Andalusia and al-Andalus

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The southern third of the Iberian peninsula, and under Islamic rule from 711 the polity of al-Andalus, whose courts became the western terminus of the Arab musical world. Andalusia is where this Journey's Mediterranean corridor lands: the ʿūd, the theory written around it, the muwashshaḥ and zajal poetic forms and the nūba suite were all cultivated here between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, in Córdoba, Seville, Granada and lesser centres. Two directions of transmission follow from that, and they should not be confused. Northward, instruments of oud type entered Christian Europe, acquired frets and a new name and became the lute — a diffusion whose evidence is etymological and iconographic and whose dating is loose. Southward, after the fall of Granada in 1492 and the expulsions that followed, the living repertoire went to the Maghreb, where it is still performed. The idea that the region's later music, flamenco above all, is a direct continuation of Andalusi practice is far weaker than either of those, and this pack does not assert it.