Happily ever after
In “Andalusia of Love”, the latest album from Lebanon’s master oud player, Marcel Khalife (above) weeps for a lost medieval kingdom. He sets to music the verse of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, an old friend and one of the Arab world’s great writers. The result is a brooding lament for al-Andalus, the fallen realm of Islamic Spain often romanticised for its ethnic pluralism and religious tolerance, a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in relative harmony for centuries. Whether there is more myth to this than fact doesn’t matter; the album has mesmerised Lebanese who crave an end to the sectarianism that divides their country and fans the region’s wars.