Part I

Before Cuba

The Highest-Priced Slaves

[begin epigraph] . . . Tyre will become like the whore in the song:

Take your lyre, walk the town,

forgotten whore.

Play your sweetest, sing your songs again,

to make them remember you.

--Isaiah 23:15~~16 (Jerusalem Bible)[end epigraph]

[begin epigraph]An accomplished singing-girl has a repertoire of upwards of four thousand songs, each of them two to four verses long, so that the total amount of poetry contained in it, if one multiplies one figure by the other, comes to ten thousand verses . . . They are all founded on references to fornication, pimping, passion, yearning, desire and lust.

--al-Gâhiz (776~~869) [end epigraph]

Separated from Europe by the Pyrenees on the northeast and from North Africa by the narrow Strait of Gibraltar to the south--through each of which gateways it has been invaded various times--the Iberian peninsula's physical isolation created its identity. The drainage of its rivers toward the southwest and the mountains of its central area suggest that the peninsula, as Barry Cunliffe put it, “turns its back on the Mediterranean and faces the Atlantic.” In ancient times, then, from the Iberian point of view, Europe was inaccessible: an endless ocean of water lay to the west, mountains separated the Mediterranean coast from the rich southern Iberian basin, and to the south was Africa, an ocean of land.

Spaniards visiting Havana today sometimes remark that it reminds them of Cádiz. The oldest city in western Europe, Gadir, or Cádiz, was established on an island off the southern (Atlantic) coast of the Iberian peninsula as a silver-mining center by the people who called themselves can'ani (Canaanites), and who are more commonly known by their Greek name: Phoenicians. Evidence in Greek literature dates Cádiz's founding at or around 1104 B.C. , though that date may refer only to early maritime contacts, since the earliest archaeological evidence for a permanent settlement suggests a date somewhere around 760 B.C .

A Semitic people whose stronghold was at Tyre, in what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians were trading people. Known for their purple-dyed textiles, they created the first seagoing merchant empire. Their language was mutually intelligible with that of the Hebrews; they are depicted in the Bible as commercial partners of the Hebrews (with Tyre the more commercially powerful of the two) but more often as immoral enemies. The king of Tyre sent builders and sold wood from the cedars and firs of Lebanon to King David for his palace and to King Solomon for his temple; on the other hand, the wicked idolatress Jezebel was a Phoenician, and the Tyreans committed “fornication with all the peoples of the earth” and trafficked in Hebrew slaves.

The Phoenicians' greatest legacy to the world was disseminating the alphabet; variants of their names for the letters ( alef, bet . . .) survive today. In pulling the southern part of the Iberian peninsula into the orbit of the eastern Mediterranean, the Phoenicians brought their literate, mercantile, urban culture to Iberia, along with their religion.

The world at this time was polytheistic. In the time of King Solomon and later, Hebrews worshipped the Phoenician gods Baal-Shamêm (known to the Greeks as Zeus), Baal-Melqart (Herakles), and Astarte (Aphrodite). The Phoenicians practiced child sacrifice, which, the Bible tells us, Hebrews also did at times: “They disregarded all the commandments of the Lord, their God . . . and served Baal. They immolated their sons and daughters by fire.”

The silver from Cádiz supplied much of the Phoenicians' wealth, and the town was an important port, in continual use from the time of its founding until today. The Phoenicians must have brought a variety of peoples with them at one time or another, almost certainly including Jews. They soon established other coastal settlements along southern Iberia, which historians refer to, at that time, as Tartessos; they also established trading posts along the northern coast of Africa, across the Mediterranean from Iberia.

* * *

There seems to be no definitive answer about the origins of the early Iberians. Since Iberia and North Africa are separated by only thirteen kilometers at the narrowest point of the Strait of Gibralter, it seems plausible that Africans might have arrived in remote times from the south (as refugees on wretched rafts do today). If so, coming directly from Africa, they might have been the first Homo sapiens to enter Europe.

The skillfully executed cave paintings at Altamira in Northern Spain are approximately eighteen thousand years old. Whether the Paleolithic people who made those paintings vanished, or whether they were ancestral to the people that the Phoenicians found when they arrived, it is clear that the Iberian peninsula has been densely occupied for thousands of years--except for the cold, dry, rocky Central Plateau, which was barely settled in prehistoric times, and which effectively divides Iberia into northern and southern regions.

A wave of aboriginal Iberians might have come to the peninsula at some point across the Pyrenees from the northeast; conceivably, they might even have arrived via the Mediterranean. In the north, the Basques, whose origin is unknown, seem to be Europe's oldest extant culture, and their language seems to predate the spread of Indo-European languages. But, certainly, there was contact with Africa from early on: in the south, ivory from North Africa is known to have been imported into, and worked locally in, the present area of La Mancha about 1700~~1600 B.C.

To live in a coastal town in the ancient world was to be cosmopolitan, in frequent, prolonged contact with people from other civilizations. Through the port of Cádiz, the Phoenicians' jewel at the western end of the known world, passed the luxury goods of the day. Like other far western colonies of the Phoenicians, Cádiz was a highly organized urban center, with houses arranged on rectangular street blocks. From the time of its founding, Cádiz must have boasted--like her granddaughter Havana more than two thousand years later--a robust service economy of taverns, gambling, dancing, and fornicating to accommodate the traveling sailors and merchants.

The indigenous society the Phoenicians penetrated was already politically stable, had elaborate art, and practiced magical religions about which we know little. The Gaditanos (people of Cádiz) were known for the number and extent of their fishing voyages in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, which they undertook in small boats. The Greek geographer Strabo (63/4 B.C . to about A.D. 21) wrote of Dídyme, a part of Cádiz: “Few reside there, since they all spend most of their time at sea.” The Phoenicians, writes a Spanish historian, “had at their service large boats, which were manned by [Gaditanian] sailors who came from the humble ranks of fishermen and driven by expert pilots of the same origin.”

How far down the west coast of Africa the Gaditanos traveled is a matter of some conjecture. If aboriginal Iberians originally came from North Africa, there may already have been some knowledge of what lay south. The Phoenicians, who as traders would have been interested in the rich raw materials and exotic products of Africa, established, apparently in the seventh century B.C. , the colony of Mogador, a small island off the African coast some 600 miles south of Cádiz. This was probably the colony referred to in Greek writings as Cerne, and may represent the southern extreme of the area known to the Gaditanian fishermen, whose knowledge of the area likely preceded its commercial exploitation by the Phoenicians.

The Greek writer Pseudo-Scylax wrote of commerce at Cerne in the early sixth century B.C. :

 

[begin block quote]The Ethiopians are found on the mainland. It is with these same Ethiopians that [the Phoenicians] trade. [The Phoenicians] sell [their wares] in exchange for the skins of gazelles, lions and leopards and also for skins and tusks of elephants and domestic animals. . . . [The Ethiopians] also have a great city to which the Phoenician traders also sail.[end block quote]

 

Herodotus, in the fifth century B.C. , tells of the three-year circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenician sailors at the behest of the Egyptians; and Pliny the Elder, in the first century A.D ., wrote of the Phoenician Hanno's voyage down the West African coast, which would likely have been sometime after 425 B.C. (since Herodotus doesn't mention it). Some historians doubt that either of these events could have actually occurred; even Pliny seems doubtful about Hanno. A tenth-century A.D. document in Greek purports to be a copy of a translation of Hanno's account of his voyage, though scholarly opinion is mixed as to the document's authenticity. Among the adventures it narrates is a journey up a river called Chretes, perhaps describing the Senegal River. According to this document, Hanno's interpreters on his voyage were “Lixitae,” assumed by some scholars to mean the indigenous people of North Africa, now called the Berbers, a fair-skinned people who had trade routes that ran down across the Sahara into black Africa.

The Sahara was not a desert until some 3,600 to 4,000 years ago, though it probably had an inhospitable desert core for much longer. The contact between black Africans and the proto-Berbers was, according to Oliver and Fage, “probably continuous since the wet phase of the seventh to the fourth millennia B.C. , when much of the Sahara was grassland and the hunting grounds of Afroasiatic and black peoples overlapped.”

The extent of black influence on Semitic society has been much debated. At the very least, it appears that the Phoenicians were in direct contact with black Africans from their earliest days of trading in North Africa. A sculpture found in a Phoenician cavern-tomb near Cádiz appears to depict the head of an African; it is also well established that the Phoenicians had at least some black slaves. In short, it seems very likely that, one way or another, black people were part of the traffic that circulated through Cádiz. Indeed, one could pose the question in the negative: given the location of Cádiz and its dedication to travel and commerce, why would anyone assume there were not black Africans in Cádiz, drinking and dancing along with everyone else?

* * *

There is evidence of Celtic presence in the north of Iberia from the seventh century B.C . By that time, the Celts, a people of unknown origin, already had iron swords. They mixed with the Iberian natives, forming the tribes historians call Celtiberian. Greek influence was felt in Iberia from the mid-sixth century B.C. The Greeks established the trading town of Emporion (as in “emporium”) on the Mediterranean coast, but never colonized Iberia. In 237 B.C ., the Carthaginians--Phoenicians who had colonized North Africa, with their capital at Carthage, in present-day Tunisia--invaded. By the end of the century, they had been driven out by the upstart Romans, during the course of which war the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched across the Alps from Spain with tens of thousands of men, as well as horses and battle elephants, the latter brought from Africa.

With the acquisition of what they called Hispania, the Romans reached the western end of the known world, and enclosed the Mediterranean. Around 206 B.C. , the Roman general Scipio Africanus the Elder built the city of Itálica (today called Santiponce), a few miles outside of Hispalis (Sevilla), on the river Baeta (the Guadalquivir). Itálica boasted an amphitheater, built to entertain the plebes, with a capacity of twenty-five thousand people--the largest, but not the only, amphitheater in Hispania. As in Rome, there were gladiator contests, boxing and javelin matches, circuses, theatrical presentations, concerts, feasts, and orgies. To the Roman taste for wine, the Spanish added their own taste for beer.

Cádiz, the second largest city in the Roman Empire after Rome itself, was known for its licentiousness, even among the pagan Romans. There are no histories from antiquity devoted solely to the subject of Iberia as such, but four Roman writers (Juvenal, Martial, Pliny, and Statius) attest to the status of puellae gaditanae (girls from Cádiz) as lascivious singing and dancing entertainers who might seem very comprehensible in the modern pop world. They had a novel percussive sound--their crotala (castanets). There are images of castanets played by women in Egypt two thousand years prior to this time. The instruments, and possibly the dancing style itself, might easily have arrived in Iberia with the Phoenicians. The Gaditanas' dancing-masters seem to have doubled as panderers; it was an antique version of the music business, in which the performer's skill was fused with sexual attractiveness and the “manager” also functioned as a pimp.

Reading Juvenal we learn that the Gaditanas were celebrated in Rome for their prowess in libidinis art (lewd arts). Satirizing the decadence of wealthy Romans in the first century A.D ., he describes the after-dinner entertainment at a feast: a Gaditana with her troupe of prurient girls, singing words more shocking than one would hear from “a naked slave standing in a reeking brothel archway.” They danced lasciviously by shaking their booties down to the ground (literally “ ad terram tremulo descendant clune puellæ ”), and made “a noise of shells,” referring to the Gaditanas' castanets, made of shells.

Besides their rump-shaking, their castanets, and their sexual services, the Gaditanas also got Romans singing what we would now call the “hooks” of their songs: Martial writes of the sexy Telethusa, sold as a maid and then repurchased as a mistress, who could “make lascivious gestures to the sound of Baetic castanets and play to the fashionable tunes of Cádiz.” He also addresses the typical bellus homo (pretty man; possibly a transvestite) of Rome, who, smelling of balsam and cinnamon, “hums catches from the Nile, from Cádiz.”

It's a matter of conjecture exactly what the song-and-dance that those pagan nasty girls shocked the Romans with consisted of. But I submit that in addition to the obvious influence from the eastern Mediterranean, that they might have been--as Egypt herself was--informed by centuries of direct and indirect contact with black Africa. The music of Africa was already ancient in the first century A.D., and it was as rhythmic and as infectious then as it is now.

* * *

In the third century A.D ., with a Latin identity already established in Iberia for centuries, the Romans introduced Christianity to the peninsula; by the fourth century it was dominant, at least in the cities. In 409, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, Iberia was overrun from the Pyrenees by barbarian Germanic peoples pushed westward by the Huns at their backs: the Alans, the Sueves, and the Vandals. The name of the last became associated with senseless destruction. The Vandals and the Alans were driven out with the help of the population by another nomadic Germanic tribe, the Visigoths, who invaded Iberia in 412 at the behest of Rome. After only two decades in Spain, in 429 the Vandals retreated across the southern straits to vandalize North Africa and Sicily. They left their name--Vandalusia, or Andalucía--and began a legacy of piracy in the Mediterranean that would last, with different masters, for a thousand years.

The Visigoths were rewarded by the Roman emperor for their conquest with territory in southern France, to which they retreated, establishing their seat at Toulouse, with the Romans in shaky control of Iberia. In 454 the Visigoths invaded Spain again, once more at the invitation of Rome, and this time conquered the peninsula, which they ruled for almost three centuries. In ruling Iberia from their capital in what is now France, there was constant cross-Pyrenees traffic, a factor that would to be crucial in the growth and development of the culture of northeastern Spain.

By then the Goths were Arian Christians: unitiarians who rejected the concept of the Trinity and the authority of the Pope. On the part of the peninsula they had entered, they imposed their name: Gotha-landia, or Cataluña. After their conquest of Iberia, they made a remarkable transformation from nomadic plunderers to sedentary monarchy. They unified the territory politically and introduced a comprehensive body of written law that served as an important precedent for others; they were, writes S. P. Scott, “in large measure, the lawgivers of Europe.” Among the aims of their law was to criminalize paganism; common people possessing books of magic could be beheaded.

In 587 the Visigothic king Recared converted to Catholicism, though remaining independent of the Holy See. At once there were prohibitions against immodest songs and dances. “These abuses, especially that of dancing, were regarded as survivals of paganism,” writes Stephen McKenna.

The major literary figure of Gothic Spain was the prolific Isodoro of Sevilla (about 559~~636), a Cartagena-born Catholic archbishop, who among his other distinctions was a music theorist. Under his influence a single order of liturgy, both prayer and song, was established throughout the territory. This repertoire of Visigothic (later called Mozarabic) chant, as extensive as the Gregorian chant sung by Catholics elsewhere, had a distinctly Iberian style.

After converting to Catholicism, the Visigoths attempted to impose their religion as mandatory. Though Jews had been in Iberia since the time of the Phoenicians, marriage between Christian and Jew was now prohibited. A policy of forcible conversion was declared in 612; in 694 the Jewish religion was outlawed and all Jews declared slaves. Enacted during an extended period of famine, the Visigothic legal code for the persecution of Jews was imitated by others in Europe down through the Middle Ages.

Meanwhile, the older beliefs, as part of which springs, stones, and trees were revered, continued quietly among the common people. Isodoro of Sevilla probably had in mind contemporary Spanish practices when he defined such varieties of magic as “necromancy, hydromancy, geomancy, aeromancy and pyromancy.” Whatever the folk religions consisted of by the time Visigothic law was introduced, they were surely syncretic (that is, they assimilated the elements of one religion into another). Iberia had by then been home to a dense overlay of cultic beliefs from many different places, including indigenous Iberian beliefs (which might have had distant roots in Africa) and those of the Phoenicians, Celts, Greeks, and Romans. There is also evidence for the existence in Iberia of altars to Syrian and Egyptian deities. Over the centuries there appeared in lieu of the prohibited pantheons a profusion of folkloric, syncretized Christian saints.

* * *

In the seventh century, a new religion divided the world into the House of Submission ( Dar al-Islam ) and the House of War ( Dar al-Harb ). Out of this ideology came one of the great military campaigns of history, dating from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who by his death in 632 had forged the feuding, polytheistic tribes of Arabia into a monotheistic state. The Arabs built a grand empire by conquering a large portion of the known world, imposing on it their language and establishing their religion as imperial orthodoxy. The name of the people who practice this religion--Muslims--derives from the name of the religion--Islam. From the Arabian peninsula, the Muslims embarked on a string of rapid conquests: Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Syria, Azerbaijan, portions of Armenia, Egypt and the whole of North Africa, where they converted the Berbers. They took Morocco in 708.

A factor in the rapidity of the Muslim conquest was the vacuum of state power in the Mediterranean world after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Iberia was in a depressed condition, with the Goths in a state of civil war, possibly between trinitarians and unitarians. The Jews of Spain seem to have welcomed, and even actively aided, the Muslims as their deliverers from the excesses of the Christians The Visigothic empire seems to have collapsed almost spontaneously.

Beware of any history of the Muslim conquest of Spain which is overly specific about exactly what happened, and when. Most of the written history was based on chronicles in Arabic, which date from 300 or more years after the conquest, though they may have been based on earlier accounts that were subsequently lost. The problems of stating with certainty what happened based on such evidence is obvious. Additionally, these accounts obviously present history as written by the victor, imbued with the victor's ideology. One anonymous document in Latin, which scholars call the Chronicle of 754 , is the closest thing to a contemporary account of the conquest that exists from the point of view of the loser.

It is generally accepted that in 711 Târik entered the Iberian peninsula with a mostly Berber army, which defeated the army of the Visigothic king Roderic, probably in 712. This campaign may have been preceded by raids into southern Spain. There was also, it appears, a second army, led by Târik's superior, Mûsâ, which landed at Cádiz and campaigned up to Toledo, the Visigothic capital. Having extended their empire all the way west to the Atlantic coast of Portugal, the Muslims were halted in their northward expansion into Europe in 732 by a Frankish army at Poitiers under Charles Martel, though it is difficult to pinpoint even this often-cited date with certainty, and it might have happened as late as 734.

The House of Submission consolidated the knowledge of a wide swath of the civilized world, absorbing the science and culture of the Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Byzantine, Roman, and Jewish civilizations. The Muslims inherited the infrastructure of roads that the Romans had built, which in Iberia, under the lax stewardship of the Visigoths, were quite run down, as well as their Mediterranean maritime routes. From their conquests of Syria, Egypt, Persia, and other areas of splendor, the Muslims captured vast quantities of gold, which they put to use by minting into coins. The golden dinars (from which comes the Spanish word dinero ) gave liquidity to their economic system. Almost at once there appeared a leisure class of wealthy aristocrats. Merchandise, technology, and ideas circulated across the now-unified territory. By the eighth century the money supply was being augmented by gold from Africa, and Islam carried on a rich foreign trade.

Vandalusia became al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, part of the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty. The heartland of al-Andalus was the rich basin of the Guadalquivir River, which runs past Sevilla into the Atlantic, and which was navigable by small boats all the way up to Córdoba. With Córdoba ( Qurtubah ) as the seat of its emirate, al-Andalus became the most learned and innovative society in Europe, and Córdoba the most urbane city in the world. Sevilla, whose rich agricultural valley had been the home of the most opulent families in the Visigothic era, was a large and important city in the Muslim era, with the farms now owned by new families and clans, many of them from Yemen.

The Islamization of Spain was by no means immediate, and was never total. There were always those who continued the older practices. It took until about the middle of the ninth century before half of the men of al-Andalus were Muslim. The rest of the people continued with their Visigothic-Roman culture.

Islam's basic tenet is common to Christianity and Judaism as well: monotheism. The whole of Islam can be summed up in seven words: “La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah” (there is no god but Allah, Mohammed is Allah's prophet). This concept, known as tawhid, is above all directed at polytheists. Muslims respected other people of the Book--Jews and Christians--in a way they did not respect polytheists or idolaters, and all three of the monotheistic faiths coexisted in al-Andalus. As long as Jews and Christians accepted their status as second-class citizens ( dhimmi ), and paid the taxes that Muslims were exempt from paying, their presence was tolerated.

Many Iberians became bilingual, speaking both their Romance tongue (still evolving out of Latin) and Arabic, the language of the court and of learning. The future language of Spanish filled up with Arabisms.

Fabulously wealthy, the Islamic world experienced an urban explosion. Córdoba grew to a size dwarfing anything elsewhere in Europe. The Muslims made significant improvements on the rudimentary Roman water system of Iberia, developing a practical method of irrigation that made the fields of al-Andalus bloom with new crops, whose names entered Spanish (and English) via Arabic: arroz (rice, a word that appears in English in the thirteenth century after five centuries of use in Spain), algodón (cotton, from al-qoton ), and azúcar (sugar, from al-succar ).

The lute dispersed throughout the territory. “Within a century after Mohammed's death,” writes Douglas Smith, “the lute became the most prominent of all instruments in the Arab lands.” The word lute is an Anglicization of laúd , which is a Hispanicization of the Arabic ‘ud. Apparently originating in Mesopotamia, the lute was not played in Greece (the Greek kithara was a lyre) or Rome. It was, however, played for centuries in Egypt, where it was probably brought from southwestern Asia; the earliest Egyptian lute of which we have any record is from the mid-sixteenth century B.C . Two lutes are clearly depicted in a wall painting from the eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty (about 1550~~1307 B.C .), in the hands of female players.

* * *

During the polytheistic, pre-Islamic tribal period that Arabs call the jâhiliyah, there were two kinds of music: nomadic, a rudimentary, rhythmic style called huda , sung by Bedouin camel drivers; and sedentary, a virtuosic style performed by female slaves called qiyân (singular: qayna ) . These singing, wine-pouring courtesans had long been a fixture in the Mediterranean world. They were common in the households of the wealthy, but more of them worked for hire, entertaining passing customers all across the Arabian peninsula during the jâhiliyah, and especially in the slave-market cities, most prominently Medina.

The poetic singing of the jâhiliyah functioned as both history and sorcery. These recitations, writes Zoltán Falvy, “became the literary language of Arabic, to which the Koran gave its authority when Islam was founded.” Already from this pre-Islamic period of Arabic poetry, there are references to competitions in verse between dueling poets.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “Islamic music.” Tajwid, or the rhythmic chanting of the Koran, is not considered music by Muslims, though to a non-Muslim ear it sounds musical. There is no direct prohibition of, or endorsement of, music in the Koran. But there have consistently been various orthodox Muslim opinions against music as a forbidden pleasure, which in their severe forms constitute the most anti-musical posture in world history. These are based either on subjective interpretations of certain Koran verses, construing various prohibitions of pleasures to apply to music, or on hadith (“sayings”) supposedly uttered by the Prophet Mohammed, which began to be collected and codified in the late eighth and ninth centuries, forming a practical basis for Islamic law more than a century after the Prophet's death.

There was, however, much music in the Muslim world, and there was a highly developed aesthetic awareness of music as an art form. The conquests of jihad brought under one banner a musical give-and-take that had already been going on for millennia in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, held together by a theoretical framework that was essentially Greek. Along with music in the Muslim world there was much dancing.

In the rich society created by the Islamic conquest, Medina became a wealthy, confident city, with ample money available to patronize trained professional musicians. Qiyân had the opportunity to receive an education, learn literature, and possibly attain a lucrative concubinage; they worked as courtesans for the profit of their owners. Rich men owned large numbers of them; a description of an Umayyad festival in the early eighth century mentions “fifty singing girls with lutes behind a curtain while the famous Jamila sang and played her lute in front of the curtain.”

Singing slaves were luxuries, but laboring slaves were central to the economy of early Islam. They came from many places, and one source--by a tradition dating back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad--was black Africa. There was an ancient, indigenous trade of slaves within Africa itself. There were black slaves in Egypt, Carthage, and Greece, and the Romans expanded the trade. But it seems that the Arabs developed the idea of blacks as a race that was the natural object of slavery, and who created a massive slave trade out of Africa.

Islam came into existence at a time when slavery was omnipresent. The very concept of the House of Submission implies that all Muslims are slaves of Allah. The Koran specifically allows for slavery, and requires the humane treatment of slaves. Slaves must be given the opportunity to purchase their freedom from their masters; the contract into which they enter, called mukâtaba , allows slaves to earn money while still enslaved. While the Koran does not suggest that one ethnic group is superior to another, in practice many Muslims only encountered blacks as slaves. The general attitude toward black slaves in eighth-century Islam was probably no different from that of the historian Ibn Khaldûn (1332~~1406), who wrote, “The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”

As slaves, black people had little opportunity to distinguish themselves in Islamic society. But there was something that they were noted for. Ibn Butlân (died about 1068) wrote of the women of the Zanj (as in Zanzibar, from the East African coast), enslaved already by the late seventh century, that “their bad qualities are many, and the blacker they are the uglier their faces and the more pointed their teeth. . . . Dancing and rhythm are instinctive and ingrained in them. Since their utterance is uncouth, they are compensated with song and dance.”

Qiyân were not usually Arab girls. Though their art form was an Arabic cultural expression, most of the great singers of Islam were Persians or Africans who were born in the Arabian peninsula, or at least raised there. A ninth-century treatise by ‘Amr Ibn Bahr Gâhiz (al-Jâhiz, or al-Djâhiz) written in Baghdad, the Epistle on Singing-Girls , satirizes the opportunities for profit through their exploitation. The one singing-girl specifically mentioned by Gâhiz is Abyssinian--that is, black. After noting that the prices for singing-girl slaves far exceeded those they would otherwise fetch were they not singers, he writes, “Who could reach anything like the price fetched by an Abyssinian girl, the slave of ‘Awn, namely 120,000 dinars?” The Baghdad musician Ishâk al-Mawsilî said: “They used not to train beautiful [Arabic-looking] slave girls to sing, but they used only to train yellow and black girls. The first to teach valuable girls to sing was my father.”

Few writers have mentioned Africa as an influence on the music of early Islam. This omission is in keeping with a general tendency of historians of an earlier era to ignore the cultural contributions of slaves. But presumably black people altered the performance style of Arabic music as black people did everywhere else they were enslaved. It would seem reasonable to think that some of the character--and certainly the intense rhythmicity--of the music of the Arabic-speaking world might owe something to its many centuries of being sung by Africans and African-descended people.

The first professional male musicians in Islam emerged in the seventh century, and continued the fusion of the arts of singing and sex. These were the mukhannathûn, effeminate freedmen known for their association with male prostitution. Ultimately, all kinds of professional male entertainers in Islam came to be called mukhannathûn. Inevitably, the passionate art of the qiyân and the mukhannathûn aroused hostility. A treatise by Ibn Abi 'l-Dunyâ (823~~94) condemned music as being in a class with such vices as chess, wine drinking, love poetry, qiyân, and homosexuality.

It appears that the first professional musicians in al-Andalus were qiyân--though the singing-girl was not a new idea in Spain, as anyone in Cádiz could have told you. But in 822 there arrived in Córdoba from Baghdad the freedman poet and courtier Abu 'l-Hasan ‘Alî Ibn Nâfi' (798~~853), better known by his nickname of Ziryâb.

The story of Ziryâb has to be considered something of a myth--true in the way that myths are true. There is no reason to suppose that he did not exist. But his legend owes much to an 1840 translation into English of a text by the historian al-Makkarî (1578~~1632), who was quoting (whether verbatim or embroidered, we do not know) the eleventh-century writer Ibn-Hayyân, whose manuscript has been lost. With such a great remove between the chroniclers and the subject, Ziryâb might have become a personification of all the cultural developments of Córdoba in his time. The many stories of his innovations, some of them perhaps fanciful, signify the consolidation of formerly provincial Córdoba as a cultural capital of the Muslim world during a period of great prosperity.

Baghdad was the center of the Abbasid dynasty, which seized power from the Syrian Umayyads in 750. Previously a tiny village, about 762 it was established as the capital of the Caliphate and grew to a vast city by the end of the century, offering great opportunities for social mobility. The Abbasids relied extensively on mawali (non-Arab “clients.” Baghdad became a great flowering center of Islamic arts and sciences, reflecting a shift in emphasis from Arabic to Persian culture. Most of our earliest written historical knowledge of Islam dates from this period.

Persia's musical culture was highly developed, and had for centuries been mixing with the ancient musical culture of neighboring India. Like Islamic music, Persian music relied on improvisation, employed the lute, and used female slave musicians. According to Atheneaus, King Darius of Persia had 329 musicians in his harem. But we have little direct information; it appears that the existing treatises on Persian music were burned by the Muslims.

Al-Andalus established itself as an independent Umayyad dynasty in 756, when ‘Abd al-Rahman I, the only ranking Umayyad who had escaped slaughter by the Abbasids, arrived in Córdoba. This rival caliphate was a refuge for Ziryâb, who, according to al-Makkarî, fled Baghdad after arousing the bitter enmity of his teacher, Ishâk al-Mawsilî, by too greatly impressing the Abbasid caliph with his soulful singing. Escaping to Tunisia, Ziryâb procured an invitation to the Andalusian court, arriving with the aid of the Jewish musician Mansûr.

The name Ziryâb is sometimes translated as “Black Songbird,” for the sweetness of his singing and his dark complexion. He brought to Córdoba a new Persian-inspired musical movement that departed from classical Arabic tradition. The caliph at Córdoba, ‘Abd al-Rahmân II, whose court boasted an extraordinary group of singers of the Medina school as well as an important singer from Alexandria, developed an extraordinary infatuation with Ziryâb. He presented him with wealth, pensions, and gifts, and, writes al-Makkarî, “When in the course of time his attachment for him became still stronger, he caused a private door to be made, by which Ziryab might enter his apartment [unperceived].”

Ziryâb was famed not just for his poetry, singing, and lute playing, but also for his style and his wide-ranging knowledge. He could be seen as a distant prototype of the fashionable guitar hero. It has been written of Ziryâb that he knew ten thousand songs; that he added a fifth string to the four-string lute; that he improved the design of the lute and substitued an eagle quill for the wooden plectrum; that he was a great music theorist who trained a line of musicians, including his own descendants; that in Córdoba he founded Europe's first conservatory of music; that he popularized new styles of dress, adding to the winter and summer clothes a specialized wardrobe for spring and fall; that he popularized facial shaving for men; that he introduced toothpaste, underarm deodorant, and the use of salt as laundry bleach; and that he popularized asparagus and made many culinary innovations, and popularized the drinking of wine. One writer attributes to him a vogue for chess, which came to Spain from Baghdad around that time. He also is said to have given Córdoba that fundamental cultural contribution of the singing star: a new hairstyle.

Musicians followed Ziryâb's rules for generations to come, not only in Córdoba, but in Sevilla, Toledo, Valencia, and Granada. Between the innovations in Baghdad and Córdoba, the ninth century is remembered as the golden age of Islamic music, determining the course of music in the Arabic-speaking world for a thousand years to come.

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The peak of Córdoba's wealth and power came in the tenth century, under ‘Abd al-Rahmân III. Though they were part of a single emirate, there was a constant tension between Syrian-dominated Umayyad Córdoba and heavily Yemenite Sevilla. Baghdad, meanwhile, had become a seat of fantastic luxury; the caliph's palace was described as housing seven thousand black eunuchs and four thousand white ones.

The contributions of medieval Islam to Europe are too extensive to list, but they include important concepts of medicine, economics, astronomy, navigation, agriculture, mining, civil and mechanical engineering, architecture, artisanship, and a high tradition of sung poetry, musical instruments, and dance. Islamic mathematicians gave Europe the decimal numbers we call Arabic numerals, including the concept of zero; , algebra is an Arabic-derived word (from al-jebr ), as is algorithm. Their chemists distilled alcohol ( al-kohl ) and perfumes. From the Chinese they learned of gunpowder, and in 751 the capture in battle of Chinese papermakers (who had a skill unknown in Europe) gave rise to a new age of the book in the Islamic world. In tenth-century Mesopotamia, Ibn al-Haytham of Basra (965~~1039) described the principle, previously known to the Chinese, of the camera obscura: by which an image is projected by sunlight through a small opening into a dark space. After Europeans learned about the camera obscura in the thirteenth century by reading a Latin translation of his treatise, it revolutionized the arts of drawing and painting, and ultimately led to the invention of the camera.

The word renaissance means “rebirth.” The standard schoolchild's capsule version of the Renaissance as taught in the nineteenth century (and much of the twentieth) was that Europe was reborn by rediscovering the civilizations of Greece and Rome--as if Greek culture had appeared out of nowhere, Egypt and black Africa didn't exist, and no culture had existed after Rome. But the way to the Renaissance was lit by the high civilization of science, arts, and commerce that existed for centuries in the Islamic world when Europe was in the Dark Ages. Muslim Spain was a center of philosophy and mysticism, of scholarly inquiry, of commercial production, and of hedonism. Aristotle's works, like those of many other Greek writers, were translated into Arabic when they had been forgotten in Europe, and were subsequently reintroduced to Europe via translation from the Arabic. With thousands of Arabic manuscripts still unread by modern scholars, and countless more long since destroyed, it is not possible to get a full assessment of the extent of Islamic knowledge in this period.

The dissemination of this new Andalusian culture into Europe presumably began immediately in the eighth century with the defeat of the Visigoths. As al-Andalus developed the first universities in Europe, scholars from other lands came to study and returned home. Spain was the broadest highway for the entry of Muslim culture into Europe, but it was far from the only one. The Muslims, who held Sardinia, took Sicily in the ninth century and established schools there as well. The Islamic world was not closed off; quite the contrary, it was mercantile, and trading contacts were major movers of culture. Both Pepin and Charlemagne, Frankish kings whose influence reached from what is now northern Italy and Germany all the way to the Pyrenees, exchanged diplomats with the Muslim courts. Rome traded with al-Andalus; Venice, Greece, and Russia had trade with Egypt.

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During the pax islamica in al-Andalus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted, albeit with occasional atrocities committed. Though Jews were few in numbers (perhaps 1 percent of the population, possibly as high as 2 to 3 percent), they were a highly literate elite who provided a disproportionate number of musicians and poets. Tenth-century Córdoba was a wellspring of Jewish intellectualism, with a revival of Hebrew language and literature sparked by the poets, doctors, and Talmudic scholars there.

But by then the empire was fragmenting. A new dynasty, the Fatimids, had taken power in Egypt and began manufacturing their own gold dinars, using gold from sub-Saharan Africa. In Córdoba ‘Abd al-Rahmân III (891~~961) also began minting his own dinars, a practice accelerated by his son, al-Hakam II. In parallel with the gold trade through North Africa was a trade in black slaves. There are records of Sudanese slaves in Córdoba from the eleventh century. (The name Sudan is from the Arabic Bilâd al-Sûdân [home of the blacks], and refers to the broad area below the Sahara, not the present East African nation of Sudan.)

A fitna (civil war) that began in 1009 and continued until 1031 brought the Umayyad dynasty of Spain to an end. The empire of al-Andalus fragmented into more than twenty petty kingdoms, called taifa . This left a power vacuum in al-Andalus; meanwhile, it caused these kingdoms, now independent, competed vigorously in commerce and culture. Music flourished in the various taifa . Schools produced homegrown qiyân , who could play in palace orchestras, recite poetry, stage choreographed equestrian battles with wooden hobbyhorses tied to their skirts, dance with knives, read horoscopes, and seduce--and who brought good prices when sold into the Maghrib.

By then the culture of al-Andalus was markedly distinct from the rest of the Muslim world. According to al-Tîfâshî, Ibn Bâdjdja of Zaragoza (d. 1139), after sequestering himself with skillful singing-girls for some years, “combined the songs of the Christians with those of the East, thereby inventing a style found only in Andalus, toward which the temperament of its people inclined, so that they rejected all others.” In other words, he was a culminating figure, possibly representing the achievements of an entire generation of musicians, who signifies the emergence of an autonomous Andalusian style, distinct from the Arabic. This Andalusian style is still played throughout Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.

Al-Tîfâshî, who tells us of Ibn Bâdjdja's achievement, unfortunately doesn't mention what his musical fusion consisted of, and for all the achievements of medieval Muslim civilization, they did not leave us a music notation. Christian Poché suggests that it may have had something to do with the incorporation of the highly melismatic style of the Visigothic chant into Arabic song. (Melisma refers to singing strings of notes on a single vowel.)

These songs were musicalizations of texts that were rarely more than four lines long. Since the verses were brief, they became points of departure for the singers, who extended them through the use of vocal arabesques. Al-Tîfâshî (who lived in Tunisia) tells us that he counted seventy-four hazzât (ornaments) in a single line of text, and adds that he heard a singing-girl take two hours to perform one line. Even making allowance for exaggeration, it is clear that the reputation of these singers rested not only on the number of verses they knew but also on their ability to extemporize on them.

Al-Tîfâshî also says that the center of this expertise was Sevilla, and he notes that in his time Sevilla was known as a center of training for qiyân, where they were trained not by men but by older women of Sevilla, and were sold for high prices to the kings of Maghrib and Ifrîkiya (Africa), along with “an accompanying register containing all [of the songs] she has memorized.” He adds that if a qayna was a consummate artist who was “an expert in all instruments, and in all kinds of dance and shadow play, and comes with her instrument, along with [an entourage of] slave girls to beat the drum and play the reed for her,” she could be sold for many thousands of dinars.

Sevilla, located a defensible distance inland from the coast on the Guadalquivir River, had long since taken over from nearby Cádiz as Spain's major southern port. It was the major point of entry for the gold and slaves coming up from sub-Saharan Africa via Morocco. As early as the eleventh century, ‘ud s were being made in Sevilla, and the city was a center for exportation of musical instruments to North Africa. It was, wrote al-Makkarî quoting an earlier chronicler, a city where “musical instruments of all sorts may at any time be procured . . . where they are manufactured with the greatest skill. . . . Many of these instruments may, it is true, be found in other cities of Andalus, as also players on them, but nowhere in such numbers as in Seville.”

Sevilla also took over Cádiz's reputation as a center of moral decay. The inhabitants of Sevilla, writes al-Makkarî, were “famous for their indolent habits, and their love of pleasure, which in them was almost proverbial. They led a most luxurious and dissipated life.”

 

al-Jâhiz, 53.

Cunliffe, 9.

García y Bellido, 319; Aubet 2001, 162, 262.

2 Chronicles 2:3;1 Kings 5:1~~11; Isaiah 23:17; Joel 3:3.

Aubet 2001, 3, 9,138.

Katzenstein, 187.

2 Kings 17:16-17.

Chapman, 34.

Aubet 1995, 49.

García y Bellido, 294.

Aubet 2001, 191, 301.

quoted in Aubet 2001, 302.

Harden, 170~~77.

Oliver and Fage, 46.

Trimingham, 13.

García y Bellido, 365.

Almagro-Gorbea, 180.

Keegan, 239.

Torres, 516.

Aubet 2001, 259.

Hayes, 1:164.

ix :164.

Hitchcock, 113.

Scott, viii.

McKenna, 111.

McKenna, 116.

Sadie, 24:115.

McKenna, 129, 140.

Glick 1979, 30~~1; Thompson, E.A., 250; Collins, 30~~1.

Collins, 26~~7.

Collins, 25.

Levtzion 1980 , 126~~7; Segal, 23.

Reilly, 3.

Bosch Vilá, 28.

Zozaya, 72.

Smith, 7.

Smith, 1~~2.

Hayes, 2:24.

Sadie, 8:3.

Touma, 2.

Falvy, 17.

Sachs, 63.

Touma, 5.

Sadie, 1:798, 802; 20:649.; Meisame and Starkey, 2:724; al-Jâhiz , 2.

Smith, 9.

Segal, 35~~6.

Quoted in Sanneh, 49.

Quoted in Lewis, 92.

Touma, 9.

al-Jahiz, 35.

Lewis, 56.

Meisame and Starkey, 2:548.

Sadie, 1:800; Meisame and Starkey, 2:725.

Falvy, 17; Segal, 80; Sadie, 1:802.

Bhatnagar, 49.

Sadie, 27:852.

Martín Moreno, 41; Cortés García, 18.

al-Makkarí, 2:118.; cf. al-Tifashi, 1998.

cf. Glick 1979 , 200.

Segal, 80~~1; Falvy, 17; Charry, 558; Glick 1979; Sadie, 27:852; Arié, 315.

Touma, 11~~2.

Bosch Vilá, 30.

Lewis, 59.

Diamond, 256.

Farmer, 8~~10.

Levtzion 1980, 128, 177.

Farmer, 6.

Cortés García, op. cit., 19~~20; Arié, 320.

Liu and Monroe, 42.

Poché, 47.

Meisame and Starkey, 724.

Liu and Monroe, 37.

Liu and Monroe, 37~~38.

Smith, 62; Sadie, 23:177.

al-Makkari, 1:56~~8