school of Islamic theology were introduced into alAndalus by Jewish Karaites, scripturalists who rejected rabbinic authority, and who, unlike their opponents the Rabbanites, usually wrote their Arabic works in Arabic, rather than Hebrew, characters, making them accessible to Muslims as well as Jews. While this is all very interesting, Stroumsa’s aim is not merely to show that the direction of influence went from Jews to Muslims as well as Muslims to Jews. Nor is it to substantiate the romantic if rather anachronistic notion of medieval al-Andalus as a site of interfaith convivencia. Rather, Stroumsa aims to demonstrate how the same philosophical traditions and ideas continuously circulated among adherents of the two religions in what...

Sarah Stroumsa, Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain

Sarah Stroumsa, Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain

Jewish Identity, al-Andalus, and Interfaith Communities: The Medieval Legacy of Islamic Spain

The Jews of al-Andalus experienced two interconnected military conquests that constituted major shifts in the history of medieval Iberia. The Almohad invasion of 1148 resulted in mass displacement of Jews, many of whom fled to the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and Provence in modern-day southern France. Subsequently, the rapid territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon following the 1212 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa ensured that by the mid-thirteenth century, much of the remaining Jewish population in al-Andalus was now living under Christian rule. However, changes in political territory did not necessitate total cultural transformation. Indeed, legacies of Jewish life in al-Andalus continued to permeate the culture of its diaspora, but discontinuities also emerged with each succeeding generation. Ultimately, the perpetuation of cultural symbols such as ideas of exceptionalism within the diaspora, use of the Arabic language, references to admired figures of the Andalusi past, and adaptations to professional activity that enabled the continuation of trading practices demonstrates the strong presence of the idea of al-Andalus in the identity of the medieval Jewish communities of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian Spain and Provence.

Agricultural Landscapes of Al-Andalus, and the Aftermath of the Feudal Conquest, ed. Kirchner, Helena and Flocel Sabaté. The Medieval Countryside 22. Turnhout, Brepols, 2021, pp. 277; 22 b/w figures, 44 b/w maps, 9 b/w tables and graphs.

Abstract: The twenty-second volume of the Brepols series on The Medieval Countryside offers state-of-the-art research and novel perspectives on the complex and varied agricultural landscapes of medieval Al Andalus. The nine collected papers emerge principally from two research groups: the Agrarian Archeology of the Middle Ages group center­ed at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and the Cultures and Societies of the Middle Ages group at the Universitat de València. Both have longstanding research programs engaging experts in the study of Andalusi society. Helena Kirchner offers an introductory essay that, although thinner in detail and reach than some readers might like (I would have appreciated more historiographical context), points to some of the methodological novelties and indicates the major topics treated. Many of the papers signal indebtedness to Thomas Glick, beginning with the highly influential Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, 1970), and also to Miquel Barceló’s studies that began in the 1980s of hydraulic systems across a broader expanse of medieval Al-Andalus. Building upon a formidable heritage, each of the offerings reports on methods that go well beyond what those predecessors conceived.

Mordechai Z. Cohen. The Rule of Peshat: Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900–1270.

Mordechai Z. Cohen. <i>The Rule of Peshat: Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900–1270</i>.

Kajian Historis Pendidikan Islam di Cordova

Cordova is one of the cities that became the center of the development of Islamic knowledge in the West during the reign of the Umayyah Dynasty II in Andalusia (now known as Muslim Spain). During the reign of ʿAbdu Al-Rahmān Al-Nāṣir, Cordova became the most cultured city in Europe, and together with Constantinople and Baghdad, became one of the three cultural centers in the world. This paper aims to describe the intellectual development and knowledge of Islam in Cordova during the Caliph ʿAbdu Al-Rahmān Al-Nāṣir, the Umayyah Dynasty. The method used in this research is descriptive analysis with a historical approach. This method is a process of critically examining and analyzing past records and relics in the form of written text. The results of the literary analysis carried out show that Cordova has made progress in science and culture since it was ruled by the Amirs of Umayyah descent who stood alone apart from the power of the Abbasids in Baghdad. The triumph of Islamic science in Andalusia is very large in Europe, both in science, science, fiqh, language, and literature. The triumph of Islam and intellectual and scientific development to be seen since the Umayyah Dynasty Caliph ʿAbdu Al-Rahmān Al-Nāṣir. Islamic education materials that develop and expand are the Qur'an, theology, Arabic grammar, poetry, lexicography, history, and geography. ʿAbdu Al-Rahmān Al-Nāṣir built a university and developed a library. The University of Cordova stands majestically and becomes an icon of Andalusia so that Andalusia is famous throughout Europe. This university stands upright with the Abdurrahman III Mosque, which in the end developed into a famous higher education equivalent to Al Azhar University in Cairo and Nizamiyah University in Baghdad. Another institution that is the center of scientific civilization and intellectual development is the library. The library is provided for the wider community as a means of learning science. The development of books also increased after the discovery of paper technology in the Islamic world.

Silver and Niello in Islamic Iberia: A New Look at the Material Evidence

Silver and Niello in Islamic Iberia: A New Look at the Material Evidence

Othello’s ‘Travailous History’

This article aims to relocate Shakespeare’s Othello the Moor in the cultural roots of Moorish Spain, arguing that he is not a Moor in the inclusionary, monolithic sense of the term, but a diasporic Iberian finding refuge in fifteenth–sixteenth-century Venice. It seeks to contextualise Shakespeare’s play by setting the Othello/Iago binary as an epitomisation of the Spanish inquisition. Giving Othello, the Moor of Venice an allegorical reading against its historical background facilitates better perception of the play’s motivational dynamics: why a Moor? And why such extreme enmity? To substantiate the argument, textual and contextual factors, such as characters’ appellations and the Moorish refugee’s ‘royal siege’, are viewed from a different perspective, factors designed to direct the mind towards specific realities, already visible to the playwright’s audience.

Review: Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1800

Review: <i>Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1800</i>

Ziryab and Us: Tradition and Collaboration in the Interpretation of an Arab-Andalusian Musical Myth

ABSTRACT The ninth-century poet and musician, Ziryab, is synonymous with the musical cultures of Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) and the idea of commonality between different genres across the Mediterranean. While some scholars have deconstructed the myth of Ziryab at a historiographical level, there has been less consideration of how the myth is interpreted in contemporary musical practice. This article examines how Ziryab is reinterpreted in the present through intercultural music making. Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid and Valencia (2016), I focus on the Ziryab and Us: A New Vision of the Arab-Andalusian Heritage project, in which French, Israeli, Moroccan and Spanish musicians sought to reinterpret the legend of Ziryab through the lens of their own musical traditions. I argue that Ziryab functioned as a discursive trope that engendered a series of micro-social relations between the musicians, framed by ideas of musical affinity, a shared cultural space (the Mediterranean) and cross-cultural exchange. But beyond the ideals of musical connection that Ziryab implies, the relational processes that characterised the project were not always unified. Therefore, I examine some of the points of tension that emerged when the musicians brought together distinct traditions under the rubric of a shared ‘Andalusian’ or Mediterranean heritage.

Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain. By SarahStrousma. Pp. xxi, 220, Princeton/London, Princeton University Press. 2019, $35.00.

Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain. By SarahStrousma. Pp. xxi, 220, Princeton/London, Princeton University Press. 2019, $35.00.

The silent inquisition: Islamophobic microaggressions and Spanish Moroccan identity negotiations in contemporary Madrid

This article explores Spanish Moroccan experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions in contemporary Madrid. It seeks to fill an important gap in the literature on religion and racial microaggressions by moving beyond the usual psychologistic explanations to show how these acts reflect Spanish historical-racialized structures, where Muslims were regarded as the Other. In utilizing in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observations, the author reveals how Spanish Moroccans are negotiating and responding to Islamophobic microaggressions at work, educational institutions, and the public sphere. Ultimately, this research shows how these microaggressions reinforced a Muslim-first identity framework, which allowed them to strategically link their experiences and identities to a collective, historical memory of Muslim Spain.

Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain, written by Sarah Stroumsa

Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain, written by Sarah Stroumsa