On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus
by Eric Calderwood.
Harvard University Press, 345 pp., $45.00
Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Averroës’ Search” begins one afternoon in twelfth-century Andalusia, in the shady Cordovan home of Ibn Rushd, later known in Europe as Averroës. The philosopher is at an impasse in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics: two words, “tragedy” and “comedy,” are everywhere in the Greek but opaque to the Arab, who has no notion of dramaturgy. At a dinner party that evening, the subject of poetry comes up again: a guest argues that the Bedouin verse of pre-Islamic times, the foundation of Arabic literature, is obsolete for poets living in sophisticated cities like Córdoba. When the sixth-century poet Zuhayr compared destiny to a blind camel, the metaphor was arresting; now it seems absurd.
The philosopher disagrees. He argues, in perfectly Aristotelian fashion, that poetry deals in universals: its purpose isn’t to amaze but to invent figures understandable by everyone. (Borges’s sly implication seems to be that the powerful yet clumsy camel, against whom all human struggle is doomed, points toward an Arabic translation of “tragedy,” even if Ibn Rushd doesn’t realize it.) Because of poetry’s universalism, the philosopher continues, the passage of time enriches it rather than making it out of date. Recalling Zuhayr’s verse now, we not only think of his metaphor but compare our struggles with his: “The figure had two terms; today, it has four.” Ibn Rushd finishes with an anecdote. During a stay in North Africa, “tortured by memories of Córdoba,” he was consoled by a line of poetry composed by the caliph ‘Abd al-Rahman, who addressed a tree in his royal garden while thinking of home in Damascus: “Thou too art, oh palm!,/On this foreign soil…”
Ibn Rushd’s dinner companions would have known all about ‘Abd al-Rahman. A member of the Umayyad family, which ruled the second Islamic caliphate from Damascus between 661 and 750, he escaped the slaughter of his kin by the rival Abbasids and fled west. In 756 he proclaimed Umayyad rule over the Iberian Peninsula—al-Andalus, in Arabic—which his descendants would govern from Córdoba for nearly three centuries. Many things in the new capital harked back to ‘Abd al-Rahman’s native Syria: his estate of al-Rusafa, with
