Andalusi Textiles at the Institut du Monde Arabe

On loan from the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.

Granada, Nasrid, 13th and 14th centuries:

Post-1492 Almería:

 Textiles that are being described as specifically Andalusi from north Africa post 1492:

A video at the end of the exhibition followed a day in the work life of a man who took over his family textile workshop in Chouen from his father, and demonstrated some of the techniques described and shown throughout:

And the self-indulgent yet obligatory selfie from the panoramic roof garden with Notre Dame in the background:

Book Review: Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language

For a book on translation out of Arabic, the irony of Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language is that the English translation distracts and detracts from the work.

I'm not crazy about the work itself: The discussion of Jahiz is useful if unoriginal and uninspired. Much of the framework appears to draw heavily upon an odd couple of the author's making: Schoeler and Derrida. The book simply doesn't add any line of inquiry or analysis that is new to anyone already well-read in the history and theory of Arabic translation. Even as he reports on Jahiz's criticism of the translation of philosophy as inherently poor because the translator can never understand the idea as well as the philosopher, the voice of Kilito the narrator reads as an inexpert guide through the material though Kilito the author and critic surely is not.

From his wonder at the writings of Hrsowitha to the concept directed to uneducated European audiences for his work, self-regard is the unifying element to these chapters in Arabic literature in translation. It is this perspective that accounts for the thoughtless and pervasive littering of the book with intentionalist fallacies of every scale. Kilito, in his authorial voice, is convinced of the importance of his own intentions; and so the intentions of other authors are also up for discussion and validation.

The sense that one gets of this being a book in which the author is addressing himself, writing himself, and spinning out his own internal monologue is reinforced throughout. For example, the discussion of al-Hariri's maqamat is lacking where it tries to ground itself historically. The discussion of Ibn Battuta hints at a variety of issues that might have been very interesting had they been drawn out and developed. The final two chapters, which present themselves as the heart of the matter, give the impression of being a pale imprint of the ideas being presented: they are probably very interesting, but Kilito does not deign to take us all the way through them, instead leaving us with lengths of description and the hint an argument made largely by juxtaposition. Again, the central importance of the author is reified. Surely he knows what he is talking about. Why don't we?

An evocative passage at the beginning of the final chapter ought to have been the starting point, not the ending one.

For a work that announces itself as an heir to Said's criticism ("I have learned from bitter experience that the other does not care about me unless I reached out to him" (7)), Kilito easily adopts a variety of Orientalist fallacies. Rather than giving voice to all that we have learned in the intervening century since Ernest Renan about the performance of poetry in dramatic settings and even authors we might call playwrights, such as Ibn Rushd's near-if-younger contemporary, Ibn Daniyal, Kilito instead reads completely with Renan. It is as if he recognizes what he is doing — with an explicit nod to Borges he writes: "I feel embarrassed as I write these lines, for despite myself I speak of Ibn Rushd with a certain amount of condescension. I am embarrassed because I know what he did not!" (44-5) — but despite this self-consciousness, he seems powerless to do otherwise.

And then there is the matter of the translation: The translator is irritatingly interventionist, adding a litany of footnotes defining basic terms and offering recourse to introductory readings. Some of this may have been moderated by a different typographical decision; in other words, endnotes would have been less distracting in this instance than footnotes, available to the uninitiated but unobtrusive. The overall effect is to remind the reader that this is a translated book, to remind her that it is transmitted through many hands. In reading, I wanted to shout: This is not your book! Restrain yourself! An apparatus or a bibliographic essay or a critical article should have been a separate undertaking. I suppose it serves me right: I could have read it in the original Arabic and I should have. Or, perhaps a book that adopts slices of a Derridian monolingualism, resists the idea of translation and speculates about the extent to which authors appreciated that their works might be translated should never have appeared in translation, and serves us all right for asking it to try.

More gravely, a book that largely deals with medieval Arabic translation, even in a postcolonial mode, needed to have been edited and translated by a medievalist. If the translator is overbearing in adding footnotes to explain basic concepts and introduce basic bibliography, he is also frustratingly incomplete; where he cites Roger Allen, he glaringly neglects to cite James Monroe, perhaps because he did not recognize a key idea from one of Monroe's early books which Kilito cites quite completely but (in good medieval mode) without attribution, a reference that a specialist in the field would have recognized. The makers of this book appear to have conceived of the translator's role as coterminal with that of the editor of the text and the creator of the critical apparatus, and in those duties, Wail Hassan has fallen down.

Even though it is an essayistic work of criticism, both author and translator are far too present.

Ultimately, book is a nice if unnecessary reminder of that passage from Jahiz, but otherwise is one of those texts that tragically makes its point by being the exception and the counterpoint to all of its own rules.

In Defense of Strange Hispanists (A First Attempt)

Edited to add: I was hired by a Spanish department, so it should go without saying that what I'm describing here isn't the case across the board. But it's certainly the norm.

It shouldn't be as easy as it is for me to get complacent about my place in at least two broadly-defined fields; but every time I have to stand up and defend myself and my intellectual work and its place within the academy, I find myself dismayed and newly surprised. I'm comfortable with the precarious position of the object of my study because taken on its own terms, it's not precarious or odd or contrived at all. It is so correct to look at text and history in the way that I do that I sometimes forget that to interlocutors whose view of the intellectual landscape is shaped by the contours of the modern university or by historical narratives that — for the sake of convenience or nationalism or laziness or a thousand other things — choose (or are unable even to choose) to set aside parts of the panorama even the most basic, central aspects of my work seem marginal or irrelevant. I have been so fortunate in finding kindred spirits everywhere I've landed that it's easy to forget that most people out there aren't.

I joke sometimes that I'm the odd-duck Arabist in the back corner of the Spanish department, but I'm still surprised when it turns out that I can be viewed, in all seriousness, in just that way. In truth, though, I'm a Hispanist. A strange Hispanist, to be sure, but a Hispanist nonetheless.

It turns out that there is such a thing as a stupid question, and I'm sick of being asked them: "Have you actually read the Poema de mio Cid?" or "Do you actually believe that Don Quijote is the translation of an Arabic manuscript?" A question like the first, that incredulously wants to make sure that I'm in some way credentialed according to a traditional curriculum belies the questioner's own intellectual provincialism; just because he doesn't see value in learning about Iberia's intellectual heritage doesn't mean that my view is similarly limited in the other direction. I work primarily with Arabic and Hebrew texts, but I'm well aware of the places they intersect and converse with Romance language texts because I don't section off material along either linguistic or modern-national lines. (And yes, I have read and taught the Poema de mio Cid. I have lost count of how many times I have read it, in fact.) As for a question like the second, I don't know what to do with it. How does one even answer that? No, because I'm not an idiot? No, because I know what fiction is? No, and there's nobody on the face of planet earth who thinks that; why would you even ask? It's the sort of question that I'm sure, one day, if it's ever posed to me again, will get me into serious trouble; I have a very black sense of humor and deadpan delivery, and I'd be sorely tempted to say: "Of course. I've worked with the original manuscript in the BNE."

This is a difficult topic to write about in the abstract, but the deflated state of the question requires that to a certain extent. In the early days of the field, there was really an opposite position to argue against: You were a partisan of Américo Castro or of Claudio Sánchez Albornóz. You believed in the Reconquista or you didn't. Instead, today it's more a question of dealing regularly with folks who have kind of grudgingly accepted that the Arabic material is relevant but think that signing up for one seminar in graduate school will qualify them to teach the Andalusi material and make them really super appealing to search committees far and wide. It's a question of dealing with the petty jealousies and resentments of those who think that dilettantism is the answer to all their problems, the ones who think that a semester or two of Arabic will serve them well rather than make them more foolish and intellectually dangerous to themselves and others.

Not every medievalist who works on the Iberian peninsula needs to work on the Arabic material, though. There is lots of room to do good, interesting scholarship on the Romance language materials and contexts. And what's more, I predict that the Hispanists of the more traditional ilk who will have the best success aren't the ones who, grumbling, attempt to do my thing and do it badly or half-cocked, but rather are the ones who do their thing and do it really, really well. Normal Hispanists and I agree on one thing: We both hate that my particular sub-discipline has become trendy. They hate it because they're not just left out of what's scholarly on trend but are in fact linguistically locked out, and I hate it because I end up having to deal with people like them, who approach my material not because it's fascinating and wonderful, but rather out of resentment, jealousy, anger and a sense of obligation, because they want in on the trend. I do sort of wonder what's going to happen when, in a few years, the Andalusi material isn't sexy anymore, and those of us who actually work on it are still laboring away, quietly, in the trenches on a really important piece of the history and literature. Will the normal and the trend-driven simply move onto the next thing? If a major theoretical work comes out about striped trousers, will all the discourse suddenly have to do with whether we can understand a line of text to mean that the Cid wore striped trousers? Where does that leave whatever it is that they are passionate about? Are they passionate about or interested in anything at all? Or are they more taken with the idea of being a literary critic? What is the value in that?

It is a question of corralling the people — even and especially the ones who really do know better — who think that the study of Spain should be limited to Spain and explaining that I can't afford the luxury of ignoring Cairo and even if I could, I also don't see ignoring Cairo as a luxury or a methodologically desirably outcome. It doesn't mean that I don't principally and wholly work on the literature of Iberia. Through contact with the Cairene community, a lot of Andalusi material ended up in the eastern Mediterranean, which thus becomes an important context for understanding that Andalusi material. Why would I want to leave out a cipher that can help me make better sense of what I work on? I wouldn't. It's worth remembering, too that the modern world itself, the one that bounds the Peninsula as though any medieval writer would understand such a boundary, couldn't keep Egypt and Spain as far apart as anyone would like.

In truth, I feel like I'm getting it from all sides, a little bit.

Yes, I am a Hispanist, even though I work with sources that are not all written in an incipient Ibero-Romance or Castilian or Spanish — or a Romance or Indo-European language at all. I'm a Hispanist even though some of my best sources ended up in Cairo during the Middle Ages, nevermind the ones that ended up in France, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States in modernity. This thing that we now call Spain had a wide reach back then. If it sounds like I'm tilting at windmills — See? I can allude to the canonical of the canonical, too — then that's good; that's exactly what I want. I want this kind of defense or apologia to seem redundant and self-evident to everyone who reads it. But it doesn't yet. And until then, I'll just keep saying it: I belong, and I am right.

Take the Way Home that Leads Back to Sullivan Street, Where all the Bodies Hang on the Air

Prefatory note: I had hoped to write a post about what it means to have grown up as an Arabist entirely in the immediate aftermath of the events of ten years ago. But this post isn't what I meant it to be. It's more concrete and narrative than analytical; I still hope to write the piece I set out to write, but the ideas need more time to develop. It turns out that with respect to making sense of it all, ten years is an arbitrary deadline. (I wrote this before realizing that more than a few commentators and historians  had come to the same non-conclusion.) This is not even really a first draft; it's more a putting to paper of some things that I needed to put to paper to free up some head space to be able to think about the bigger issues.  And really that's what this blog is for: To start to think through my ideas about all aspects of the profession and to put the little details in writing so I can really have room to think through the bigger issues. I wasn't even in New York on the day, but I still physically flinch whenever I see the photographs and I still feel this compulsion to narrate rather than analyze (a compulsion and a deficiency uniquely American, according to some other pundits). All of what follows needed to be said before I can even think about saying something that might be worthy of the gravity of the day.

***

My overwhelming emotion is relief that the anniversary did not fall this year on a day when I teach. At first it seems a petty, self-interested and small-minded response. But upon reflection, it becomes clear just how much of my university career was shaped by the events of that morning. For me, the aftermath has always been within the university. So the only strangeness of my first response is that I should want to mark the day out of classroom, alone, away from any student or colleague, rather than in it.

***

Ten years ago today, I began my third week as a university student.

Having started my days in high school between 7:15 and 7:30, I was convinced that an 8:30 am English class would feel like sleeping in every day; it didn't take me long to realize that even that was pushing it for my night owl self. And so I very, very quickly developed the custom of taking a nap between English 129 and my next class. I sleep with news radio on, and in those days my soporific of choice was WCBS. As I dozed, I couldn't figure out why they were replaying footage from the 1993 bombing of one of the WTC garages. It wasn't a big anniversary. It wasn't even the right time of year. Not long passed before I realized what was actually happening. I leapt out of bed and into the common room of my suite in Durfee Hall. The whole building was quiet except for the TVs playing in every suite, audible because everyone had seemed to have the same reflex: to open their doors. We wandered in and out of each others' suites, silently, almost as if to see if the news on anyone else's TV was different. That is what I remember most of my own experience of the day: our collective, eerie, spontaneous hospitality.

I left Durfee when it was time to go to that next class, a lecture on the history of modern American architecture. The professor was Vincent Scully, considered to be the leading light in his field and the most gifted lecturer I have ever heard speak, a man well above six feet tall whose broad shoulders belied his nearly eighty years. He began class by referring to the syllabus, to the topic of the day's lecture: modernism.  Specifically, he told us, he had planned that day to lecture on how, in ideal aesthetic terms, the Twin Towers had ruined the New York City skyline. (I wouldn't learn until later the legendary extent of his former hatred of those buildings.) Given the morning's events, he told us as he choked up, it was no longer an appropriate approach to the material. Toward the end of the lecture, when he arrived at whatever one could still say about a building that had only just become a symbol of something entirely different than the ruin wrought by glass boxes on the American city, that had only just ceased to exist, he could no longer hold back tears. It was at that moment, witnessing not the destruction of the buildings but a giant of a man and a mind weeping openly in front of three hundred students that I knew that the world had already come to an end.

***

I had been offered an internship at ABC news for the summer of 2002, but turned it down to begin to study Arabic. It was clear that all the Arabic classes would be full to capacity in the fall, and as a sophomore, I would have had low enrollment priority. In terms of the quality of my beginning Arabic instruction, it was a completely fortuitous series of decisions; and so in that respect, the tragic coincidence ensured that I would become a much better Arabist, surely, than I would have been otherwise. But that is not really the subject upon which I wish to reflect upon right now; it is the stuff of sheer coincidence. The rather more pressing question is this: What does it mean to have grown up as a medieval Arabist completely parallel to the Arabism, both pressing and expedient, that most of the rest of the country experienced, viewed, or in some way became aware of during the last decade?

I came into the field as its practitioners were forced to cultivate a pernicious, intentional irrelevance in order to protect the object of our study that in many supplanted the glorious irrelevance that is the entitlement of the medievalist. Many times I have had to tell incredulous interlocutors that no, I don't study medieval Iberia because I wish Jews, Christians and Muslims could all just get along. Almost as frequently I have had to explain to a wholly different kind of interlocutor that no, I don't in any way feel guilty about studying Arabic in this day and age. This, in turn, has required the cultivation of a certain freakishness, an oblivousness to the world as my friends joined up to the departments of State and Defense, and to the euphemistic Company where, in certain corridors, I am told, one can still walk and sing the Whiffenpoofs Song and fully expect someone to harmonize from an adjacent office.

To study medieval Arabic is to push the modern world as far away as possible — perhaps even farther than it would have been before Arabic and Islam emerged into the popular consciousness. Not only have I chosen to study something that is removed from the world in which I live, I have to actively remind myself and everyone else that no, I don't do that. I don't know about terrorists. I can't do more than offer a historical account of regicides and regime changes. Rather than quietly living with my head in the thirteenth century as my predecessors did, I stand and say: Yours is not my world.

Perhaps my despair is different from the despair of the people charged with remembering and with fixing. I can see the failures coming from farther away because they are the same failures of ninth century and of the thirteenth but I am as impotent as they are — even if for different reasons. (Here I refer of course to politicians and not to civil servants or soldiers, whom I have generally found to be well-read, insightful, and equally despairing.) I am no more impotent against this than the people who shouldn't be.

I could say that to pursue the matter of Araby — in the words of another daughter of Eli — is to make a stand for the values of humanism that seem to have eroded over the course of the last decade for a whole host of reasons. But that seems too neat. And the honest truth is that I still don't know. I have no great insight into what it means to be a medieval Arabist after September 11, 2001. Ten years on, and I still can't write this piece. It means nothing. The great world keeps spinning, history continues to pile on top of history, and someone has to read it all.

***

Several years ago I had an exceptional student who happened to be a Naval ROTC cadet; she must be just on the verge of her commissioning now. She chose to write her research paper for my class about medieval military tactics after reading some of the battle hymns of Samuel the Nagid. The presentation of her research happened to fall on a day when she was required to wear her uniform on campus for inspection. I don't know if my other students noticed, but the striking coincidence of the visual and the aural and of the academic and the practical and dangerous was not jarring, strange or even — though I note it now — especially noteworthy.

The Nagid's war poetry is, I think, my favorite of the Arabizing Hebrew poetry from Spain. Perhaps it was inevitable, under the circumstances, that the poetry of war, like the simple fact of war, should feel familiar and appeal intellectually and aesthetically. War and Arabic poetry have occupied my world for precisely the same length of time. Perhaps the towers' collapse is not nearly as far from my mind as I would like.

***

How could it be? It is the matter of Araby that brought me to New York, to an apartment with this view from the living room window:

***

Let me conclude by quoting John Adams, writing in a letter to his wife Abigail in 1780: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

I am grateful, especially today, to the students of war whose sacrifices have afforded me the right to have spent the last decade studying poetry.