“I Have Mandated It to Fly to You on the Wings of My Ardent Desire”

The literary genre of letters addressed to the Prophet in his tomb (al-rawḍa alnabawiyya), hailing him and asking for his intercession in worldly and eschatological matters (wa al-tashaffuʿ bihi ilā Allāh fī l-maqāṣid al-dunyawiyya wa l-ukhrawiyya) (al-Qalqashandī), was particularly popular in al-Andalus;1 the author of the Ṣubḥ al-Aʿshā describes this genre as a speciality of the people of the Maghrib because, he writes, of the remoteness of their homeland (buʿdi bilādihim wa nuzūḥ aqṭārihim).2 The immediate motivation for the writing of such letters seems to be the inability of their authors, and of the people commissioning them, to visit the holy places of the Ḥijāz and perform the ziyāra at the Prophet’s tomb; these letters also provided an opportunity for their authors to express in a direct style their feelings of yearning at being far from Medina and the holy sanctuary of Mecca, and their love for and attachment to the Prophet, whose noble virtues and eminent qualities they praise, along with the marks of his election by God; they also express their personal worries, grievances and complaints. They seek a guarantee of baraka, but beyond this they wish for some consolation, comfort, and support in the here and now, and intercession in the next world. These letters make up a specific genre,3 one that has something in common with the literature of madāʾiḥ (panegyrics),