Andalusi Literature on a Global Stage

Ibn Zaydūn’s (d. 463/1071) al-Risāla al-Hazliyya (The playful [or frivolous] letter) is famed today as a bold counterstroke in a love triangle smoldering in fifth/eleventh-century Cordoba for the favors of the princess Wallāda. The familiar story, however, is most unlikely, and even casts doubt on Ibn Zaydūn’s very authorship of the Hazliyya. This paper argues that while, on balance of probabilities, the totality of evidence about Ibn Zaydūn suggests the authenticity of his authorship, the most important aspect of the Hazliyya is the remarkable spread it enjoyed several centuries after Ibn Zaydūn’s death. The truly global circulation was the result of the Hazliyya’s commentary, the Sarḥ al-ʿuyūn by Ibn Nubāta (d. 768/1366), who provided pithy explanations for the large number of names to which Ibn Zaydūn’s al-Hazliyya alludes. The names are those of historical figures, the majority of whom lived in pre-Islamic times or were significant figures of Arabic culture in very early Islam. The spread of the Sarḥ demonstrates wide-ranging desire to learn that material, such that it seems to be a core of what this paper proposes to identify as the “Arabic classical tradition”—a canonical corpus of figures, ancient and esteemed, who, while they had little or no ostensible connection to Islamic history, were valued by Muslims as material that a knowledgeable individual ought to know. Ibn Zaydūn’s achievement was to present a truly deep cross-section of this material to ready audiences from the shores of the Atlantic to India, from the Indian Ocean to the Bosporus, and beyond.