Narrating Muslim Sicily by William Granara;

Author:William Granara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Ibn Hamdis and his modern critics

Much as he saw in the Euphemius of two centuries earlier, Michele Amari sees Ibn Hamdis as a native son of Sicily forced into exile by dire political circumstances resulting from foreign occupation of the homeland. To recall, Amari was born in 1802 to a prominent family from Palermo. At an early age, his father, a government functionary, was imprisoned for anti-government activities, and the young Amari was forced to earn a living for himself and his family. His early education lured him, first, into the volatile politics of popular resistance to the Spanish Bourbon rule and aspirations for Sicilian autonomy, and, later, into a national movement of Italian reunification that would culminate in the Risorgimento of 1860. His banishment from Sicily (and Italy) and his long period of exile led him to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of the eminent Arabists and historians, Reinhard Dozy and Levi-Provencal, learned Arabic, and embarked upon a life-long project to study Sicilian history in both the Muslim and Norman periods.5

Amari is the first of modern historians and critics to read Ibn Hamdis’s poetry, to which he was first introduced by Dozy,6 primarily through the prism of the biographical detail, read, extracted or understood from any given qasida. In Amari’s case, his own nationalist agenda and his political and ideological conflicts drew him to situate Ibn Hamdis within the uninterrupted continuum of Sicilian history shaped by the perpetual conflict with the island’s foreign invaders and occupiers. This led Amari to read Ibn Hamdis in a highly literal fashion, setting a paradigm for future scholars by which both meaning and intent of the poem are determined by and remain strictly within the confines of the historical moment.7 It is here where the diwan of Ibn Hamdis takes on the unusual importance as a major source for the reconstruction of Muslim Sicilian history.

In 1897, Celestino Schiaparelli, a disciple of Amari, published the first modern edition of the diwan and followed it soon thereafter with an Italian translation. The edition was based primarily on the two extant manuscripts, one at the Vatican and the other at St. Petersburg, but it incorporated materials and fragments collated from other sources available to him at the time.8

Half a century later, Francesco Gabrieli (d.1991), premier Italian Orientalist best known for his work on early Islamic history, adab, and Kharijite poetry, published a full work on Ibn Hamdis (Mazara, 1948), drawing on the poetry as a reflection of his life and times. Gabrieli brings ‘Ibn Hamdis studies’ into a (more) modern phase of criticism and analysis, having himself been exposed to, and been a participant in, the remarkable advances in Arabic and Islamic scholarship of the twentieth century. The discovery of new material, the growing sophistication of manuscript editing, and the impact on modern humanities and social sciences on what had prior been a field of pure philological endeavour allowed Gabrieli to gently loosen the grip on Ibn Hamdis from Amari’s nationalist agenda and recast him in broader historical and literary contexts.

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