The Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History ed. by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette (review)

This book is a collection of articles in memory of Maria Rosa Menocal, who is famous for insisting that the Arabic literature of medieval Spain (al-Andalus) was as much part of the European literary tradition as the works of Raimbaut, Chaucer, or Wolfram von Eschenbach. The book shows how languages in the Mediterranean washed up against each other and mingled, then separated again (like the branches of the medieval World Ocean). The undercurrent of this linguistic sea was a contrapuntal music around whose bass continuo or “tenor” (to use the medieval term) the different languages were the moving voices. Political identities melded into ethnic and religious ones; convivencia was a medieval cosmopolitanism. In physics, only one individual could occupy one space, but in languages and culture the rules of physics no longer applied. Jewish Sefarad, Islamic al-Andalus, and Romance Hispania occupied the same space.

I was left wondering: what if the translations of Arabic scientific works into Latin that have been assumed to have been made in Christian territories were made rather by and for Christians living under Islamic rule, struggling to keep up their own culture, just as Muslims in Christian Spain sought to preserve their culture, in Arabic script, even if the language had become Spanish? A prevailing spirit in this book is that of nostalgia: Cervantes looking back at medieval al-Andalus; Galland and the Arabian Nights, at Baghdad; Arabian poets in Spain, at their homeland in Islamic Sicily: “Our abode, when we inhabited it, lived in the shade of a sweet and fertile life” (Ibn al-Kamuni). Looking back was a dominant theme—and also a methodology that was pursued by Maria Rosa Menocal and is encapsulated by Karla Mallette, one of this book’s editors, in the philological image of the boustrophedon: turning back to the beginning of the line when you have reached its end.