Des chamelles à l’Alhambra : l’utopie au centre des paysages poétiques d’al-Andalus
Camels in Alhambra. Utopia at the Heart of the Poetic Landscape of Al-Andalus

Summary/Abstract: Landscapes in medieval Arabic poetry are idealized, which is to say, “derealised” ones. This is a characteristic they share with Western poetic landscapes of the same period. As well as this, in Al-Andalus, these landscapes were involved in the vast operation of legitimation conducted by the Umayyad caliphs and emirs of Córdoba in the tenth century. It was indeed imperative for the Umayyads that Andalusian culture easily compete with their great eastern rivals, the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Fatimids in Cairo, and to do so, the Umayyads needed to claim their strong Arabic identity forcefully. In this sense, Andalusian landscapes are representative of the description of an ideal society, one situated in an imaginary geography, typifying the notion of utopia as construed by Thomas More. The ideal society was thus embodied by an Arab elite revolving around the center of power at the Umayyad palace, surrounded by beautiful gardens and cultivating the art of fine, harmonious living. Furthermore, the caliph, God’s representative on earth, had to evolve in a paradise-like setting. As for the imaginary geography, it meanwhile appealed to a representative part of Arabism. In order to accomplish this, descriptive poetry had to draw on two repositories of Eastern Arabic poetry: the lush irrigated and hence domesticated nature on the one hand, and the nature of arid desert areas, the cradle of Arab identity, on the other. This is the reason why al- Andalus landscapes owe so little to the natural environment of their birth, often contrary to what the Andalusian “myth” professes. We know what happened to the Arab Caliphate transplanted into Iberian land. The “Andalusian landscapes” that developed during the reign of the caliphs however lived on, making an indelible mark on the Arab-Muslim imagination.

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