We do well, in the context of the Middle Ages, to pause before such prospects, since they bespeak so rich and rare an interplay between men, faiths, languages, and cultures, all to the benefit of the people of the Iberian peninsula. And we may ask the same kind of obvious questions that arose in the synagogue of Samuel Halevi. Where are the Arab leaders with learned and powerful Jewish ministers, who sponsor Jewish scholarship in the country where they live? The question sounds absurd. But if it was possible in medieval Spain, over a thousand years ago, are we to think it will be impossible, forever, in the decades and centuries to come?
And Hasdai is far from being the only example of the powerful Jewish-Muslim political force field in Al-Andalus. Take the example, a century after Hasdai, of a man we have already met, Ismail ibn Naghrela. This is a man whose name will be more familiar every passing decade. Another leader of the Jewish community in Al-Andalus, he was a refugee from Córdoba and, by legend at least, a spice merchant and scribe in Málaga. One pictures him dusted in spices and working in language to find a way to marry sensual delight and spiritual certainty. Through his eloquence, derring-do, and literary abilities, he rose to the notice of the vizier of Málaga. Later, he made himself so indispensable to the king of Granada that he was appointed the king’s vizier and, astoundingly, the king’s chief military commander. Imagine this: a Jewish leader for the military forces of a Muslim head of state. As if this were not enough, he was a Biblical scholar and a world-class poet, even penning lines from the battlefield. His verse is metaphysical:
Earth to man
is a prison forever.
These tidbits, then
for fools:
Run where you will
Heaven surrounds you.
Get out if you can.
Or it is practical:
Luxuries ease, but when trouble comes
people are plagued by the wealth they’ve accrued.
The peacock’s tail is spectacular
But it weighs him down on the day he’s pursued.
Or it is erotic:
I’d give everything I had for that gazelle
who, rising at night
to his harp and flute
saw a cup in my hand
and said:
“Drink your grape blood against my lips!”
It is easy to imagine Naghrela, in all his lucid, adventurous power, in his palace on the Sabika hill, where the Alhambra now stands, and looking over to the thriving Albayzín.
Hasdai and Naghrela are two of the preeminent figures of the Jewish culture of Al-Andalus—the resplendent centuries known to history as the Sepharad. It was a culture of preternatural brilliance, with its doctors and astronomers, poets and viziers, scholars, translators, poets, mystics, and mathematicians. To mention one of them, virtually at random: in medieval European philosophy, there is the influential Avicebron, whose philosophical work was taken up by Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Albertus Magnus, and who played a central role introducing Neoplatonism to the period. For centuries, no one knew precisely who this gentlemen was. A writer in Baghdad? A contemporary of Avicenna or Omar Khayyam? The best guess, for centuries, was that he was a Christian or Muslim philosopher. Then in 1846, a scholar working in the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris noticed that the Latin translation of Avicebron’s most influential book, The Fountain of Life, was taken from a book written in Arabic—by the Jewish Solomon Ibn Gabirol, an Andalusian philosopher and poet from Málaga. Gabirol’s work includes Kingdom’s Crown, a long, transcendent, unforgettable prayer that figures prominently in the literature of Hebrew. Gabirol’s poetry remains part of Hebrew liturgy; and his challenging philosophy took on such core notions as divine essence and divine will, the creation of matter and form, universal soul, and the exact elements that compose the created order of the world. And so the philosopher Avicebron turned out to be a temperamental, independent genius, disfigured by a horrific skin disease, who lived much of his life wandering among the Jewish communities throughout Al-Andalus. He entered fully into his physical pain, and into his solitude and darkness, that we might have the good light and uncompromised power of his work.
To understand the convivencia, it is best to let the work of the period speak for itself: work on all fronts that took form brightly in this mixture of cultures, religions, and languages. I have been reading history for years, and I recall no astonishment so sharp as learning of the accomplishments of Al-Andalus.
THE NEW OLD WORLD OF POETRY AND STORIES
Since we have learned of the poetry of Ibn Gabirol and Ibn Neghrela, let us listen to other poets of the period. The verse is far-rambling and marvelous in scope, written not from ideas, but from the good ground of experience, even at its most metaphysical. There is nature poetry, verses of searching love and raucous consummation, transcendent appeals to the heavens, bitter laments and longing, taunts, jibes, seductions, and wholehearted thankfulness. It’s poetry meant to embrace the whole of life, to call the mind close to life.
As we named the translators who changed forever the course of European history, so let us name some of the Arabic and Jewish poets of Al-Andalus: Yehuda Halevi, Moshe Ibn Ezra, Wallada, Ibn Zaydun, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Khafaja, Al-Mutamid, Ibn Abd Rabbihi, Al-Ghazal, Ibn al-Quittiya, Avraham Ibn Hasdai, Yusef Ibn Zabara, Hafsa, Ibn Hani, Ibn Shuhayd al Andalusi, Yosef Qimhi, Avraham Ibn Ezra, Al-Sunawbri, Dunash.
Sound familiar? Before our move to Spain, I was wholly ignorant of nearly all of them. It is yet another example how work of merit rises slowly to prominence, dependent upon the whimsy of politics, of taste, of cultural ignorance or presumption, of the vagaries of accident, and of our willingness to look into the past with hope, goodwill, and resistance to political and aesthetic propaganda. The names of these poets are as familiar as would have been the names of, say, Vermeer in 1800, or Vivaldi in 1850, or Emily Dickinson in 1886—all three of them virtually unknown before, respectively, their painting, music, and poetry was rediscovered, understood, and cherished. I name these poets of Al-Andalus to honor them, and as part of the blessed rediscovery of them now underway at long last.
Here, to give you some savor of their work, is a sampling, what is called in Spanish a florilegio: a gathering of flowers:
From Ibn Hani in an amorous mood:
Is it the darks of your eyes, or your father’s swords?
Are these cups of wine, or your kissable lips …
Your eyes are our rendezvous …
A generous verse of praise from Ibn Shuhayd:
She’s played adulteress to her men,
But what a lovely adulteress!
And from the same poet: he has grown old, he looks into the gathering darkness, yet is still possessed:
But what is strange is that in my breast
A love kindles, like flying sparks of embers.
It moves me as death bores into my heart,
Excites me as my soul hangs in my throat.
From Ibn Hazm, long gone in love, from a poem called “The Nature of the Beloved”:
Do you belong to the world of angels
Or that of men?
Explain it to me …
Blest be the One who …
… arranged that you
be marvelous natural light.
From the poet Ibn Khafaja, a lovely verse on longing:
Your love is firm, but I am full of consternation
At our ever fated separation
As if we were on a revolving sphere,
When I appear, you disappear.
And then the same poet, on a happier night:
He almost drank my soul, I almost drank his cheek.
Nature poetry was so well developed in Al-Andalus that there were established genres for poems about spring, about gardens, and about flowers. There was even a tradition of minute description, that studied in language the most humble things, like a medieval version of Pablo Neruda’s witty Odas elementales. Take these lines, for instance, by Ibn Al-Quitiyya, about a walnut:
Its
covering is composed
Of two halves so joined
It’s a pleasure to see
Like eyelids joined in sleep.
A simple, beautiful line from the nature poet Al-Sunawbri:
The silence of gardens is speech.
Centuries before the Romantics of England, and yet more centuries before the powerful tradition of nature writing in North America, we have the poets of Al-Andalus in conversation with nature, seeking concord and hoping to attend, to learn, to understand. Here is Ibn Khafaja again, traveling through a mountain pass, and hearing the voice of the mountain itself:
It blocked every which way
The rushing winds and at night
It shouldered the stars
Arched over desert the mountain
Like some thinker
Weighing all the consequences
Clouds like turbans, black, wrap him
Lightning fringed them
With tufts of crimson
And mute as he was, languageless,
On my night journey I heard him
Speak to me of the mysteries …
We have been roaming among both Arab and Jewish poets, and it is worth knowing that the Jewish poets’ shining work has its roots in the same blessed phenomenon: the convivencia. For Arabic had strongly developed vernacular forms, and the Jewish poets of the period used them as their schoolhouse. As one of the earliest Jewish poets wrote: “Let Scripture be your Eden, and the Arabs’ books your paradise grove.”
And so the early Jewish poets made a deep study of Arabic prosody—the patterns of meter, intonation, rhythm, all the conventions of music and rhetoric present in the body of Arabic verse. They adapted those elements to Hebrew and made together a revolution. It is a period now called the Golden Age of Hebrew Poetry. It has also been called the Spanish Miracle. The best of these poets are now with us, thanks to the work of the poet, scholar, and translator Peter Cole. His beautiful collection, The Dream of the Poem, brings these poets into our hands and their light into our daily lives.
A few more offerings from Professor Cole’s translations. First, let us return to Ibn Neghrela, the vizier, scholar, and military leader of Granada. Listen to this fierce vow, as he leaves a city lost to anarchy:
By God and God’s faithful—
and I keep my oaths—
I’ll climb cliffs
And descend to the innermost pit,
and sew the edge of desert to desert,
And split the sea
And every gorge,
and sail in mountainous ascent,
until the word “forever” makes sense to me.
And an offering from a man we’ve already met, Solomon Ibn Gibirol, or Avicebron, also a poem of departure and defiance, as he is leaving Saragossa:
You who seek my peace, come near—
and hear the roar of my heart like the sea.
If your heart has grown hard it will soften
faced with the hatred that faces me.
Here in Granada, in the eleventh century, lived the poet Moshe Ibn Ezra, ranked among the best of the epoch. His work ranges from this bedazzled piece, called “Weak with Wine”—
We woke, weak with wine from the party,
barely able to get up and walk
to the meadow wafting its spices—
the scents of cassia and cloves:
and the sun had embroidered its surface with blossoms
and across it spread a deep blue robe.
—to the poems of his years of exile from Granada, separated from his family and from an energetic and brilliant life in this beautiful city. It’s called “The Dove”:
Why is that dove in the highest branches
grieving now in the garden of spices?
His summer streams won’t run dry,
the palm trees shade will always shield him,
and before him, in spring his fledglings sing
all the melodies he has taught them.
So cry, little bird, but cry for the man
forced to wander. His sons are far.
He cannot tend his young. He sees
No one who sees them—and sorcerers alone
Can he consult. Sigh for his wandering,
but do not bring your song to him;
Lend him your wings to fly to them
and delight in the dust and stones of their land.
This man could be our neighbor. He could be showing us the agony of exile in our own times, as he talks directly and intimately to us, across nearly a millennium. In Moshe Ibn Ezra’s work, and throughout the work of the poets of Al-Andalus, we have their uncanny modernity, a clairvoyant engagement with the details of politics and daily life.
There is this rueful piece, from Avraham Ibn Ezra,
The heavenly spheres and fortune’s stars
veered off course the day I was born;
If I were a seller of candles,
the sun would never go down.
And from Yosef Qimhi, this bitterness, called “Love for the World”:
Man in his love for the world is like
a dog gnawing on bones;
He sucks the blood between his lips
and doesn’t know it’s his own.
From Avraham Ibn Hasdai, in a quatrain called “Wisdom’s Mantle,” taken from a longer piece called “Advice for a Future King”:
As long as a man seeks out wisdom
wisdom will have him hold sway over men;
but once he thinks he’s wearing its mantle—
know that it has just been taken from him.
The thirteenth-century poet Todros Abulafia has this playful erotic piece, called “The Day You Left”:
The day you left was bitter and dark
the finest thing, you—and when I think of it,
it feels like there’s nothing left of my skin.
Your feet, by far, were more beautiful,
the day they mounted
and wrapped my neck in a ring.
I would like, reader, to have you into our garden, and sit with you under the grapevine and beside the pomegranate tree, and read aloud with you a whole suite of selections of this poetry. I would wager that never, in the course of such a reading, would you say: how medieval! This is the poetry of men (and some women) who were centermost in the life of their times, plunged in the life of their times, with all its prosperity and learning, its beauty, irrepressible curiosities, songs and science and mathematical ingenuity, its religious exaltations, its stunning culture, and its spasms of violence. These poets offer us the very minutiae of their lives. Rather than the tedious religious dogma we find elsewhere in Europe, they work into the verses all they can of their days and nights, and nothing is off-limits. We can read poems of longing and praise addressed directly to God, and savory erotic speculations; subtle political advice and sage psychological observations; forlorn torments of despair and thanksgiving for a deliverance in love; the refusal to submit to fate and to bitterness, yet sometimes the anguished offerings of a learned man overtaken by events and trampled by sorrow.
In other words, these men and women write to us from their lives, which are our lives. Though they may have lived centuries ago, they are our neighbors. As we read, what grows in us is a feeling that is uncommon when we hold a book from the Middle Ages: a feeling that we are among friends.
Before we leave the literature of Al-Andalus, we should look together into a book of a man born near Granada at the beginning of the twelfth century, Ibn Tufayl. His profile is similar to many of the writers of this period—he had profoundly diverse interests and skills. He was a doctor of such renown that that he was court physician to a sultan of the period, Abu Yaqub, a lover of books who delighted in the company of men of learning. The sultan would spend hours musing with them about whether the world was eternal or created, about Aristotle and the Koran, about the source of the world’s order. In all this, Ibn Tufayl played a crucial role, bringing men of science and philosophy to the court. It
was a place of robust and wide-ranging inquiry. Ibn Tufayl was even assigned the task of writing commentaries on the works of Aristotle. He steered the assignment to a young, luminous protégé—also a doctor and philosopher—Averroes.
Ibn Tufayl not only placed crucial work in brilliant hands, he wrote medical treatises, gathered important astronomers in the court and promoted their mathematical challenges to Ptolemy, and wrote poetry and a number of works on natural philosophy. But the book of his that is still with us, and still will stagger a reader, is his short account called The Journey of the Soul. It is, in modern translation, all of sixty pages. I do not recall, in a lifetime of reading, so piercing a surprise.
It is the story of man named Hai bin Yaqzan (which means Alive, son of Awake), who as a baby is marooned on an island. He is discovered by a doe, who suckles him and protects him. The boy thrives and grows, and his world changes when the doe perishes. Assaulted by sorrow, Hai begins to explore and to reason, and as we listen to his reflections, we are taken on his journey, on this island, by himself, with only his own experience to guide him. Hai muses his way straight to heaven. Let us follow along, as we can.
His journey begins when, in attempt to bring the maternal doe back to life, he finds her heart. He realizes that she will not return, that what was animating and vital had departed forever, and he learns from ravens that he must bury her remains. But from his discoveries he comes into a kinship with the life of the island, and from a flare-up in a thicket of cane, he discovers fire and then cooking. He takes up a life as an amateur scientist, and in hopes of understanding the life around him, he practices dissection. We should remember—it is difficult to do so—that this is a twelfth-century text.
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