The Ring of the Dove: Race, Sex, and Slavery in al-Andalus and the Poetry of Ibn Hazm

54 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 43, No.2, Spring 2019 The Ring of the Dove: Race, Sex, and Slavery in al-Andalus and the Poetry of Ibn Hazm Kevin Anthony Fox, Jr.* The institution of slavery was fundamental to production in many societies and was often essential to the social fabric of even those others in which it did less to propel economy. In al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, its maintenance and ubiquity were always a moral imperative. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate, through rhetorical analysis of the first half of Ibn Hazm’s poetic cycle-love treatise The Ring of the Dove, the attitudes of his class toward race, sex, and slavery. This paper is structured to introduce and explain the current scholarly ideas on race, sex, and slavery in al-Andalus and explore how The Ring of the Dove can inform understanding of the era, the place, and its people. Its purpose is to demonstrate that The Ring of the Dove expresses complex Andalusi notions which saw romantic love as compatible with sex slavery within a divinelyordained hierarchy that took women’s subjugation for granted. To paraphrase Matthew Gordon’s introduction to Concubines & Courtesans, slavery is ubiquitous throughout the history of early Islam.1 Slavery existed in Iberia and across Europe before and after al-Andalus, but the sociocultural mixture of ethnicities and religions there led to unique results. Islam restricted the right of Muslims to throw other Muslims into bondage, but principle and practice were not always the same. Maribel Fierro, for instance, has shown how soldiers brutalized and enslaved women in the suppression of rebellions, killing men whose attestations of Muslim faith * Kevin Fox earned his Master of Arts from the History Department, Villanova University, with a concentration in State and Society. He primarily studies Latin America in the Cold War, the African diaspora in Latin America, the global African diaspora and comparative slaveries. 1 Matthew S. Gordon, “Introduction,” from Concubines & Courtesans – Women and Slavery in Islamic History, edited by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), 2, referencing Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 6-7. 55 they did not believe and taking the women as property.2 The roles and privileges of women-as-property varied according to the rights and wills of their masters, but sexual license was taken for granted. Capability as a maid or a wetnurse was valuable, but the ability to entertain and the possession of physical attractiveness were valuable as well. Slavery was deeply-gendered. In Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines, Simon Barton argues that the physical, political, cultural, and legal frontiers that women navigated in this patriarchal society were unequivocally interconnected through race, sex, and religion. Politics, the law, and religion were inseparable but there are points where the leading social influencers, from their courts and their desks, disagreed. Race in al-Andalus Defining race in medieval terms is not easy. Some scholars find it anachronistic to apply contemporary understandings of race to the premodern world, and they have the potential to be correct. However, Geraldine Heng proves in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages that race is a useful lens of analysis that can help us better understand how pre-modern societies laid the groundwork for the contemporary. Thereby, we can better understand race and, potentially, the general cultural phenomena of human categorization. In al-Andalus, typical beliefs about cultural identity stated that Arab identity was transmitted through the father. Muslim men were permitted to marry Christian slaves and impregnate Christian concubines with the understanding that the children were to be raised Muslim. The highest cultural classification under Umayyad rule was a natural born-andraised Arab, but the next-best thing was the honorary Arab, defined as a category of person who gained their status by studying literary Arabic, Arab culture, and the Qur’an. Islam was often feared in Christian Europe. The faith of Muhammad evolved more rapidly and cohesively (though not permanently or uniformly thanks to the Sunni-Shi’i split following the death of Ali...