Ibn Khafaja

'Ibn Khafajah (إبن خفاجة) or Abu Ishaq Ibn Ibrahim Ibn Abu Al-Fath Ibn Khafajah (1058-1138/9) of Alzira was one of the most famous poets of Al-Andalus during the reign of the Almoravids.[1] He was born in 1058 in Alzira (Arabic: جزيرة شقر) near Valencia where he spent most of his life.[1]

He developed nature poetry to a great level of sophistication.[2] His poetry includes a few panegyrics, e.g. to Yusuf ibn Tashfin whom he praised out of thankfulness that he had saved Al-Andalus from chaos by retaking the region of Valencia from the Spaniards after the Conquest of Valencia in 1109.[3] During the occupation of the surroundings of Valencia by the Spaniards (ca. 1100) Ibn Khafaja had fled the city to North Africa.[3] He remained umarried but had many friends[3] and lived to be over eighty.[1]

According to Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Khafaja demonstrates, in some of his poems a revolutionary attitude to language, using a vocabulary of great originality, which she describes as "warm and sensuous, obsessed with human intimacy, turbulent and conscious of the violence of life around him in a war-ridden country, awed by nature and eternally mystified both by its beauty and by its permanence vis-avis human mutability."[2]

Composer Mohammed Fairouz set three poems of Ibn Khafajah to music in a cycle of vocal chamber music written for the Cygnus Ensemble.[4]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Samuel G. Armistead, E. Michael Gerli (ed.), Medieval Iberia, an Encyclopedia, 2003, entry "Ibn Khafaja"
  2. 1 2 Salma Khadra Jayyusi, "Nature poetry and the rise of Ibn Khafaja," in: Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), The legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994, p. 381
  3. 1 2 3 Arie Schippers "Ibn Khafaja (1058-1139) in Morocco. Analysis of a laudatory poem addressed to a member of the Almoravid clan," in: Otto Zwartjes e.a. (ed.) Poetry, Politics and Polemics: Cultural Transfer Between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, p. 14
  4. Moore, Thomas (September 12, 2010), Mohammed Fairouz: An Interview, Opera Today, retrieved 2011-04-19

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External links

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