In recent years, several studies of musical and poetic traditions that are popularly traced to al-Andalus – medieval, Muslim-ruled Iberia – have been published. Most of these have been close studies of local and national practices in Maghrib countries. While scholars have not entirely ignored the existence of related traditions in the Mashriq, the scholarly literature thus far has confirmed a broader tendency in the field to sharply separate North Africa from the Middle East, and has pointed out the relative lack of multi-sited ethnography that crosses national boundaries. In addition, most of this work has focused exclusively on the musical and poetic legacies of al-Andalus in Arabic-speaking contexts.
Jonathan Holt Shannon's Performing al-Andalus is a welcome departure from these habits of inquiry. In lyrical prose, the book explores the rhetorical uses of musical al-Andalus mainly in the first decade of the present century through an apt juxtaposition of three cases: Syria, Morocco, and Spain. In many respects, Shannon highlights the shared aspect of the mystique of al-Andalus in the contemporary moment. Through close examination of written materials in Spanish, French, and Arabic and through ethnographic engagement with listeners and performers in the three countries, Shannon points out the way in which disparate actors have drawn on and elaborated a common narrative of civilizational blending, loss, and hope by way of music. This is not only a shared narrative but also what Shannon suitably calls a “project,” in which nostalgia for a mythicized past serves as a platform for imagining a better future. Not infrequently, the project brings together actors from these three countries, many of whom have engaged in international collaborations that evoke al-Andalus in musical terms.
At the same time, Shannon's exploration of the shared narrative, as well as his treatment of concrete musical collaborations across national boundaries, draws out some important points of difference. In three well-planned chapters, Shannon highlights distinct representational tropes regarding al-Andalus in each of the countries, along the way pointing out the distinctiveness of the musical traditions as well. In Syria, where the musical traces of medieval Iberia are inseparable from the muwashshaḥ vocal tradition of Aleppo and Damascus, al-Andalus is primarily a way of imagining a Syrian and Arab modernity that was anticipated in the medieval period and might still come to pass in the future. In this narrative, al-Andalus was not so much a foreign place whose refugees found refuge in Syria so much as it was a destination for the Syrian ‘Umayyad dynasts whose descendants later returned home with a perfected culture, musical and otherwise. Such invocations stand in a complex relationship with Syrian nationalist discourse, at times melding with it, at others serving to critique the present state of societal affairs.
In Morocco, where the musical traces of medieval Iberia are linked to a more elaborate and more conservative vocal and instrumental repertoire that lives largely through state-sponsored festivals, al-Andalus is nearer at hand, both in the geographic sense and in the sense that al-Andalus was tightly linked to Morocco in terms of power and population. The fact that contemporary Morocco is home to a significant number of people of Andalusi descent, and that this is largely a middle-class or elite population enjoying close ties to the royal family, links musical invocations of al-Andalus to concerns of genealogy and authenticity. At the same time, Shannon points out the way in which post-independence Moroccan deployments of al-Andalus have built on colonial musical projects and categories.
Finally, in Spain, where early music ensembles and fusion projects are the primary musical vehicles, al-Andalus is in some respects even nearer at hand, in that it refers to the medieval prehistory of the modern nation-state. However, due to the violent erasure of al-Andalus, the century-old intellectual struggle over the meaning of that past, and the contemporary presence of Muslim immigrant populations as well as significant numbers of Muslim visitors, invocations of al-Andalus today are largely oriented to the notion of multicultural tolerance and recognition embodied in the term convivencia, which stands as a vision of both what was lost and what might be promoted in the present.
The four numbered chapters of Performing al-Andalus are devoted to the exposition of the elements of shared narrative and repertoire as well as to the foregoing country-by-country contextualization of the varying rhetoric of musical al-Andalus. Despite these elements of national distinctiveness, however, Shannon suggests that transnational musical collaborations around al-Andalus have proliferated with little perceptible friction. It is in the extended conclusion of the book, however, that Shannon points out that convivencia-inspired efforts to collaborate can also bring to light sharp divisions with regard to the ability of non-elite Moroccans and Syrians to freely travel to Europe. This darker view of trans-Mediterranean musical collaborations introduces another element to the story – one that is not so much about juxtaposition, conjunction, or sharing as it is about distinctly modern barriers to movement.
Jonathan Holt Shannon's Performing al-Andalus is evocative, accessible, compact, and innovative in its methodological and expository approach. These qualities make it an attractive text for undergraduate students, as well as for graduate seminars focused on Mediterranean studies, the ethnomusicology of the Middle East and North Africa, and the politics of culture and memory. More broadly speaking, readers who are grappling with the possibilities and impossibilities of thinking through the Mediterranean and al-Andalus will find much stimulation in its pages.
