Medieval Arabic literature is remarkably rich when it comes to information about music. Not only are there detailed texts about music theory, musical instruments, biographies of musicians, collections of song lyrics, and treatises by religious scholars about the licit or illicit nature of listening to music (Ar. samāʿ), but descriptions of musical performances, anecdotes about singers and musicians, accounts of rivalries among super-star performers, descriptions of their clothing, the rewards they received when they pleased their patrons and the punishments meted out when they displeased them, the buying and selling of musically trained slaves, and an astonishing amount of detail about the day-to-day life of musicians are all found scattered throughout works of history, compilations of edifying information (adab works), geographical works, and many other genres of writing. As Eckhard Neubauer has noted, “Music seems nearly omnipresent in Arabic literature.”1
Sadly, of course, although we have a great deal of information about medieval Arab music, we do not have the music itself or even musical notations, other than a very few short examples. None of the Arabic textual sources from the 8th to 13th centuries offer enough detail to even attempt a re-creation of the music of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba or other musical centers during their heyday. On the other hand, what does survive is one of the richest records of early medieval musical life anywhere in the world.
This volume includes complete English translations of three of the most important medieval Arabic texts about music and musicians, each with its own introduction and explanatory annotations. These texts are significant in their own right, but together they also represent three of the most important texts for the study of the music of medieval Muslim Spain, al-Andalus.2 The first text is the biography of the great musician Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī (742–804 CE) found in the tenth-century compendium of Arab music, Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī.3 Though portions of this biography have been excerpted by Eckhard Neubauer, and small snippets from this text are frequently cited by other authors, the complete text has never been translated into any language.4 In fact, strangely enough, it appears that the only biography of a musician in KA ever to have been translated in its entirety is that of the singer Maʿbad, translated into Latin by J. Kosegarten in 1840.5 Several of the biographies of poets from KA were translated in the nineteenth century, but the musicians’ biographies have not attracted the same amount of attention from western scholars.6
Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī was one of the central figures in the ʿAbbasid court of Baghdad and was widely considered the greatest musician of his time. His biography unfolds in a series of anecdotes, each carefully attributed to its oral or written sources. In some cases, the compiler has chosen to include conflicting accounts of key events or information, such as the great musician’s name, genealogy, childhood, and so forth, leaving the reader to judge which report should be deemed closest to the truth. One great advantage, therefore, of providing a complete translation is that it allows modern readers to observe the compiler ‘at work,’ so to speak, and also preserves the multivocality of the original text.7 Modern scholars, Arabs and Westerners alike, have usually eliminated the scholarly apparatus from the original text (i.e., the ‘chain of transmission,’ Ar. isnād, that prefaces each section) and selected only choice tidbits from the wealth of material it contains. This provides many short, readable, fascinating anecdotes, but erases the structure of the whole.
Ibrāhīm’s life was full of adventures, beginning in his youth when he runs away from home to avoid the beatings his uncles gave him for wanting to study music and travels to various places seeking to learn songs and singing techniques, after which he is conscripted – somewhat against his will – into the entourage first of an Arab noble and then that of the caliph. At one point he is whipped and thrown into prison for carousing with the young sons of the caliph, later he learns some songs from Satan himself, and learns others from jinn who appear to him in the form of talking cats. Along the way, the text is filled with remarkable detail about musical performances in the ʿAbbasid court, rivalries among musicians, negotiations over the prices of female slave singers, and even an account of Ibrāhīm’s household finances and the operation of his kitchen. Although the focus of this text is the life of Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī, it provides a remarkably detailed sense of musical life in the early ʿAbbasid court and also offers, in miniature, a portrait of the riches contained in KA as a whole.
Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī and his equally famous son, Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī, were the teachers of the figure featured in the second selection in this volume, the great singer Ziryāb, who emigrated from Baghdad to al-Andalus in the ninth century. The text translated here is the earliest full biographical account, which appears in Ibn Ḥayyān’s eleventh-century Kitāb al-Muqtabis [The Quoter].8 An abridged version of this text was penned by the seventeenth-century scholar al-Maqqarī in his history of Muslim Spain, Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb [The Scented Breeze from the Tender Branch of al-Andalus], which he compiled in Cairo for an eastern readership.9 Through a twist of fate, al-Maqqarī’s text came to the attention of Western scholars in the early nineteenth century, some 150 years before the publication of Ibn Ḥayyān’s text, upon which it was based. The portion of the manuscript of Ibn Ḥayyān’s work that includes the biography of Ziryāb was first published in facsimile (1999), and has in recent years appeared in an edited Arabic edition (2003) and in a Spanish translation (2001).10
As I have argued in several publications, Ibn Ḥayyān’s original text offers a rather different account of this great musician’s life.11 Given that Ziryāb is without doubt the single most famous musician of al-Andalus, and that his legendary presence colors almost everything that has ever been written about Andalusi music, I hope that a translation of this text will be a contribution not only to the history of medieval Iberia, but also to that of medieval Arab and European music.
The third and final text included here is the single most important medieval Arabic text on the most famous song genre to emerge from al-Andalus, the muwashshaḥ. The treatise, titled Dār al-Ṭirāz fī ʿamal al-muwashshaḥāt [The House of Brocade on the Composition of Muwashshaḥāt], was written in Egypt in the twelfth century by Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk (c. 1155–1212), the text has appeared in two Arabic editions and was translated into Spanish in a 1962 article by Emilio García Gómez.12 García Gómez, however, found many of the passages about music to be incomprehensible and went so far as to say that the author of the text was mistaken or was exaggerating the role of music in the muwashshaḥ tradition. Much has been written about this text, but it has not been translated into any language other than Spanish, and a new translation is sorely needed, in particular, one based on a more careful reading of the musical information in the text. The translation I offer here also involves a substantial reinterpretation of the text since I argue that editors and scholars have misunderstood some of Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk’s central arguments by interpreting the term wazn throughout the text to mean ‘poetic meter.’ The scholarship on the origin and spread of muwashshaḥ poetry and song is truly enormous, so a translation of this key text will, I hope, be welcomed not only by Arabists, but also by scholars of medieval European music, since this genre of song has often been cited as a possible key influence on the poetry of the Troubadours, the Castilian Cantigas de Santa María, and the Gallego-Portuguese cantigas de amigo and cantigas de amor.
I have tried to produce translations that are accurate, but also both readable and accessible to non-specialists. My guiding principle has been that the texts should be comprehensible on their own and that the footnotes should provide additional information, not necessary to a basic understanding of the text. Arabists with access to the original texts will therefore note that in many places I have substituted names for pronouns to provide clarity, and also included additional English words in places to help smooth out the translated text. Major interventions have been enclosed in brackets. Transliterations follow the style-sheet of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), with the exception of final -h for tāʾ marbūṭa. Years and centuries in the introductions to the texts are given in Common Era, rather than duplicated CE and AH terms; however, dates that occur within the translated texts are given in both.
There are without doubt many faults in these translations, and I am certain that someone more gifted in the translation of medieval poetry could provide more artistic renditions of many of these verses and lyrics, but I hope that these attempts to provide English versions of these significant texts will offer both scholars and non-specialists a glimpse into the extraordinarily rich musical life portrayed in medieval Arabic literature.
Eckhard Neubauer, “Arabic Writings on Music: Eighth to Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 6: The Middle East, eds. Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus, and Dwight F. Reynolds (New York/London: Routledge 2002): 363–86, at p. 363.
As such they serve as a supplement to Dwight F. Reynolds, The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021).
Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, Kitāb al-aghānī, Vols. I–XVI (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1927–1961); Vols. XVII–XXIV (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-Taʾlīf wa-l-Nashr, 1970–74). All references to KA in this volume are to this Cairo edition.
Eckhard Neubauer, Musiker am Hof der Frühen ʿAbbāsiden, Inaug. Dissertation (Frankfurt am Main, 1965).
Joannis Gothofredo Ludovico Kosegarten, Alii Ispanhanensis liber cantinelarum magnus (Greifswald, 1840).
See Hilary Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003): 1–2.
See Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs, for an analysis of the technique al-Iṣbahānī used in compiling anecdotes into biographical and historical entries.
Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Sifr al-thānī min kitāb al-Muqtabis, ed. Maḥmūd ʿAlī Makkī (Riyāḍ: Markaz al-Malik Fayṣal li-l-buḥūth wa-l-dirasāt al-islamiyya, 2003).
al-Maqqarī, Analectes sur l’Histoire et la Littérature des Arabes d’Espagne, par al-Makkari, ed. R. Dozy, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1855–61), rpt. Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1967. This edition has been superseded, however, by Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās, 8 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968).
Muqtabis II: anales de los Emires de Córdoba Alhaquem I 180–206 H, facsimile edition, ed. Joaquín Vallvé Bermejo (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1999); Spanish trs., Crónica de los emires Alḥakam I y ʿAbdarraḥmān II entre los años 796 y 847 [Almuqtabis II-1], tr. Maḥmoud ʿAlī Makkī and Federico Corriente (Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, 2001); Arabic edition, see footnote 8 above.
Dwight F. Reynolds, “Al-Maqqarī’s Ziryāb: The Making of a Myth,” Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 11, no. 2 (2008): 155–168, and Musical Heritage, pp. 59–85.
Dār al-Tirāz fī ʿamal al-muwashshaḥāt, ed. Jawdat al-Rikābī (Damascus: 1st ed, n.p., 1949; 2nd ed. Dār al-Fikr, 1977, 3rd ed. Dār al-Fikr, 1980); Dār al-Ṭirāz fi ʿamal al-muwashshaḥāt: Dirāsa wa-taḥqīq, ed. Muḥammad Zakariyā ʿInānī (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 2001); Emilio García Gómez, “Estudio del ⟨Dār at-Tirāz⟩ Preceptiva Egipcia de la Muwaššaḥa,” Al-Andalus 27 (1962): 21–104.