I thread my way through the crowd of evening shoppers in the Suq al-Buzuriyya, passing barrels of aromatic spices and nuts, as well as Ghraoui’s, my favorite chocolate shop. There's no time to stop tonight, however, for I am headed to Khan Asʿad Pasha to hear a concert of Andalusian music. Accompanying me is my friend Husayn, a well-known ʿūd player. We arrive to find the large Ottoman khan already crowded. Tonight's concert is part of the Andalusian Music Festival sponsored by the Instituto Cervantes in Damascus, and features ensembles from Morocco and Spain. The Moroccan group, Ensemble Ibn ʿArabi,Footnote 1 directed by the Tangier-based performer and scholar Ahmed El Khaligh, specializes in Islamic chant (inshād) and Sufi songs (samāʿ) as well as instrumental music from North Africa. Wearing flowing white gowns, they are the very picture of authenticity. They begin their performance with a bow and salutation to the “noble shaykhs of Damascus” (shuyūkh dimashq al-afāḍil) and then present a short suite of songs, including some attributed to Ibn ʿArabi. They conclude their performance with a few well-known Islamic chants. The music is somber yet pleasant as it echoes in the courtyard. The audience, a mix of mostly urbane Damascenes and curious foreigners, as well as a few local musicians, seems engaged enough, and some people sing along with the chants, though there is also the usual milling about and banter that one finds at this sort of event. After the first song is over Husayn leans over and remarks that the music has a distinct Moroccan flavor. He pronounces the qānūn (zither) player in particular as ḥilū, using the all-purpose Syrian Arabic term for “good.” Yet, according to him, “the Moroccan modes are limited (maḥdūda). They only play Western (gharbī) modes. The Arab modes have more possibilities.”Footnote 2
As we talk with friends, the Spanish group begins to set up. It is the ensemble Mudéjar, founded in the early 1990s by vocalist and psaltery player Begoña Olavide.Footnote 3 In addition to Olavide's qānūn-like psaltery, the ensemble features performers on ʿūd, nāy (end-blown bamboo flute), and frame drums; in other words, the group is similar to a traditional Arabian takht ensemble. They perform a suite of what they call Arab-Andalusian music (música arábigo-andaluza or la música andalusí) and sing in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Spanish, and Ladino. They play a song from the Moroccan Andalusian repertoire, and my friends seem at once interested and perplexed. The musicianship is good, and to my ears the vocals are lovely, but for them something seems a little off. When the song is over I ask them what they think. “It's just flamenco using our instruments!” says one friend. “Her pronunciation is bad and the modes are all European,” claims another. “Ḥilū,” says Husayn again, “but it's a hybrid (hajīn), and not authentic (aṣīl).” My friends hear the songs from Spain as distant echoes of their own music, returning, as through a chamber, darkly, to remind them of their connections to a land long lost to them: al-Andalus. Although the ensemble Mudéjar strives for authenticity in their presentation and in the emotional tenor of the songs,Footnote 4 to the ears of my Syrian friends, their music is not entirely authentic. At best “ḥilū,” the performance strikes them as just another “flamenco” performance—a hybrid where they want the “pure” original. As we shall see, the contemporary presence of al-Andalus in Syria actuates a congeries of often-contradictory associations about Syrian self-identity and notions of authenticity.
THE RHETORIC OF AL-ANDALUS IN SYRIA
I begin this essay with a musical evocation in order to highlight the broader cultural context in which al-Andalus (medieval Iberia under Muslim rule) resonates in Syria. Modern Syria, though far removed in time and space from medieval Iberia, is awash with images and echoes of al-Andalus: in literature, given the rich poetic legacy of al-Andalus, but also in painting, vernacular architecture, television and cinema, popular discourse, and of course the musical forms called “Andalusian.” Syrian music serves as a powerful vehicle for the expression of pan-Arab sentiment.Footnote 5 Despite Syria's geographical remove from Iberia, al-Andalus remains an important referent for Syrian musicians; this is especially the case for the muwashshaḥ, a poetical-musical genre generally understood to be of Andalusian origin and a powerful sonic metaphor for the Arab past. Aside from its aesthetic merits, the Andalusian muwashshaḥ genre links contemporary Syria to medieval al-Andalus and plays a defining role in the rhetoric of al-Andalus in modern Syria; that is, Andalusian music, both in its performance and as a rhetorical construct, at once draws on and promotes the logic of the modernizing Syrian nation-state and its memory culture.Footnote 6
In what follows, I analyze the development and cultural politics of the rhetoric of al-Andalus in modern Syria,Footnote 7 focusing on the role of Syria as a location for the elaboration and negotiation of forms of social memorializing that promote what media scholar Amanda Lagerkvist terms “nostalgic dwelling.”Footnote 8 Through analysis of literary and musical discourses about al-Andalus, I explore the chronotopesFootnote 9 of nostalgic dwelling in Syria that reveal different and at times contradictory projects of modernity. I seek to answer not only what role al-Andalus has played in the development of a modern Syrian cultural imaginary, but also how and why it has come to play these roles. I argue that the rhetoric of al-Andalus has been closely related to the project of nation building in Syria. The idea of a link between Syria and al-Andalus assumed rhetorical force in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of ideologies of pan-Arabism, the loss of Palestine, and, beginning in the 1970s, the rise of Islamist threats at home and petrodollar regimes in the Arabian Gulf. By the 1990s, with a semblance of political stability achieved (at the expense of political freedoms), the rhetoric of al-Andalus became a central component of Syrian self-understanding. Moreover, it continues to play a role in today's conflict-ridden Syria as a means for reimagining the nation based on the heavily mythologized and nostalgic visions of al-Andalus as a “first rate place” (to borrow from Maria Rosa Menocal's reading of Andalusian history).Footnote 10 In this way the rhetoric of al-Andalus can be understood not only to embody a past-oriented and nostalgic vision of community, but also to embrace many of the contradictions of a modernizing postcolonial state.
In analyzing the Syrian relationship to al-Andalus as a rhetoric I draw on the work of Kenneth Burke,Footnote 11 for whom a rhetoric is both a discourse (defined in the Foucauldian senseFootnote 12 as a set of ideas and associated practices set forth in language and fundamentally tied to the creation of knowledge and the production of power) and a project for a future; Burke defines this aspect of rhetoric as “invitational.” A rhetoric is therefore an act of persuasion and a promise, not merely an embellished retelling or description of a past or current state of affairs. I suggest that the rhetoric of al-Andalus in Syria invites forms of collective memory and memorialization in the present that at the same time engage with projects for the future.
It does so, I suggest, by drawing on forms of remembrance that are best understood as nostalgic. Far from being a form of naive longing for the distant past, nostalgia must be understood as a primary component of the memory practices of modern nation-states, including practices of remembering and forgetting.Footnote 13 Following the work of Svetlana Boym, I understand nostalgia to be a quintessentially modern phenomenon—that is, tied intimately to the processes and contradictions of modernity—rather than as a traditional or archaic form of remembrance.Footnote 14 Formed from the Greek roots nostos (home) and algia (pain, malady), nostalgia referred in the 17th century to a medical condition among displaced persons (prototypically, Swiss soldiers) removed from home, and was treated as a curable ailment (the treatment included opium, leeches, and a trip to the Swiss Alps).Footnote 15 Today nostalgia tends to be understood as a wistful variety of remembrance for the past; for Boym, however, to conflate nostalgia with longing and remorse is to misunderstand its complex history and to underestimate its contemporary cultural and political currency.
According to Boym, two main varieties of nostalgia operate in the modern nation: restorative and reflective. The former emphasizes the nostos, the home, and attempts to reconstruct a lost or imagined home, while the latter emphasizes the algia, the pain of longing, and instead of a return home (which may be impossible given political conditions) embraces an ironic attachment to a (lost) past. In addition, restorative nostalgia does not appear as nostalgia per se—that is, as a longing—but rather as tradition, heritage, and the truth. For this reason many nationalists, revivalists, and religious movements engage in forms of restorative nostalgia; in remembering, they are preparing the conditions for a return. By contrast, reflective nostalgia eschews any sense of heritage and revival, acknowledging the “ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.”Footnote 16 In reflective nostalgia, one finds an almost philosophical reflection on history and on the conditions of modernity rather than “the recovery of absolute truth.”Footnote 17
In addition to the restorative and reflective, Boym suggests other varieties of nostalgia: retrospective, which is what we normally think of when we consider nostalgia; prospective, which is future directed and laden with the hopes of capturing a past mode of being; ersatz or feigned, a longing for things that were never lost in the first place; and anticipatory, which anticipates a longing for the present in some future time.Footnote 18 These varieties are not mutually exclusive, and even when they share the same object they produce very different projects with different narratives and rhetorics. Moreover, Boym asserts that “outbreaks” of nostalgia often follow significant social change, including revolutions, producing “a global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.”Footnote 19 In a less sanguine manner, Susan Stewart argues that nostalgia risks mutating into a “social disease”Footnote 20; more than a mode of thinking or an orientation toward places and objects, nostalgia erases and denies the present through a narrative attachment to reconstructed pasts and imagined futures. For Stewart, nostalgia can at best fuel imaginative practices in the arts and letters, or even promote social and cultural projects of memorializing, but it can at worst promote a false attachment to the past and a denial of the present. Nostalgia then becomes an impediment to progress.
The Syrian relationship to the Andalusian past, then, needs to be understood not only as nostalgic but also as a form of historical memory, remembrance, commemoration, or longing. This is because, as I show below, modern Syrian history is inextricably linked to ideologies of pan-Arabism. Pan-Arabism, as a sort of hypernationalism, draws on a wellspring of memory practices that French historian François Hartog describes as constituting a modern “regime of historicity.”Footnote 21 One of the chief characteristics of this modern regime is nostalgia, as it supports a teleological understanding of national history as unfolding from a timeless past into an inevitable future. As Hartog argues, the lessons of national history are, paradoxically, found not in the past per se, but in the future apotheosis of the telos of the past. Nostalgia in these instances (and Hartog has in mind what Boym would describe as reflective nostalgia) serves as a reminder of past glories and the promise of (or invitation to) the future realization of the special character and mission of the nation.Footnote 22 The simultaneously backward- and forward-looking orientation of reflective nostalgia tends to give way to restorative nostalgia and its projects, especially, as Hartog notes, in periods of transition from the modern to what he calls the “presentist” regime of historicity—one in which memory and commemoration, more than monuments, are the driving forces of the memory culture.
In thinking about the relationship between place, memory, and culture in the construction and performance of Syria, I argue that nostalgia is a form of future-directed memory making; that is, it is a “nostalgia for the future,”Footnote 23 a programmatic and highly mediated process whereby imaginings of a past (through poetry, music, and other forms of popular culture) are conscripted into the project of constructing a future present. The recent (preconflict) histories of such Syrian cities as Aleppo and Damascus (and, across the Mediterranean, Fez and GranadaFootnote 24) illuminate and echo both past- and future-oriented projects of nostalgic dwelling. Not coincidentally, Aleppo and Damascus (like Fez and Granada) are registered as UNESCO World Heritage sites,Footnote 25 indicating the ways in which nostalgic dwelling in these sites is linked to the global circulation of ideas of authenticity, cultural ownership, and nostalgic consumption.Footnote 26
AL-ANDALUS IN AND OUT OF SYRIA
The standard narrativeFootnote 27 of al-Andalus is eminently one of exile, conquest, and movement, of ebbing and flowing, like the sea that partially forms its boundaries, defines its points of access, and sets its limits.Footnote 28 As an object of nostalgic consumption, al-Andalus serves as a chronotope of authenticity, as a time-place endowed with an aura of the authentic, yet one with an ambiguous geographical referent—sometimes the whole of Spain, sometimes the southern Iberian and Moroccan sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, and sometimes the Spanish autonomous region of Andalucía, including the modern cities that bear the names of the medieval city-states of Cordoba, Granada, Málaga, Seville, and Valencia. The story of al-Andalus also exercises a powerful hold on the popular and even scholarly imagination of medieval Spain as a golden age of cultural development, and a much-lamented lost paradise, if not a “culture of tolerance.”Footnote 29 These multiple, overlapping, and at times contradictory imaginings of al-Andalus attest to the power of the rhetoric of al-Andalus to animate projects of collective memorializing and myth-making.
As in the standard narrative, many Syrians with whom I spoke and the majority of texts on al-Andalus I consulted conceived of al-Andalus as the pinnacle of cultural achievement. However, in a departure from the narrative, many Syrians I interviewed also emphasized not only the Arab but also the Syrian dimensions of al-Andalus, elements that play either a minor role or are left out altogether in most North African and Spanish versions. Syrians see themselves at the heart of the story of al-Andalus: as descendants of the Umayyad founders, contributors to its development and glory, and recipients of its treasures once it fell. For them the story of al-Andalus is one of Syrian Arab cultural roots blossoming in a new land, then, after years (indeed, centuries) of development, returning home to their native soil with the exile of the Moors from Spain and their eventual resettling across the Mediterranean, including in the Levant. As a result, the Syrian narrative can best be characterized as one of migration and return voyage, a “there and back again” of Syria in al-Andalus, and then of al-Andalus back in Syria.
The pan-Arab dimensions of the Andalusian imaginary are evident in Syrian popular discourse. On one of my first visits to Damascus I met the novelist and publisher Fadil al-Sibaʿi. When I mentioned my interest in music and especially in the poetic-musical genre of muwashshaḥ, considered to have been created in al-Andalus, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Ah, al-Andalus! You mean the Andalusian muwashshaḥ.” He went on to talk enthusiastically about firdawsunā al-mafqūd (our lost paradise), referring to the Arab loss of a paradise of culture, learning, and tolerance—much like the standard narrative of rise, efflorescence, and fall. On another occasion a few years later we met at his home and discussed his interest in Andalusian heritage. While al-Sibaʿi is best known as a novelist, he worked for many years as a lawyer and civil servant and founded an independent press, Dar Ishbiliya (Seville House), which focuses on Arabic translations of well-known Andalusian texts and works on al-Andalus. He cultivated a deep personal interest and expertise in Andalusian science (especially agricultureFootnote 30) as well as literature, and his vast library held publications from Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Spanish publishers. When I asked about his deep interest in medieval Iberia, he suggested it was “natural” (ṭabīʿī) for him as a Syrian Arab to feel this link, because of his familial connection to medieval Iberia. When I expressed surprise about this connection, he asserted that his ancestors originally came from the Arabian Peninsula, had settled in Syria many centuries ago with the “opening” (fatḥ) of Greater Syria, and then joined one of the various waves of emigrants to al-Andalus, possibly settling in Ishbiliya (hence the name of his publishing house). With the fall of that and other cities, they came home to Syria, retracing in some ways the route of the muwashshaḥ genre itself, at least as it is portrayed in Syrian discourse. The there and back again of the Syrian rhetoric of al-Andalus was embodied in his personal history, even if it started, as he claimed, “1500 years ago in the Hijaz.”Footnote 31
At the time I found it curious that a modern Syrian writer and intellectual would trace his roots deeply in Arabian and Andalusian history. However, for al-Sibaʿi, as for many others, these are intertwined stories: an Arabian–Syrian–Andalusian nexus with great rhetorical power. Not long after this discussion I could not help but note the curious presence in modern Syria of the Andalusian past—curious because historically Syria has been more closely tied to Levantine, Arabian, Ottoman, and Persian cultures than to the far west (the Maghrib, including al-Andalus). For example, numerous restaurants, hotels, and stores carried names related to al-Andalus. In Damascus I found Hotel Granada, Cordoba Hotel, Seville Gifts, al-Andalus Sweets, al-Andalus Hospital, and al-Andalus Coppersmith. In Aleppo I came across al-Andalus Street, an entire neighborhood named “al-Andalus,” and several establishments with names linked to al-Andalus—the al-Andalus Institute for Languages and Computers, al-Andalus Bookstore, al-Andalus Hairdresser, and even al-Andalus Chicken (though it referred more to the “al-Andalus” neighborhood than to the bird). I came across other examples of the popular use of Andalusian referents in urban design and commerce, as well as statues of major Andalusian cultural figures, including ʿAbd al-Rahman I (al-Dakhil), the founder of Umayyad Spain, erected on the occasion of a conference held in Damascus in 1986 called “From Syria to al-Andalus” (Min al-Sham ila al-Andalus). For an older generation, those coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, al-Andalus not only represented a past—their past—but reverberated with their understanding of Syrian Arab society and culture, thereby linking their personal biographies to national social and political history. For al-Sibaʿi, as for many of his generation, al-Andalus has remained a living presence, but also an Arab presence. Moreover, al-Andalus serves as a powerful link between the medieval past and a contemporary world characterized by the global circulation of forms, ideas, and media. What might account for the development of this Andalusian imaginary?
AL-ANDALUS, PAN-ARABISM, NOSTALGIA
One productive avenue for inquiry is the role of visions of al-Andalus in promoting Arab nationalism in 20th-century Syria. Many historians concur that Arab nationalism developed as an oppositional movement tied to the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the advent of Turkish nationalism, and, to an extent, the rise of Zionism.Footnote 32 In its various incarnations, Arab nationalism sought to rally the Arab people under one flag based on historical, cultural, geographical, linguistic, and affective ties. The aim of such movements was partly to continue the 19th-century nahḍa project of cultural renaissance, reform, and renewal, but it also served as a project whose aim was to consolidate the power of the traditional urban elites in eras of transition.Footnote 33 In Syria, with the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of French colonial rule (c. 1920–46), urban notable families, primarily in Damascus, sought means both to bolster their position through the new external power and to gain favor with an increasingly resentful population. As Philip Khoury argues, “nationalism provided the kind of ideological cohesion and emotional appeal that urban leaders needed to be politically effective between the wars.”Footnote 34 For the urban notables, nationalism was not a revolutionary project but rather a means for retaining their privilege.Footnote 35 The tenets of Arab nationalism in this early period remained relatively simple: glorifying the Arab past and appealing to the sentiments of peoples accustomed for centuries to what they perceived to be the yoke of tyranny. In this context, the call for a unified Arab nation “was an attractive and compelling ideology.”Footnote 36 Among the more important trends during the colonial era was the establishment of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (1932) and the Baʿth Party (1947).Footnote 37 Both organizations advanced distinct visions of Arab unity: the former envisioned a “Greater Syria” based on geographic contiguity, while the latter envisioned pan-Arab unity based on cultural ties and political aspirations; this is encapsulated in the Baʿthist motto “Unity, Freedom, Socialism” (waḥda, ḥurriyya, ishtirākiyya). With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the idea of pan-Arabism became intimately connected to anti-Zionism (and vice versa).Footnote 38
However, in these nationalist and pan-nationalist imaginings, evocations of the glories of al-Andalus played little if any role; none of the major nationalist figures evoked in their writings the lost paradise of al-Andalus in order to rally the Arab nation, and my extensive review of early 20th-century publications in Syria revealed only sporadic reference to al-Andalus, usually in the context of incipient tourism to the “Arab” sites in Spain. One exception to this trend was the Syrian politician and historian Shakib Arslan (1869–1946), who espoused a variety of Arab nationalism guided by a reformed vision of Islamic statecraft—what William Cleveland terms “Islamic nationalism.”Footnote 39 To support his views, Arslan penned an extensive history of al-Andalus, al-Hulal al-Sundusiyya fi al-Akhbar wa-l-Athar al-Andalusiyya (The Silk Brocade Garments in the Annals and Ruins of al-Andalus),Footnote 40 in which he depicts al-Andalus as a lost paradise, thereby presaging modern Syrian versions of the rhetoric of al-Andalus.Footnote 41 Like al-Hulal, his other major work, Li-Madha Taʾakhkhara al-Muslimun wa-Taqaddama Ghayruhum (Why the Muslims Declined and Others Progressed), and the journal he edited, La National Arabe, promoted an Islamically informed notion of pan-Arabism that contrasted with the secular nationalism developing in this same period, and in both works al-Andalus serves as a referent and an inspiration. Yet Arslan was unique in this vision; for the majority of thinkers, al-Andalus played little if any role in their writings in this early period.
We can trace a general Arab interest in al-Andalus as a golden age to historical, biographical, and literary writings from the early modern to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Footnote 42 In early 20th-century travelogues, al-Andalus provides a metaphorical refuge from the ills of the present, one marked by colonial oppression and societal decline.Footnote 43 However, for midcentury authors, the Andalusian heritage served not only as a remembrance of a past Arab golden age, but also as inspiration for renewal in the present. In this era, the political context of nationalism was more important as al-Andalus came to stand both as a chronotope of authenticity and as a foil against which to read the Arab present—one marked, as William Granara indicates, by “colonialism, racism, sexism, political and intellectual repression, religious intolerance and militancy, class stratification and economic inequities.”Footnote 44 If early works evoked al-Andalus in terms of a reflective longing for the past, more recent texts promote both restorative and reflective nostalgias. That is, in the former, al-Andalus is a mythologized golden age devoid of controversy and contradiction, whereas in the latter, it stands as a mirror reflecting an idealized if fragmented image that blends a nostalgic view of the past with a lament for the present state; “reflective nostalgias,” writes Boym, “see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts.”Footnote 45
I suggest that the idea of al-Andalus played little role in early modern Syria because it had little in the way of value; it did not engage deeply held sentiments of belonging and was not yet a component of a broader nationalist rhetoric. However, by the early 1960s al-Andalus had come to serve as a useful rhetorical tool. The rhetorical force of al-Andalus in modern Syria owes an enormous debt to the literary works of Nizar Qabbani (1923–98) and Salma al-Haffar al-Kuzbari (1923–2006), who set the stage for the emergence in Syria of an Andalusian imaginative horizon that structures how the past is understood as well as how the present and future are constructed. Like earlier travel memoirs, their memoirs were facilitated by actual visits to Andalusian sites. As with the earlier works, theirs were influenced by the larger political context: not colonialism, however, but pan-Arabism. Pan-Arabism's golden age in Syria was circa 1954–64, a period that coincided with the growth of the state and its institutions, regional alliances, primarily with Iraq and later the ill-fated union with Egypt, and the continuing Palestinian quest for self-determination.Footnote 46 The loss of Palestine (marked by the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973) resonated with an Arab population coming to terms with the challenges of postcolonial state building; in fact, more than the military defeat itself, the inability of pan-Arabist governments to generate sustained economic growth during this period damaged not only their credibility, but also the validity of pan-Arabism as an ideology. In the context of these developments, the idea of al-Andalus as a golden age resonated with the rhetoric of the loss of Palestine, and allowed both lands to be imagined as lost paradises (mythologized as such) and the recovery of them to be promoted as a basis for moving into the future. In addition, the hollowness of pan-Arabism allowed for the later development of a restorative and even “prospective nostalgia” for a future Andalusian utopia (a theme picked up in much post-9/11 writings).
Though al-Kuzbari wrote of her experiences first,Footnote 47 it was Qabbani who would enjoy greater fame. In May 1963, Qabbani (then working as the cultural attaché at the Syrian embassy in Madrid) accompanied al-Kuzbari and her husband, then the Syrian ambassador to Spain, to Cordoba and Granada. The voyage to Granada would result in the composition of some of Qabbani's most important poems.Footnote 48 Of these, “Gharnata” (Granada) has enjoyed the widest influence; many educated Syrians I came to know during my field research could recite it from memory. Based on a visit to the Alhambra palace, “Granada” is a landmark poem that echoes Syrian nationalist hopes by making a claim on modern Spain through the medieval Syrian-Arab heritage, come to life in the form of the Syrian-Arab past irrupting in the Spanish present.
The poem itself is well known. Echoing al-Kuzbari's “Two Eyes,” Qabbani opens the poem with an evocation of a meeting with a dark-eyed Spanish tour guide:
The young woman inspires in him remembrances of Damascus, Syrian history, and the ancient Arab past. For this Damascene Proust, traveling to Andalusia reawakened in him an awareness of the living Arab past in the Spanish present. In a later work, Qabbani reflects on his experiences in Spain with deep regret and longing:
For the Arab, Spain is an unbearable historical anguish. Under each stone of hers sleeps a caliph, and behind every wooden door of hers there peek two black eyes. In the gurgling sounds of the water fountains in Cordoba's houses you hear a woman's weeping for her knight who never returned. To visit Andalusia is to travel in a forest of tears. Not once did I go to Granada and stay in the Alhambra Hotel but I found Damascus sleeping with me on my Andalusian pillow.Footnote 50
The poem and the later reflection on it reveals a lot about not only Qabbani's romanticism, but also the growth of a new nostalgic literature on Spain. This literature moves beyond the elegiac tone of earlier works, themselves inspired by the conventions of the faḍāʾil, ʿajāʾib, and rithāʾ al-mudun genresFootnote 51 that sought to revive the Andalusian past in the Arab present. Instead it evokes the Syrian past in the Andalusian present.
Older Syrians I interviewed recounted that “Granada” became standard fare for schoolchildren from the 1960s onward, for it struck a chord in a Syrian public highly attuned to poetry, as well deeply versed in the rhetoric of loss.Footnote 52 As a result, the idea of al-Andalus as an Arab golden age began to circulate more frequently, and has continued to circulate widely.Footnote 53 The idea of a great Umayyad Arab past as a cultural referent for the present made sense for Baʿthists, and while Qabbani was far from being a Baʿthist ideologue, he was a committed Arab nationalist and his works celebrated not only women and sensuality, as is well known, but also the beauty of Syria, especially his native Damascus.Footnote 54 It was not a stretch for the poet of Damascus to become a poet of Cordoba and Granada, through the historical and, in his poetic imagination, contemporary aesthetic links. He was not alone, and the metaphor of al-Andalus as a lost paradise has reverberated strongly in political discourse and in modern Arabic literature, particularly after the loss of Palestine.Footnote 55
In conjunction with these ideological developments, the influx of wealth from the oil-rich Arabian Gulf nations has funded the realization of what had previously been only dreams: the resettling of al-Andalus and its elevation to not only a lost paradise of past glory, but also a (utopian) vision of a future state of glory in the Arab world itself, a sort of neo-Andalusia. If the 1970s saw the rapid growth in nation building in the Arabian Gulf (in particular the Gulf Cooperation Council states), the 1980s witnessed investment of Arab wealth on an unparalleled scale around the world, including in Spain. Arab investment in Spain was concentrated in trade goods, including Spanish arms and agricultural products,Footnote 56 but also in real estate, often though not exclusively in the province of Andalucía (the eponymous home of al-Andalus). There, Arab oligarchs and potentates, including Saudi kings and shadowy characters such as Syrian strongman Rifaʿat al-Assad, erected fabulous palaces and formed real-state empires along the “Golden Mile” of Marbella.Footnote 57 Funds from the United Arab Emirates financed the building of the Great Mosque of Granada (which opened in July 2003), the first mosque to be constructed in Spain since the expulsions.Footnote 58 At the same time, beginning in the 1980s large numbers of Syrian intellectuals began to travel to the Gulf to work as teachers, journalists, and businessmen, bringing the optimism of the new Gulf economies to bear on critical questions of Arab identity. By this time al-Andalus was in the air as a cultural standard, yet one not only to be remembered with longing but also to be recultivated in the present and financed by newfound wealth. Al-Andalus was more than an idea: it became a project.Footnote 59
Certainly Arabian Gulf investment in Spain did not alone cause a renewed fascination with al-Andalus. There was an elective affinity between this investment and the rise of interest in the glories of al-Andalus, one promoted as much by Spanish politicians and entrepreneurs seeking new foreign investment as by wealthy Arab investors eager to build luxurious vacation homes. Remarking on the impact of Arab investment in his city, Alfonso Cañas Nogueras, the mayor of Marbella from 1979 to 1983, remarked in an interview that “the impact has been very positive. . . . The arrival of the Arabs on the coast came at a time of crisis and has generated new investments and new jobs”; moreover, as journalist John Markham notes, “half of all new investments in Marbella in the last three years [1978–81] had been generated by the Middle Eastern newcomers, who include several Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians as well as the Saudis.”Footnote 60 Longstanding residents of Granada, both Spanish and foreign, mentioned this connection to me on several occasions during my research, implying that the combination of tourism, Arab investment, and conversion to Islam in southern Spain fed the growth of interest in al-Andalus not only as a place, but also as a project to be studied, documented, and even recovered. This connection was also promoted by international attention to commemorations of the 500th anniversary of the fall of Granada.
This mixture of petrodollars, cultural confidence (with a decidedly conservative and Islamic orientation), tourism, and heritage politics helped give birth to the idea of a new–old Andalusia and a veritable cottage industry of Andalusian-inspired projects, from the architectural and cinematic to the musical and scholarly. In addition to the aforementioned 1986 conference “From Syria to al-Andalus,” from 1996 to 2010 the Instituto Cervantes/Spanish Cultural Center in Damascus hosted a biannual international Andalusian music festival. In 2002 and 2003 the Archaeological Society in Aleppo hosted conferences on Andalusian historical figures and other events related to Andalusian history, often in conjunction with the Cervantes Institute in Damascus. In this period the Arab-Andalusian links were powerfully present, even when the associations between cities such as Aleppo, Fez, and Granada were ambiguous. The emcee for a concert I attended in Aleppo in 1997 remarked that the city is the “jealous guardian” of the Andalusian traditions, even though very few Aleppine families claim direct Andalusian ancestry.Footnote 61 In 2006, Aleppo was selected as a Capital of Islamic Culture,Footnote 62 and among the many conferences and events were those that treated the connections between al-Andalus and Aleppo, including the poetic and the musical.Footnote 63 During the period of the 1980s and 1990s through the early 21st century, al-Andalus was in the air as an ever-present element in Syrian self-understanding, both of its past and its present and future orientations. As journalist Jean-Pierre Perrin argued in a critical appraisal (2001) of the exhibit Les Andalousies, de Damas a Cordou (al-Andalus: From Damascus to Cordoba) held at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris:
Al-Andalus is no longer only in Andalucía. . . . And if contemporary Andalucía does not feel particularly bereft of the Arab world . . ., it, however, feels itself indeed to be an orphan of al-Andalus. Not only the intellectuals, artists and writers, those always haunted by this sacred and irretrievably lost Atlantis, but also the common people of Cairo, Damascus, Marrakech, and Baghdad. For al-Andalus is still in the collective unconscious of the Arab peoples. For them, it was a golden age, so much so that they feel dispossessed of it. . . . In Arab cities, al-Andalus is everywhere.Footnote 64
THE RHETORIC OF AL-ANDALUS IN SYRIAN MUSIC
If “al-Andalus is everywhere,” it has reverberated especially in Syrian musical practices. In preconflict Syria, the use of the Andalusian appellation for certain genres of music supported and “sounded” state ideologies of pan-Arabism and also played a role in the cultural politics of heritage production and consumption. The so-called “Andalusian” muwashshaḥāt were a staple of traditional performance practice in Syria throughout the 20th century, on the stage, in the Muslim dhikr ceremony, and in conservatories.Footnote 65 In Syria these songs are known as “Andalusian” muwashshaḥāt, even though many if not most of them were composed not in medieval al-Andalus, but in the Levant and Egypt in the previous two centuries.Footnote 66 The Andalusian appellation acknowledges their probable origin as well as the fact that many (though certainly not all) of the lyrics to the muwashshaḥāt performed in Syria are based on poetic texts first composed and then set to music in al-Andalus between the 10th and 15th centuries. However, many of the muwashshaḥāt lyrics draw on texts by Levantine poets, from ancient to modern, and Syrian artists today still compose new muwashshaḥāt. This is in distinction to their counterparts in North Africa, where composition of new songs is considered inappropriate.Footnote 67 In addition, one of the most important medieval works on the muwashshaḥ was the Alexandrian Ibn Sanaʾ al-Mulk's 12th-century Dar al-Tiraz (The House of Brocade).Footnote 68
Melodically, Syrian muwashshaḥāt are firmly rooted in the modal and rhythmic cycles of what in the 20th century came to be called “Arab” music, though it has much in common with Ottoman and Persian musical cultures.Footnote 69 In this regard their musical structures are distinct from those utilized in North African Andalusian musical forms, and the relationship between them remains debated. Yet, most listeners would hear a family relationship between them in terms of structure (suite-based), tonality (modal), rhythm (complex), instruments, texts, and general aesthetic features, including the concept of ṭarab.Footnote 70 Syrian ensembles that perform muwashshaḥāt utilize variations of the ensemble known as the takht, comprising the muṭrib (vocalist) accompanied by ʿūd, qānūn, nāy, kamanja/kamān (violin), and percussion instruments such as the riqq (tambourine) or ṭabla (goblet-shaped drum). The standard narrative of Andalusian musical history claims that the fundamental structures of the musical tradition (its organization into suites and the like) was brought to al-Andalus by the Iraqi master Ziryab, who, according to legend, fled his irate master in Baghdad and arrived in Cordoba in c. 825 CE. Some common retellings of the Ziryab legend have the legendary progenitor of Andalusian music stopping in Syria (specifically in Aleppo) on his flight from Baghdad to Cordoba.Footnote 71 Since there is little hard evidence to prove or refute this claim, I treat it as ideological and rhetorical, in the sense that it promotes ideological positions. The incorporation of Syria into the Ziryab legend speaks volumes about how many Syrians see the Andalusian heritage as essentially Arabian, an extension of Syrian culture, and not North African or Iberian. In some ways the return voyage of modern Syrian artists to al-Andalus mimics the mythical voyage of Ziryab, which has become a standard trope for understanding not only the origins of Andalusian music, but also the pan-Arab connections between Iberia and Arabia.Footnote 72 In this discourse, the musical and poetic structures, at heart Arabian, were refined in al-Andalus, and after the fall came home again to Syria.
As in the narrative of Fadil Sibaʿi, the modified Ziryab legend was performed musically in Spain by two visiting Syrian artists. In 2001 ʿūd player Husayn Sabsaby performed at a concert for the Splendor of the Córdoban Umayyads exhibition held in the ruins of Madinat al-Zahra.Footnote 73 The exhibition featured weekly concerts of music coming from the “Three Cultures” from June through September 2001, and was attended by both the Syrian president and the Spanish king. Sabsaby described the performance as a collaboration between himself on ʿūd and Spanish flamenco artists, both a guitarist and a vocalist, in order to demonstrate the links between Syrian Arab music and Spanish flamenco. To his ears they were related, and in fact he went on to perform and record with a Syrian flamenco guitarist.Footnote 74 This is no surprise coming from a student of the Iraqi ʿūd master Munir Bashir (1930–97), who produced a recording of solo ʿūd improvisations entitled “flamenco Roots.”Footnote 75 Sabsaby says he composed the track “Min Wahi al-Andalus” (Inspired by al-Andalus) after he performed at The Splendor of the Córdoban Umayyads exhibition. On his website he describes composing “Min Wahi al-Andalus” in response to his visit to Spain, evoking the rhetoric of al-Andalus as a lost paradise of cultural efflorescence and evening entertainment. In fact, the rhetoric of al-Andalus as essentially Syrian Arab was performed musically in compositions, recordings, and concerts throughout my research in Syria, as well as in recordings and concerts abroad. Syrians commonly understood Spanish flamenco to derive from “their” music, and in fact whenever Arab music was mixed with popular and classical European musics, even European early music styles, many Syrians heard them as “flamenco,” as at the concert evoked in the opening of this essay. Several Syrian musical experiments have featured guitar and ʿūd, or ʿūd played in the style of flamenco guitar (loosely understood), meaning strumming and sometimes chordal playing not characteristic of traditional Arab-style ʿūd playing.
On 31 January 2008, the young female Syrian ʿūd player and singer Waed Bouhassoun opened the Damascus Arab Capital of Culture festivities with a performance in Granada at the Alhambra palace.Footnote 76 In the presence of the Syrian first lady and the Spanish queen, Bouhassoun performed in one of the rooms of the fabled Alhambra palace—an extremely rare opportunity according to Spanish musicians I interviewed. In addition to highlighting a talented young woman performer from Syria as a symbol of progress and openness, the festival also demonstrated the rhetorical ties between Syria and Spain. Even more pronounced than having a Syrian perform at the Córdoban Umayyad exhibit—since, after all, the Umayyad dynasty in Iberia was of Syrian origins—the move to open the Damascus Capital of Arab Culture programming in Spain was remarkable. It literally inserted Damascus (and, by extension, Syria and the Arab world) into Spain, at the heart of one of the most symbolically charged architectural spaces in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions (despite that the Alhambra does not date from the Umayyad period in al-Andalus). Sabsaby's and Bouhassoun's performances confirmed the Syrian rhetoric of al-Andalus; namely, that the “original” and “authentic” Arab culture (metonymically associated with Umayyad culture) was the heart of the development of Andalusian culture. With their ʿūds, Sabsaby and Bouhassoun literally sounded the close affective and rhetorical links between Syria and Spain.
The links between Andalusian and Syrian culture were made clear to me by one of my teachers in Aleppo. During a voice lesson when we were working on an “Andalusian” muwashshaḥ (actually a song composed in Aleppo in the 1960s that uses lines from a poem by the 14th-century Iraqi poet Safi al-Din al-Hilli), I asked him why Syrians celebrated their ties to al-Andalus when it was so far removed from them in time and space. He thought for a moment and then replied, “al-Andalus was for us a golden age (ʿasr dhahabī), but it is a source of solace (rāḥa), especially in an era of political, economic, and cultural decline (tadahwur).” The music, he argued, was essentially earlier “Arabian” songs that developed new dimensions in medieval Spain before returning home to Syria after the fall of Granada. For him the music, at heart “Arab,” had acquired an Andalusian flavor or tinge during its Iberian sojourn.Footnote 77 It not only sonically represented a past golden age, but also reverberated with a condition of decline (and this was stated well before the Syrian conflict began in March 2011).
The Syrian-Andalusian connections were performed in the series of biannual concerts of Arab-Andalusian music sponsored by the Instituto Cervantes in Damascus (the last was held in 2010). Here is the description of the 1998 concert evoked at the beginning:
Two Syrian cities (Damascus and Aleppo) will [host] four Andalusian nights in which ancient music and songs from the days of the Moors in Spain will be presented. . . . The Syrian-Moroccan-Spanish connection of this cultural festival is evident: the Umayyad Dynasty based in Damascus established the Umayyad rule in Andalusia, and Aleppo, capital of the north, became the bearer of the artistic traditions of this glorious past. Morocco became the refuge to the thousands of Spanish Muslims (Moors) who fled the Spanish inquisition after the Spanish re-conquest of Andalusia. Thus, musical traditions of Andalusia were preserved throughout centuries. Three [ensembles] from Aleppo, Morocco and Spain will perform in this festival, using period instruments and authentic styles.Footnote 78
One notes the recourse to a Syrian-Moroccan-Spanish circuit via the history of the Umayyad dynasty in Cordoba (and by inference the Ziryab tale), the implicit assumption of a static, mythological temporality linking modern Syria, Morocco, and Spain with medieval al-Andalus, as well as the claim to authenticity; the mention of “period instruments” and “authentic styles,” while no doubt journalistic hyperbole, supports the broader Syrian rhetoric of al-Andalus. Moreover, Morocco, though mentioned, is not given any agency or influence in the creation of Andalusian music; in the Syrian rhetoric, the Maghrib serves only as a refuge for the music and culture, not as a locus of creativity. Later festivals were held in a number of Syrian cities and, like the first, celebrated the shared legacy of al-Andalus between Syria and Spain. Press accounts of these festivals also framed the performances as drawing on “the glorious past of the Arabs in Spain.”Footnote 79
The reactions to the festivals illustrate how for many Syrians al-Andalus remained not only a living presence, but first and foremost an Arab presence. Even when drawing on Islamic elements, such as in al-Sibaʿi's work on Andalusian sciences or in Sufi musical evocations, the primary cultural orientation tended to be Syrian-Arab, not pan-Islamic (let alone North African or Berber). Al-Andalus, for these artists as for so many others, represented a high point of Arab culture and an extension of the cultural developments first begun under the Syrian Umayyad dynasty. Even today, in crisis-ridden Syria, contemporary composers use the Andalusian form. For example, from his exilic home in Alexandria, Egypt, my former Aleppine teacher recently composed a muwashshaḥ based on a poem by the 10th-century Andalusian poet Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, and others I know in or from Aleppo also compose new muwashshaḥāt.Footnote 80
For their part, partisans of the Syrian regime have used the rhetoric of al-Andalus to proclaim the desire that Bashar al-Assad will liberate al-Andalus for the Arabs.Footnote 81 Similar discourses were heard in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when Ayman al-Zawahiri, then Osama bin Laden's deputy, asserted that his followers would not repeat “the tragedy of al-Andalus,” while Zakariyya Musawwi, the so-called “twentieth hijacker” of the 9/11 attacks, claimed in court that his principal demand was “the return of Spain to the Moors.”Footnote 82 These remarks recall the Arabic graffiti I spotted at the Alhambra in 2002: sa-nastarjiʿ iyyāk in shāʾ allāh (We will get you back, God willing). Western observers quickly noticed the threat and denounced the desire of Islamic militants to retake Spain and “liberate” the West for Islam.Footnote 83 Charles Hirschkind notes that after 9/11 then Spanish prime minister José María Aznar used a similar conflictual rhetoric of al-Andalus to argue that Spain has known Islamic terrorism since the 8th-century conquest (with the year 711 serving as a prefigurement of 9/11).Footnote 84 Both the Spanish prime minster and Bin Laden cynically drew on ideologically biased readings of the history of al-Andalus to promote projects: for the former, a Fortress Europe, while for the latter, a reconstituted Muslim community (umma). Revisionist history cuts both ways, and in recent years we have seen yet more interpretations of al-Andalus, from scholars who argue against the notion that it was a culture of toleranceFootnote 85 to those who claim it was, at best, a form of “apartheid in paradise,”Footnote 86 if not a myth.Footnote 87 In times of crisis, we see that forms of remembrance, including reflective, prospective, and even ersatz nostalgia, are very much up for debate.
CONCLUSIONS
These examples suggest that al-Andalus came to play a large role in the imaginings of the Syrian nation only when the forces of social and political integration were active; the rhetoric of al-Andalus is one of the Syrian nation coming to understand itself. I hope to have shown as well the role of literary and musical interventions in sparking and echoing these developments. The prospective or future-oriented nostalgia for al-Andalus has grown alongside not only the politics of Arab nationalism, but also the aesthetics of loss for Palestine (performed in poetry, song, and other art forms). Moreover, the vision of an Arabian past to be remembered and even recovered and recreated has been funded in large part by the growth in petrodollars and significant Arab investment in Spain since the 1980s. These political and economic developments have allowed Arab intellectuals and entrepreneurs to reinvest Spain and its Arab-Andalusian heritage with their own hopes for renewal, their own invitational rhetorics for a better future. Finally, the small but growing community of Syrian and other Arab migrants in Spain, especially in Andalucía, has played a role in making these dreams a reality for some, and a nightmare for others.Footnote 88
Musical performances across the Mediterranean continue to evoke this complex history of entanglement between the Arab East, North Africa, and southern Europe. In the context of the unfathomable pain and suffering in Syria today, al-Andalus and its musical legacies may come to play a role not only as a symbol of Syrian (Arab/Umayyad/Sunni) achievement, but also as a project for a desired future redemption. In response to trauma, literary and musical performance may contribute to world-making projects that draw selectively on readings of history, imaginings of the past, historical amnesias, and fantasies of the future.Footnote 89 They may also help us understand how various orientations toward the past and regimes of historicity offer means of reinvesting sites with meaning and creating conditions of nostalgic dwelling. Given the deep divisions in Syrian society, the future remains uncertain. The rhetoric of al-Andalus, so closely tied not only to Arabism but also to a broad understanding of community, may yet again offer a way to reimagine the Syria of tomorrow as a “first rate place.”
