Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in Al-Andalus

Shari Lowin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135131609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in al-Andalus investigates a largely overlooked subset of Muslim and Jewish love poetry in medieval Spain: hetero- and homo-erotic love poems written by Muslim and Jewish religious scholars, in which the lover and his sensual experience of the beloved are compared to scriptural characters and storylines.

This book examines the ways in which the scriptural referents fit in with, or differ from, the traditional Andalusian poetic conventions. The study then proceeds to compare the scriptural stories and characters as presented in the poems with their scriptural and exegetical sources. This new intertextual analysis reveals that the Jewish and Muslim scholar-poets utilized their sacred literature in their poems of desire as more than poetic ornamentation;in employing Qur'?nic heroes in their secular verses, the Muslim poets presented a justification of profane love and sanctification oferotic human passions. In the Hebrew lust poems, which utilize biblical heroes, we can detect subtle, subversive, and surprisingly placed interpretations of biblical accounts.

Moving beyond the concern with literary history to challenge the traditional boundaries between secular and religious poetry, this book provides a new, multidisciplinary, approach to existing materials and will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers of Islamic and Jewish Studies as well as to those with an interest in Hebrew and Arabic poetry of Islamic Spain.

1 Introduction

It is told that an aristocratic Muslim gentleman fell in love at first sight with a certain woman while they were at the Ka‘ba, Islam's most holy site. Overcome with love, the man approached the lady and recited:

I have great passion for my religion while I like pleasures.

How can I have passion for pleasures as well as Islam?

The lady replied, “Leave the one and you will have the other.”¹

It has become almost axiomatic to note that many religious traditions teach that to be closer to God, one must distance oneself from the pull of the sensual world. It is thus puzzling to the modern mind to find Muslim and Jewish scholars of religion, authority figures in their faiths, standing proudly among the greatest composers of erotic secular love poetry in Muslim Spain of the tenth to thirteenth centuries. After all, we do not generally find imams or rabbis among the prime proponents of indulgence in physical pleasures. Yet, in Muslim Spain, rather than separating the spiritual world from the physical world, distinguishing between what the modern world deems the secular and the religious realms,² these Muslim and Jewish religious authority figures fused the two. Many of the men who composed influential works of scriptural exegesis, theological compositions, and religious legal tomes very often are the very same scholars who authored works on science, literature, and nature. Indeed, while Christian Europe found itself in an intellectual slumber, the educated leaders of Muslim Spain produced literature on almost every subject then known to man: theology, language, history and historiography, belles-lettres, geography, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and religious studies.³

But perhaps the literary product most wide-ranging in appeal are the poems, composed in both Arabic and Hebrew, touching on almost every sentiment and topic under the sun. Just as they involved themselves in composing “secular” and “religious” prose works, so too Muslim and Jewish religious scholars saw fit to write religious as well as secular verse.⁴ They composed poems that praised God and yearned for His presence, while simultaneously extolling the drinking of wine, the beauty of gardens, of animals, and of beauty itself. They wrote poems bemoaning death, illness, and poverty. They contemplated the role of man in the world, the forces exerted by fate on the life of the individual, the circle of life. They complained in meter and rhyme of slights committed against them by friends or employers,⁵ praised comrades and politicians, or wrote commissioned works of praise. Some later found themselves with the task of eulogizing these same people after their deaths. We find verses encouraging ethical behavior, warning against earthly seductions, or providing guidance in all matters. We find even witty epigrams, riddles, and language puns.⁶ But perhaps the most enchanting of these secular poems composed by Muslim and Jewish poets, and the ones that form the basis of the current study, are the powerful, beautiful, and somewhat surprising (to the modern reader, at least) poems that speak of romantic desire, eros, between two people. These poems are known in Arabic as poems of

(‘ishq) and in Hebrew as

(shirat ḥesheq).

The current study addresses one particularly intriguing category of these secular ‘ishq/ḥesheq poems: poems written by religious scholars in which the lover and his sensual experience of the beloved are compared to scriptural characters and storylines. As any library catalog search will show, the Arabic and Hebrew love poetry of Andalusia serves as the subject of many a modern scholarly work. Yet, in engaging the scriptural allusions found in the love poetry, scholars have very generally restricted themselves to a two-pronged approach. Most commonly, scholars have approached such scriptural references and allusions in these poems largely to identify them, to show readers the scriptural sources from which the poets drew. Additionally, scholarly attention to the scriptural references has focused on demonstrating that the themes and imagery used by religious scholarpoets in their secular verses form part of the stock imagery current in the poetry of the Andalusian period.⁷ In other words, modern scholars have shown that the medieval poets used Scripture largely as poetic ornament in service of the Andalusian poetic conventions of the day.

The current study challenges the notion of Scripture as ornament alone and what Ross Brann has termed the “rigorously formulaic approach to the study of literature”⁸ of studies that insist on this as the only path. To be sure, the religious scholar-poets conformed to the “poetic vogue” in composing their secular poems. However, that religious authority figures turned to decidedly scriptural/exegetical characters and storylines in otherwise secular compositions begs our further attention. Indeed, it can be no accident that those most concerned with upholding the sacredness of religion, most involved in its texts, and promulgating its ideals, culled sacred imagery from the Bible, Qur’ān, ḥadīth (Islamic oral traditions), and midrash aggadah (rabbinic exegetical texts) to flesh out their heterosexually and homosexually charged poems of eros. As the current study shows, while both the Muslim and Hebrew poets eroticized their forebears in their poems of desire, they did so with differing results. As we shall see, when Arabic religious scholar-poets allude to their Scripture, drawing parallels between their lovers and their scriptural forefathers, they do so to sanctify earthly love. While Hebrew scholar-poets employ their own Scripture to the same effect, to be sure, some of the Hebrew poems appear to take the allusion a step further. In some of the hetero- and homoerotic Hebrew love poetry, we can detect subtle, subversive, and surprisingly placed biblical exegesis.

Brief history of Andalusian poetry

The Iberian Peninsula first came into contact with both Islam and Muslim Arabic culture in a significant way when the scion of the crushed Umayyad dynasty, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I (r. 756–88), escaped the hands of the Abbasid defeaters, raced across the Strait of Gibraltar,⁹ and established an independent Umayyad kingdom on Spanish soil, based out of Cordoba. While ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I brought with him from Damascus Eastern traditions and literary sensibilities, which he promoted in his new kingdom, it was not until the reign of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (912–61) that Arabic culture truly began to flourish in Andalusia. A patron of the arts, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III built mosques, palaces, and libraries, turning Cordoba into one of the greatest intellectual centers of Western Europe at the time. Under his encouragement, Cordoba became renowned as a hub for learning in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, jurisprudence, philosophy, and literature.¹⁰ Cultivation of culture and education continued under al-Ḥakam II (r. 961/2–976/7) who founded twenty-seven free elementary schools for Cordoba's children, ensuring literacy for almost all of his subjects. Al-Ḥakam II also founded a library whose catalog alone came to twenty-four volumes. To be sure, Cordoba did not remain the only seat of learning and education in Muslim-conquered Spain. Schools of higher education and of theology were founded and flourished in Seville, Toledo, Valencia, Almeria, Granada, Jaen, and Malaga.¹¹

When the Umayyads fell from power in 1031 and were replaced by the smaller dynasties known as the Party Kings¹² over the course of the eleventh century, the flourishing of Arab culture in Spain grew even stronger. Vying with one another in monetary and cultural splendor, the Party Kings set aside many of the religious restrictions of Islam to more grandiosely foster both material and intellectual cultural development. Despite the political instability that reigned, they built sumptuous palaces and villas, saw to the establishment of magnificent gardens, indulged in wine-drinking, and reveled in literary parties to which they drew scholars, poets, and musicians.¹³ Under the Party Kings, Arabic poetry flourished as princely patronage of the poets continued in stride. Indeed, each principality became a center of literature and art.

It was sometime during this period that two new forms of Arabic poetry were born, both of them native to Muslim Spain: the zajal

and the muwashshaḥ

. These accompanied the qaṣīda

, a pre-Islamic form of long, formulaic, mono-rhymed desert poetry with a rigid tripartite structure.¹⁴ The zajal poems, the longer of the two new formats, constitute vernacular Arabic strophic poems with varying meter, beginning with a rhyming couplet that then serves as the refrain; evidence from the Arabic sources indicates that although not every zajal came with a musical score, the zajal was intended to be sung rather than read. Since poetry was the product of literate men, often these “vernacular” poems tilt toward classical Arabic. The greatest of the zajal poets of Andalusia was Ibn Quzmān (Cordoba, 1078–1160), whose longest zajal stretched to fortytwo stanzas.¹⁵ Like the ...