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THE AL-ANDALUS QUARTET: PART TWO
CÓRDOBA / QURTUBAH   950 AD / 339 AH

From Madinat al-Zahra
and the City of Córdoba, the roads
to the Renaissance are renamed and
traveled, patrolled and protected, routed
and projected by the Umayyad Caliph 
and the frail conviviality of constituent 
cultures, which like the white light of
day and the lace veil of night, are somehow
connected in the shadows of evening and
the gray skies of dawn but in fundamental
opposition define one another
An astute Sephardic rabbi
said the culture of Islam in Al-Andalus
is like a cataclysmic flood that abuses
the land, rearranges its features, nourishes
its soil, eventually disappears through 
evaporation and runoff, leaving  folksong
and legend to chronicle its passing
The transmission and enhancement of
Classical knowledge, philosophical
erudition, the patient diplomacy within
the righteous framework of an arrogant 
tolerance are like a brilliant sunrise in the
medieval world but even the sanguine
observer hears the clashing of swords in 
the far mountain passes and the whispers
of betrayal at clandestine meetings and
knows that, bright as it is at this high tide
of impact, the culture is fading, not like
day into night but like the moment of 
noon into the moment thereafter, that 
sunlight and flood, both powerful and
magic, are receding in concert, slowly,
inexorably, through the Taifa mosaic,
the slow-motion shattering of a 
stained-glass window shining colors and
light in a thousand directions, then fading
through evening toward midnight and
darkness, illuminated by stars that, 
in spite of their beauty, will later be
remembered as light years away   

Emanuel Carter

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