Review: Brianna Zimmerman on Al-Andalus
A real place and a real time that lingers in art and memory
Dome of the Cordoba Mosque in Cordoba, Spain, begun by the Umayyid dynasty in 785 CE. The dome was completed in 958 CE, anticipating Gothic rib vaulting by a century
When an empire falls, does it make a sound? In On Earth or In Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus, Eric Calderwood shows that an empire falling can make many sounds, echoing across place, time, and peoples who may not even realize their relation to each other.
Calderwood’s subject, al-Andalus, refers to a succession of Islamic dynasties across Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages. But it has also come to represent colloquially, and, as Calderwood argues, simplistically, a society in which people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—live together in harmony. Today, the Spanish word convivencia refers broadly to this historical period in the Iberian Peninsula; it literally translates as “living together.” Convivencia carries the spirit of togetherness, community, a project of building belonging. Calderwood takes this concept of al-Andalus as a utopia of difference and pries apart its contradictions to reveal a varied society with issues highly relevant to America’s today—he asks that rather than think of al-Andalus as a golden era that magically tolerated difference we understand it as a place that actively, and sometimes violently, grappled with people’s contradictions: ways of praying, ways of loving, ways of organizing family and society and military, ways of eating, ways of enjoying, ways of living.
