The Legacy of Muslim Spain.

• Author: Sells, Michael

Salma Jayyusi's volume includes forty-nine articles in areas as diverse as history, poetry, technology, and architecture. Trying even to touch upon the work as a whole, the reviewer would by necessity be confined to a discussion of the framework of selection rather than engage fully the individual essays.

The essays on literature open with a graceful overview of Andalusian literary movements, with a focus on prose, by Pierre Cachia. Ten essays follow, five of which are particularly extended, by Salma Jayyusi (two), James Monroe, Maria Rosa Menocal, and Luce Lopez-Baralt. It is to these five essays that this review will turn. The perspectives of the four authors are sometimes complementary and sometimes in tension, but they are always compelling.

Salma Jayyusi begins her two essays on Andalusian poetry with the axiom that the Arabic poetic tradition was sufficiently fixed, internationalized, and self-contained that it could not have been seriously transformed by any local or regional influences, Iberian included. Behind this position and more integral to the analysis of the poetry, are the literary values of a critic who is also a poet. Jayyusi presents us with encounters, both engaged and critical, with the poetry of Ibn Hani, Ibn Shuhayd, Ibn Zaydun, and Ibn Khafaja, as well as shorter sketches of other poets. In each case she examines the tension between the natural and the artificial, between a local style and one corresponding to paradigms in the eastern Arabic world. As a poet, she is not afraid to show exasperation, as she does with Ibn Zaydun, whom she finds at times overrated (particularly with respect to his mastery of poetic acoustics, which Jayyusi would limit to only a few poems), and yet whom she is led at other times to concede is the master of Andalusian verse. These are the ambivalent evaluations of a poet and critic able to sense both Ibn Zaydun's mastery and his tendency to fall into preciousness. Even for a reviewer who might evaluate these tensions in Ibn Zaydun's poetry differently, Jayyusi's article is filled with insight.

In her essay devoted to Ibn Khafaja, Jayyusi offers an account of Ibn Khafaja's visual imagery as it moves between the descriptive and the emotive. She explores the poet's philosophical world view, attitude toward mortality, and the way in which both philosophy and mortality are woven into his understanding of nature. Her analysis is accompanied by some extraordinary short translations, such as the...