Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
CULTURE/FILM
This Is Andalus!
Siwan by Jon Balke, Amina Alaoui, JonHassell, Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche, and Bjarte Eike
Review by DAVID SHASHA
Andalusian history represents not only one of the great high points of medieval civilization—the ground on which Jews, Muslims, and Christians once coexisted and interacted culturally in productive ways—but also the place where Europe and Arabia met and lived with one another.
It is this rich history that comes to life through song in Siwan, a project undertaken by the Norwegian jazz pianist Jon Balke after he was commissioned to present a special project in an Oslo music club. Balke chose to contact the Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui and produce an aural history of Spain through the eyes of Convivencia, the fabled cultural interchange that brought together the Jews, Muslims, and Christians of Spain.
The music is magically filled with the indelible light of Andalus—a light that was extinguished by the smoldering fires of the Spanish Inquisition. The attempt to destroy the polyglot culture of Andalus is not a recent development, but an old and distressing story of religious intolerance that lamentably continues to be played out on the world stage.
The songs presented to us in the delightful Siwan package are timeless evocations of a world primed for cultural resurrection. Rejecting the detritus of contemporary politics, Siwan presents its listeners with hope and passion. It provides us with the robust culture of one of the world's least known and yet most brilliant civilizations. Its songs are both simple and deeply complex in an emotional and historical sense, telling the story of Andalus/Sepharad in an evocative way that resonates deeply with those of us who still cherish our traditions.
The medieval Convivencia of Jews, Muslims, and Christians has not always been cherished by modern Spanish historians and intellectuals. For example, historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz waged a bitter polemic against Américo Castro regarding the place of Arab-Islamic culture in the context of Spanish history. Albornoz asserted that Arab culture was an aberration that should not be taken into account when assessing the larger field of Spanish civilization—a civilization that he claimed should be solely based on its European-Christian component.
In our day this debate has been made even more complicated by the presence of a largely Islamophobic pro-Zionist cadre of scholars led by ubiquitous figures such as Bernard Lewis, Norman Stillman, and Jane Gerber, who have argued that the presentation of Andalus/Sepharad as an interfaith paradise is belied by the historical evidence. In their reading of the historical record, we see something much less than an interfaith utopia and more akin to the Anti-Jewish persecutions of Europe.
The truth of the matter is that Andalus resists facile comparisons to our present values and cannot really be judged by current standards of human rights and sociocultural mores.
That said, the attempt to fit Sephardic history into an Ashkenazi mold—framed by a Zionist paranoia regarding Islam—has led scholars to overlook the Andalusian civilization's role in shaping our Western tradition. In particular, the musical history of medieval Spain has been very poorly documented in the West and, in fact, its legacy is largely unknown to the general public.
The negative, skeptical view of Andalus/Sepharad has been countered in popular books by María Rosa Menocal and Chris Lowney, as well as in more specialized studies from Ross Brann, Peter Cole, and Ammiel Alcalay, but these works have drawn fire from members of the Bernard Lewis camp. There is a sense that centuries of Jewish pride in Sepharad was misplaced and that we must accept the jaundiced voices of misanthropic scholars who seek to paint Islamic history in less than flattering terms. After many decades of scholarly respect in the Jewish world, Sephardic heritage is slowly becoming invisible to rank and file Jews, not to mention the larger world.
The German label ECM has made an important addition to our knowledge and cultural appreciation of the Andalusian world with its release of Siwan. Best known for its avant-garde classical and jazz recordings, ECM has nevertheless also released the brilliant work of the Greek singer Savina Yannatou, which touches on this old Mediterranean world. In her last few releases (beginning in 2001 with the classic Terra Nostra, which was recorded with her expert musical ensemble Primavera en Salonico), Ms. Yannatou has sketched out a Mediterranean civilization that is notably inclusive of the Ottoman legacy—a legacy that continued to extend the Andalusian tradition after the tragic events of 1492.
In Yannatou's seminal recordings, we are presented with a unified Mediterranean society that is linked by the songs and traditions of an older world, which can best be seen in the historical civilization in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted in a world of rich cultural productions. From Spain to North Africa to the Balkans and Greece, Mediterranean civilization fused different traditions that came together to create a rich amalgam. It is this resilient amalgam that has lasted through generations of political and military conflicts in the region.
Alongside Yannatou, Italian-Sephardic singer and scholar Miriam Meghnagi is another wonderful musician who has worked to revive the songs of this area: in 2004 Meghnagi and her brother produced the compelling CD Dialoghi Mediterranei.
And now we are blessed to have Siwan, as well. Jon Balke's new album takes its Convivencia very seriously. Rather than ferreting out the Arabic from the Spanish or vice versa, the poetic texts that have been adapted for the recording run the gamut from the classical Arabic Golden Age to the later productions of Christian figures in the Spanish Golden Age.
The booklet that accompanies the CD displays the lyrics of the songs in Spanish, English, and Arabic. The lyrics are drawn from the cream of medieval Spanish civilization, including words by giants of the Iberian world such as Ibn Khafaja, Ibn Abbad, Ibn Ghalib al-Rusafi, and the ever-notorious mystic Al-Hallaj, along with Lope de Vega and John of the Cross.
Hallaj, the martyred Sufi who notoriously proclaimed himself the "Truth," was not, technically speaking, an Iberian, but a Baghdadi originally born in Persia. The way his ideas and spiritual insights traveled from East to West was typical of the period and its relentless mobility. Hallaj and John of the Cross were both important figures in the mystical traditions of Islam and Christianity, and their spiritual teachings were deeply influential in the religious lives of Spaniards. The spread of their wisdom exemplified the way in which ideas could cross national borders and culturally unify the Mediterranean region from West to East and back again.
Alaoui is not only a graceful vocal interpreter of this musical tradition, but a scholar of Andalusian civilization as well. In the liner notes, she expertly sketches out the historical figures behind the songs and provides listeners with a panoramic view of this magnificent civilization.
Siwan thus presents the listener with a rich composite of a world in perpetual ferment and cross-cultural pollenization. The swirl of sounds marks what María Rosa Menocal's new book has called "the arts of intimacy": a blending of ideas and traditions exalting the sacred in the context of the brilliant aesthetic developed in a polyglot Andalusia. The album skillfully shows us the historical connections between contemporary Arabic music—much of which remains an integral presence in our Syrian-Sephardic liturgy, as Mark Kligman has shown in his excellent study Maqam and Liturgy—and the music of the Middle Ages. The songs are not mechanical attempts to reproduce ancient melodies as historically constituted, but free interpretations of the poetic texts using the skills of the musicians and composers who bring to the project an expertise in both the Western and the Arabic musical heritage.
What's more, Siwan is a pleasure to listen to from a purely musical standpoint. Perhaps it can act as a bridge to a world that has been closed off to many because of the culture of our current politics—a politics that has often demonized Arabic civilization and with it the Sephardic heritage that is so closely allied to it. We are not sensitive enough to the ways in which Arabic and Spanish are intertwined with one another. By recasting old literary texts in a contemporary setting that draws from the rich heritage of both East and West, the musicians and singers involved in Siwan have provided an aural monument to a civilization that offered an invaluable model of how cultures can work with one another and become enriched in the process.
Without seeking to recreate a mythical Andalusian fantasy world, Siwan succeeds in both delightfully entertaining and teaching us. We can luxuriate in its rich tapestry of sound and poetry and simultaneously experience the exalted grandeur of a history that is central to our current concerns: a history that needs to be remembered and explored not simply as an academic matter, but also as an existential one. In this sense, Siwan enriches its listeners with an accessible yet learned voyage through the world of Andalus—a wondrous world that once spoke in the twin languages of Europe and the Middle East.
David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York. The center publishes a weekly e-mail newsletter, Sephardic Heritage Update (http://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha), and promotes cultural events.
Shasha, David. 2010. This Is Andalus!. Tikkun 25(2):67 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010shasha
