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Breaking with the classical Arabic qasida which dates from the pre-Islamic period, Andalusian poets made a revolution in a field previously untouchable: the poetry of the ancients. They abandon the monorhymed poems built on a single meter and invented alternating rhymes and rhythms. The muwashshah becomes the appropriate poetic mode of expression of a society that has managed to establish relative harmony between its different social and ethnic backgrounds. The art of tawshîh is unquestionably the original signature of a hybrid civilization with various ethnic groups, particularly the Iberian, Arabic and Berber. indeed, from the middle of the 8th century, the muwashshah would constitute a kind of declaration of independence on the literary map. Despite the reluctance of medieval scholars to seriously document it, this kind of poetry would experience a significant development. This book traces such development through an examination of its structure, themes, as well as its 6 metrical form and relation to music and zajal.
About the author
Mourad El Fahli is an assistant professor of Literature and literary theory at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Sais-Fez. He received his PhD in 2012 from the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Rabat-Agdal. As for research and interest, Dr. El Fahli works mainly on medieval Andalusian.
