Who actually was the Caliph al-Ḥakam II? What interests motivated him? What were the events which marked his existence? At this conference, Eduardo Manzano Moreno will be showing us his approach to the great Umayyad caliph’s personage through a detailed portrait of his character. Based on data from the available sources, this conference delves into the biography of this historical figure. However, it is possible to recognize the features of a person made of flesh and blood who lived in recognizable places within the current topography of Cordoba. Above all, we will see how he left a deep imprint on the development of the Umayyad dynasty.
 
The purpose of the series ”Semblances of Cordoba: The Umayyad period in the first person” is to introduce the personages (Muslims, Jews and Christians) who lived in Umayyad Cordoba, focusing on each character’s life story and, through it, providing a recreation of the social group to which that person belonged, as well as the context in which he or she lived.
 
Eduardo Manzano Moreno is a researching professor at the CSIC Center for Human and Social Sciences. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Oxford, Chicago and St. Andrew’s. His work has focused on the history of Al-Andalus and on the social implications of History as a field of study and the profession of historians. He has led numerous research projects which revolve around these two topics, about which he has also had a large number of articles and book chapters published both inside and outside of our country. His works include The Caliph’s Court: Four years in the Córdoba of the Umayyads (La Corte del Califa. Cuatro años en la Córdoba de los Omeyas, published by Crítica, 2019), translated into English and German and Conquerors, emirs and caliphs: the Umayyads in the formation of Al-Andalus (Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus, Crítica, 2007). His new book, Diverse Spain: Keys to a Plural History (España Diversa. Claves para una Historia Plural), will be published next April.
 
*Photo: Layout map of Cordoba from the tenth century, in Lévi-Provençal (1957). Muslim Spain: Up to the fall of the Cordoba caliphate (711-1031 CE), in MENÉNDEZ-PIDAL, R. (dir.), Historia de España, Madrid.

The biography of Ṣubḥ, wife of Caliph al-Ḥakam II and mother to Caliph Hišām II, is a fine example of the forms of power available to women in the milieu of the Al-Andalus sovereign. Through what is known about her life, which is quite a lot when compared with information on other women from the same time and place, we can see how gender was such a decisive factor conditioning the position of a woman like Ṣubḥ within the dynastic structure of the Umayyads. From her origin as a slave, possibly brought up in the palace, Ṣubḥ knew how to leverage her status as the spouse and mother of heirs to the throne in order to exert effective political power when her son was still underage. In achieving this, she relied on significant supporters within the castle, but in the end she was unable to win out in her final confrontation with the most important of them all, Al-Mansour. Ṣubḥ’s fate shows how complex it wa for Moorish women to act in arenas which, as in other cultures, were not designated for them, but to which they had access under certain historical circumstances.  
 
Manuela Marín
A researching professor at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid) until her retirement in 2011, she has dealt with the social and cultural history of Al-Andalus. She has placed special attention upon the history of women in Al-Andalus and has authored Mujeres en al-Ándalus, Vidas de mujeres andalusíes (Women in Al-Andalus, Lives of Moorish Women), and other monographic studies. Her most recent publication on women’s history, in collaboration with Rachid El Hour, is Memoria y presencia de las mujeres santas de Alcazarquivir (Marruecos). Transmisión oral y tradición escrita ([Memory and Presence of Holy Women from Alcazarquivir, Morocco: Oral transmission and written tradition], University of Salamanca, 2018, English translation, 2022).
 
*Image: “Bote de Zamora”. The so-called Jar from Zamora is a gift received by Subh, as the inscription indicates, for the birth of the eldest son of Caliph al-Hakam II (Photo by Luis García, CC BY-SA 3.0).

Like Shakespeare, Fernando de Rojas or Hippocrates himself, Cordoba physician Abū l-Qāsim Khalaf ibn ʿAbbās al-Zahrāwī is one of many authors whose fame has been veiled by his own work, in this case the Kitāb al-Taṣrīf li-man ʿajiza ʿan al-taʾālīf. This title can be translated as “the book that gives full powers [over medicine] to one who is unable [to access] the works [of medical treatise writers].” Other translations are possible, but all coincide in expressing that the author meant to write a comprehensive manual that could take the place of reading medical literature. The Taṣrīf is the most important medical manual written in Al-Andalus and one of the most outstanding in the history of Arab-Islamic medicine. As is well known, it stands out in history for its section on surgery. The scarcity of biographical data and the equivocations of unreliable chroniclers had led many to believe that al-Zahrāwī died at the beginning of the eleventh century, perhaps in 1013.

A few years ago (in 2020), the Kitāb al-Talkhīs was published, a treatise on medicines written by Marwān ibn Jānah (died circa 1050). He was a well-known Jewish physician who had been educated in Cordoba and had emigrated to Zaragoza in the early eleventh century due to the dangers of living in a city plagued by civil war. The work’s publishers (Gerrit Bos and Fabian Käs) verified that Book 29 of the Taṣrīf contained summaries of large sections of the Talkhīṣ, and that it was al-Zahrāwī who had copied Ibn Jānah, and not the other way around. The aforementioned publishers hypothetically dated the writing of the Taṣrīf between 1020 and 1030. The new data supports old hypotheses. For instance, a reliable biographer (Ibn al-Abbār) claimed that al-Zahrāwī was the teacher of Toledo physician Ibn Wāfid (1007/8-1074-5), this was not fully believed, because it was thought that al-Zahrāwī had died in 1013. However, this simple piece of information also supports a second important hypothesis: al-Zahrāwī may have written a treatise on agriculture that appears in two manuscripts attributed to a certain Abū l-Qāsim ibn ʿAbbās “al-Nahrāwī.” This new information does not change our belief about the Taṣrīf, which can still be regarded as the pinnacle of medicine developed in Cordoba throughout the tenth century, under the auspices of the Umayyads.

However, the new information also invites us to revisit al-Zahrāwī as a figure in order to better understand his role in the history of science and medicine in Al-Andalus. The “new al-Zahrāwī” appears before us one millennium later as a man who lived in a transitional period which was as politically convulsive as it was intellectually fertile. It is a time in which one era reached its peak, that of the construction of a Moorish scientific culture under the Umayyads, and another began, that of the maturation of the legacy under the Taifa kings in the eleventh century. This second era is considered by many to be the “golden age” of science in Al-Andalus, and al-Zahrāwī was probably one of its main promoters.

Miquel Forcada
Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, co-editor of the journal Suhayl, Journal for the History of Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilisation and a member of what is known as the “Barcelona School of Arab Science History,” created by Professors Juan Vernet and Julio Samsó. He has carried out many studies on Arabic scientific texts focusing on various topics, especially the history of scientific ideas, the socio-cultural contexts of scientific production and the relationship between science, medicine and philosophy. On medical authors, he has published studies such as Ethics and ideology of science: The Doctor/Philosopher in Al-Andalus (Almería: Ibn Ṭufayl Foundation, 2011); “Didactic poems on medicine and their commentaries in medieval al-Andalus and Western Islam,” Suhayl 18 (2020-21), 165-204; “Bronze and Gold. Al-Fārābī on Medicine,”  Oriens 48 (2020), 367–415; “From Alexandria to Cordoba: Medicine according to Ibn Rushd and the Arab-Islamic tradition,” Asclepio. Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 72/2 (2020), 1-15; “The Reception of Galen after Avicenna (Eleventh–Twelfth Centuries)”, in Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Barbara Zipser (eds.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2019, 227-243.

*Image: Illustration of medieval Muslim surgical instruments belonging to the physician Abulcasis (eleventh-century medical encyclopedia: Kitab al-Tasrif). Abulcasis, also known as Abu’l Qasim al-Zahrawi - Turner, H. “Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction,” University of Texas. ISBN 0292781490 p. 146