“Many a Zayd and ‘Amr”: Mediation and Representation in Al-Andalus

Abstract

The go-between reemerges in Iberian letters some hundred years after Ibn Hazm created a space for her in the Andalusi courtly discourse of love elaborated in the Dove’s Neck Ring. The taifa courts, the inheritors of Umayyad splendor and culture, were in their infancy as Ibn Hazm was composing The Dove’s Neck Ring, but by the end of the eleventh century they have fallen to the Berber Almoravids. Unlike Ibn Hazm, whose Dove’s Neck Ring reflects a hopeful attitude that Andalusi caliphal splendor might be restored, Abū l-Tāhir Muhammad al-Saraqustī, al-Andalusi, Ibn al­Ashtarkuwi (d. 1 143) (al-Saraqustī) turns a critical eye to Andalusi splen­dor and its legacy—the literature of Andalusi Arab identity—exposing this cultural model as an illusion no longer viable in a changed Iberian cultural landscape. Mediation and mediators figure prominently in al-Saraqustī’s col­lection of fifty brief narratives, the Maqâmât al-luzûmiyah, both as characters within the narrative and in the very literary form he has chosen for such representation, the maqâmât, which itself is defined by formal and stylistic conjuncture (discussed in detail below). In her new context the go-between is no longer part of a codified courtly discourse. The go-between and the rhymed prose with which she was created have been displaced from the caliphal court and now begin to roam in a new Andalusi land­scape, that of al-Saraqustī’s maqâmât. In “Maqâma 9” we witness as she creates her own erotic discourse, offering the lover fictional accounts of a nonexistent beloved in order to manipulate him to her own ends.

It was forbidden to a Muslim to take delight in hearing the melodious voice of a strange woman, because the first look would be made at you and the second against you.

—Ibn Hazm, The Dove’s Neck Ring