Image: Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, al-Andalus, 13th c. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vaticano arabo 368.
The history of Marrakesh cannot be told without al-Andalus. From the eleventh century onward, the Iberian peninsula and the western Maghreb formed a single cultural sphere across which scholars, poets, and craftsmen moved with remarkable freedom. The principal vehicles were the circulation of books and the mobility of educated people: a jurist trained in Córdoba might end his career teaching in Fez, a poet formed in the salons of Seville might find a patron in Marrakesh. The movement ran in both directions, and it intensified whenever the political fortunes of al-Andalus turned, each wave of upheaval sending the educated class of the peninsula southward into a Maghreb that received them as the inheritors of an established tradition.
The deepest mark of this exchange lies in the cities themselves. The craftsmen who came south carried the visual language of al-Andalus into the stone and plaster of the Maghreb, and the carved cedar, the interlace, and the calligraphic friezes that define the great Moroccan monuments belong to a vocabulary refined on both shores at once. The libraries filled with Andalusian manuscripts, the teaching circles took on Andalusian texts, and the gardens were laid out according to ideas of order that the peninsula had perfected. A city that received this inheritance carried it into its own architecture, its libraries, and its courts, where it set the terms by which cultivation was understood.
Poetry held a particular place within this transmission. Andalusian verse had developed forms of great technical sophistication, among them the muwashshah and the zajal, strophic forms that opened classical Arabic poetry to vernacular rhythm and to rhyme schemes the qasida had never used. The aesthetic that produced them worked through a dense formal ornament held within a fixed underlying structure. A poet trained in these forms carried that whole discipline into the court that received her.
By the late twelfth century, Marrakesh had become one of the cities where this Andalusian inheritance settled most deeply. The Almohad court drew to itself the learning of the peninsula, and among those who made the journey south was a poet whose reputation had been formed in Granada. Hafsa bint al-Hajj al-Rakuniyya, recognised as one of the most accomplished poets of al-Andalus, accepted an invitation in the 1180s to educate the daughters of the caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur, and she spent her final years in the city. Ibn al-Khatib would later call her ustādhat waqtihā, the teacher of her time. Her surviving verse, ranging from love poetry to elegy to satire, is among the best preserved of any woman writing in Arabic in the medieval Iberian world.
The jacket that carries al-Rakuniyya’s name was selected in dialogue with what survives of her work. The cloth is an indigo blue, and a single band of embroidery in that same blue descends the length of the front panel, its arabesque turns worked close against the structure of the seam. The forms in which she wrote arranged a dense ornament along a fixed and repeating frame, the elaboration and the structure held to one another with great precision, and the blue embroidery follows the front of the jacket on those same terms.
The Rakuniyya Jacket
Selected Reading
- Menocal, María Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.
- Fletcher, Richard. Moorish Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
- Constable, Olivia Remie, ed. Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.