Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia across the Mediterranean by Jonathan Holt Shannon (review)

The legacy of al-Andalus (medieval Islamic Iberia) has become a powerful narrative that threads together memory cultures across the Mediterranean. Built upon the utopian notion of coexistence (convivencia) between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, al-Andalus has become an edifying trope for contemporary projects of cultural exchange and multiculturalism. Convivencia has taken on a special significance given the rise in anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobia across Europe. In this frame, the study of Andalusian music—traditions believed to have originated in al-Andalus that now exist across the Maghreb and Levant—has met with renewed interest. A sizeable body of literature has emerged in recent years that explores the musical legacies of al-Andalus from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. Jonathan Shannon’s book is a crucial addition to this scholarship.

Taking an ethnographic focus, the book explores how the narrative of a shared cultural memory is articulated in musical practice across the Mediterranean. Shannon examines how nostalgia for al-Andalus is represented and negotiated through the performance of Andalusian music. He argues that Andalusian music partakes in broader projects of remembering the past that shape aspirations for the future. The book successfully weaves together three geographical cases studies (Syria, Morocco, and Spain) and should be approached as a ‘sonorous tissue that transcends these geographical orientations to reach across and around the Mediterranean basin’ (p. 6). Shannon unpicks the many forms of nostalgia that give al-Andalus, and by extension Andalusian music, such cultural and political significance.

Central to Shannon’s theoretical framework is nostalgia, which is subjected to detailed analysis in the opening chapter. In particular, he draws on Amanda Lagerkvist’s notion of ‘nostalgia dwelling’: the articulation of lived experience in the present through narratives of the past (Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past (Basingstoke, 2013)). For Shannon, music is a powerful vehicle in the production of shared social memories. In historicizing al-Andalus, musicians construct different forms of nostalgia that both salvage a lost, idealized past and co-opt this past in the service of future-oriented projects of national renewal and international exchange. Chapter 1 offers a detailed overview of the historical rhetoric surrounding al-Andalus and Andalusian music. While Shannon acknowledges certain inconsistencies in historical accounts, he sketches the ‘standard’ narrative that underpins many discussions of Andalusian music. Also useful is the ‘listener’s guide’ to Andalusian music, which provides an overview of key styles from the different geographical case studies.

Chapter 2 explores the legacy of al-Andalus as performed through music in pre-conflict Syria. Drawing on years of extensive research, Shannon examines how an Iberian cultural memory is employed in the construction of a pan-Arab identity. Here, al-Andalus is ‘good to think’ because it references the supposed genius of Arab culture: a golden age of cultural and artistic development that spread across the Arab world and Europe. The cultural and political weight of such a narrative is a relatively recent phenomenon in Syria, emerging in the post-independence era and aligning with Ba’thist notions of secularism and pan-Arabism. In a musical context, Syrian connections to the ‘lost paradise’ of al-Andalus are emphasized by ‘there-and-back-again’ narratives that link the Umayyad caliphate with present-day Syria, most notably through the legend of Ziryab and the poetic genre of muwashshah. While the purported musical links between al-Andalus and Syria are often tenuous, they carry powerful weight as tropes of nostalgia for a perceived glorious past. Rather than being locked in the past, however, Shannon argues that the cultural and political currency of al-Andalus is a model for renewal in the present and aspirations for the future, an idea that carries particular poignancy given the conflict that is engulfing Syria.

Chapter 3 explores the significance of al-Andalus in Moroccan Andalusian music (al-ala). Unlike the pan-Arabism...