Hafsa al-Rakuniyya

The Granadian woman has been unique in her time for her beauty, her elegance, and her literary culture – Ibn al-Khatib.

As you already know, we love to talk about important Granadians, from many different fields and historical eras, who have made different contributions to our culture. Women's Day was recently celebrated, and for this reason, in this blog post, we'd love to tell you about a very special woman from Granada, who is very little known to history: Hafsa al Rakkuniya.

When Hafsa is mentioned, people always talk about the poet's great love, Abu Jafar; we can't deny that this relationship played a very important role in her life, but today we'd like to focus on her as an intellectual of her time. Her surname is a gentile from Rakuna, a town in the Alpujarras where her family came from, which, according to sources, was noble, wealthy, and powerful. Although it's difficult to date her birth, it is thought to have been around 1135.

Her biographers praise her beauty, as well as her culture, wit, and her ease and speed in writing poetry. She developed her intellectual activity mainly in the Almohad court of Granada; after the death of her beloved, she moved to Morocco, under the protection of the caliph of the time, to instruct princes and princesses. She remained there until her death in 1191.

Hafsa is the Andalusian poetess with the most surviving literature. Her style is characterized by its heirship to the Arabic poetic tradition. At the same time, she is able to convey her emotions with a spontaneous writing style, using plain and simple language. Here is one of her poems:

A visitor comes to your home:
With their gazelle's-like neck,
a crescent moon over the night;
Their gaze has the charm of Babylon
And the saliva of their mouth is better
than that of the daughters of the vine;
Their cheeks shame roses
And their teeth confound pearls,
May they enter, with your permission,
Or must they leave, for some reason?

*Image taken from Instituto Cervantes.