Granada

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In Arabic letters, the tradition of remembering the lost shards of Islamic Spain is an old and venerable one. The destruction of Cordoba itself — the Caliphate politically dismembered and the venerable city sacked, along with the nearby palatine city of Madinat al-Zahra, One Thousand and One Nights-like in its architectural wonders — was the subject of what is perhaps the best-known work of Andalusian literature, Tauq al-Hamam (The neck-ring of the dove), by Ibn Hazm of Cordoba. Not unlike the extended family of characters so lovingly created by Radwa Ashour in this novel, Ibn Hazm was himself of a generation that lived through the transition from one universe to another, a personal witness to the unimaginable losses that followed the political debacles of his time. The Cordoban’s celebrated work about love, and about its ways of shaping the human condition, and about the sorrows of loss in love, easily elides the love of a woman with that of his homeland. When he says “My love for her blotted out all that went before, and made anathema to me all that came after” he might as easily be describing one as the other. And it is precisely this kind of crucial interdependence of public and personal histories, and the ways in which life and love must indeed go on, and yet are unbearably transfigured by earthshaking historical events, that is on vivid display in Granada.

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