Copyright by Joseph Charles Fees 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Joseph Charles Fees certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: New Directions in Kharja Studies: Gender, Sexuality and Religion Committee: Madeline Sutherland-Meier, Supervisor Samer Ali Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba Guy Raffa Cory Reed New Directions in Kharja Studies: Gender, Sexuality and Religion by Joseph Charles Fees, B.S.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my family. Thank you for showing me immeasurable support and love over the years. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge all of the help the professors in the Spanish and Portuguese Department have given me during my time at U.T. I particularly would like to thank my advisor, Madeline Sutherland-Meier for her constant help and guidance. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee for their valuable feedback and encouragement. This dissertation would not have been possible without the funding support of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at U.T. which included teaching and travel support. I am also grateful to the Center of European Studies for the two summer FLAS awards which allowed me to improve my Arabic language skills and aided in my analysis of the kharjas and muwashshahs. v New Directions in Kharja Studies: Gender, Sexuality and Religion Joseph Charles Fees, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Madeline Sutherland-Meier The focus of kharja criticism on origins and influences has prevented scholarship of this literature from exploring different approaches for understanding this poetry. This dissertation takes a new and needed direction by examining the themes of gender, sexuality and religion in the muwashshahs with Romance kharjas. The first chapter presents a meta-critical analysis of kharja scholarship and notes how these studies have been focused on philological issues. The second chapter looks at the role gender plays in this corpus of poetry. It analyses the relationship of the voices of the kharjas and muwashshahs, compares descriptions of males and females, discusses gender conventions in Arabic poetry and determines the gender of the referent for each poem. The third chapter places the muwashshahs in the context of Andalusian sexuality and society. It notes the importance of their courtly creation and examines the themes of violence, sexuality and pleasure. The fourth and final chapter examines the convergence of religious and sexual language in the muwashshahs. It summarizes this tradition beginning with Plato’s Symposium followed by descriptions of paradise in the Koran and Ibn Hazm’s The Dove’s Ring Neck. The conclusion compares the muwashshahs to the cantigas d’amigo, the troubadour lyric and the Divine Comedy with respect to the themes of gender, sexuality and religion. This analysis demonstrates the cultural and societal influences on these literatures. vi Table of Contents Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Chapter One: A History of Kharja Studies .............................................................9 Chapter Two: Muwashshahs, Kharjas, and Gender ..............................................57 Chapter Three: Muwashshah Reflections of Society and Sexuality ...................124 Chapter Four: Muwashshahs, Religion and Desire.............................................166 Conclusion: The Muwashshahs and the Later Romance Lyric ...........................202 References ............................................................................................................225 vii Introduction The kharjas are the endings to the muwashshahs, Arabic and Hebrew strophic poems written in the 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus. The kharjas are only a few lines in length and typically voiced as a woman whereas the muwashshahs are longer and voiced as a man. The kharjas are unique because they give a feminine dimension to the usual masculine perspective of classical Arabic poetry. The kharja voice often laments the absence of a lover or expresses some type of amorous desire. Although most of the kharjas were written in colloquial Arabic, some of the kharjas were composed in a mozarabic dialect. They are classified as the first extant poems written in Romance and have been placed at the beginning of the Romance literary canon because of this distinction. The dedicated work of critics on kharja scholarship and research on related Arabic and Hebrew poetry over the last century has greatly expanded the understanding of the literature in al-Andalus. While scholars have debated in a particularly acrimonious fashion, a greater awareness exists today of many facets of muwashshah and kharja poetry. This knowledge includes aspects of language and its meaning, meters, rhyme and varying theories about the relationship between this genre and other Arabic and Western literature, and partially but to a much lesser extent, how the poetry reflects the Andalusian Islamic and Hebrew culture in which it was written. However, many questions related to the kharjas including philological issues of language, paleography and the implications of the problems posed by the manuscript errors have been and continue to be difficult or impossible to resolve. Despite the voluminous amount of 1 scholarship completed on the kharjas, criticism is by no means closed to future conversations on the contentious debates which have occupied most critics’ investigations. Additionally, many new perspectives still can be explored to enhance the research on this poetry. Much work still needs to be undertaken on issues related to the kharjas to further increase not only how specialists, but also general medieval scholars and students of this literature, understand them. Where do we go from the crossroads at which this criticism stands? The possibilities, particularly considering theories of the 20th and 21st centuries related to desire, sexuality and language, can illuminate and be relevant to these and other medieval texts. Of course, the kharjas and the muwashshahs have yet to be contextualized systematically in the historical and cultural reality of the societies in which they were created. Much of the contentious research that polarized kharja scholarship in part inspired this dissertation. The job of a literary critic is to speculate, theorize and connect. With so much lost to history, unfortunately there are large gaps in the knowledge of the literary creation of al-Andalus. This deficiency includes the lack of possible proof of the influence this literature had on the later Western European lyric poetry, including the Galician cantigas d’amigo and the troubadour lyric. There is no direct evidence of a connection between the literature of al-Andalus and the European genres of poetry, yet many have theorized that there is a close link between them. Understandably, a large range of interpretations of the meaning of this poetry and its place in literary history have been hypothesized. Unless some new manuscript discovery miraculously comes to light, however, much of the research done and the theories espoused in this field will remain 2 speculation. Despite the fact that the arguments about the origins and influences of this poetry have been demonstrated effectively, they remain conjectures without irrefutable proof. It is particularly problematic that many anthologies of Spanish literature and lyric poetry contain only one interpretation of a select few kharjas (often García-Goméz’s interpretation, considered by some to be erroneous or highly interpretive) without their muwashshahs. Without knowledge outside of these anthologies of Hispanic literature, it becomes easy for one to categorize this literature as a simple and short lyric consisting of outbursts of love or the pain of lost love. While this is accurate to some degree, the kharjas and the muwashshahs which contain them are much more complex and represent a society vastly different from the one represented by the anthologies. The kharjas present themselves as a rich opportunity for students of literature, not only as the first poetry in a Romance dialect, but also for what they convey about the cultures and history of the Iberian Peninsula. Aspects of gender roles and conventions, societal power structures, expressions of both religious and sexual desires and an introduction to the Arab literary aesthetic are facets which can enhance the discussion of this poetry in the classroom and in scholarly venues. The notions of this poetry which have pervaded scholarship and teaching of this literature need to be corrected and modified to more accurately reflect the social reality and context of the kharjas and muwashshahs. This dissertation fills in some gaps in kharja and muwashshah research—giving a more complete picture of the themes of gender, sexuality and religion in the muwashshahs and how they reflect the society in which they were written. This 3 dissertation takes a different approach from the focus on Arabist v. Romanist hypotheses of origins and influences prevalent in the mainstream criticism of the kharjas. Instead, it concentrates on examining the muwashshahs to contextualize the kharjas within the framework of these themes. The first chapter