For Iberian medievalist
María Rosa Menocal, the Christian occupation of Toledo in 1085 marks
a significant historical moment: it was the decisive halfway point in what
would become known as the "Reconquest," the Christian kingdoms'
long campaign to dominate the peninsula whose conquest by the Arab Muslims
began in 711. In spite of this seemingly polarized Christian-Muslim struggle,
the mid-point of the "Reconquest" marks a period of cultural
hybridity and the "seamless marriage of presumed opposites." The
Christian Church of San Román, for example, constructed after the
taking of Toledo, nevertheless bears glorified Islamic images and Arabic
script, revealing the extent to which the lines of this cultural conflict
were profoundly blurred.
Medieval Iberian identity has long fascinated Menocal,
particularly the role that religious belief plays in cultural identity.
Like the Church of San Román,
another topic of Menocal's investigations has been the jarcha, a form of classical
Arabic poetry, within which a new form of verse begins to emerge known as the
moaxaja, textual interludes composed in "romance," considered an
early form of Castilian. Though jarcha and moaxaja together constitute a single
poetic form, they have been separated and funneled into discipline-specific
study in a way that mirrors and perpetuates the "perennial war" of
the cultures embodied in the notion of the "Reconquest."
Menocal approaches the 12th century with what many
would consider a "heterodox" point
of view. The real importance of the "reconquest" of Toledo by Castilians
is, for her, not that it is the end of their Arabization, but rather the beginning.
Such an idea runs counter to the mythology of the Castilians as a people who,
ensconced in the north of the peninsula, had been unconquered and untouched
by Arab culture, and, as such, styled themselves the rightful reclaimers of
the land invaded by the Muslims.
In stark opposition to this mythology, Toledo--the
vital center of the nascent Castilian empire--would develop a three-culture
landscape that
Menocal considers "inimical
to the role of champions in the anti-Islamic cause." Under the 13th-century
rule of Alfonso X, the Wise, who created a School of Translators to render
in Castilian and Latin countless scientific, philosophical, and literary texts
from the Arabic, Toledo came to have a bona fide "culture of translation" that
also generated a highly successful export industry of learned texts to the
West.
The concept of strengthening sovereignty through the
appropriation and adaptation of other cultures was not an idea inherited
from the Germanic
Visigoths—whom
the Arabs had conquered—though the Castilians were anxious to claim
them nominally as their principal cultural ancestors. Instead, this
concept came from the
Umayyads, for whom poetry and cultural integration had been fundamental
aspects of empire.
Abd al-Rahman, survivor of the massacre of the Umayyads
in Damascus by the Abbasids, fled to the West, beginning anew in Córdoba. The Great Mosque
of Córdoba is a testament to the values of his culture that privileged "different
kinds of translation and conversion": in addition to traditionally Arabic
forms, the mosque also incorporates Romanic and Visigothic elements, including
the Visigothic horseshoe-shaped arches that would later, ironically, come to
be known as the foremost icon of Islam in Spain.
Umayyad Córdoba gave rise to a syncretic civilization in which Jews
and Christians alike spoke Arabic as their native tongue and lived in Arabized
society as their maternal culture. Cultural documents from the period defy
our notions of paradigmatic cultural opposites. The "Beatus" manuscripts,
for example, which purport to decry Islam, are detailed in a painting style
that is "unambiguously" Arab. A depiction of one of the Horsemen
of the Apocalypse, a Christian defeating the snake of Islam, would nevertheless
seem Muslim to the unknowing eye.
This hybrid Arabized culture absorbed indigenous groups
in multi-ethnic acculturation, leaving a Christian minority with an apocalyptic
sensibility. Alvarus, for example, was an outspoken critic of Islamic culture
and urged Christians to reject the Arabic language and Arabized culture
alike. Many Christians, however, considered their Arabized culture to be
their own and rightfully Christian. These "mozarabs" ("wanna-be-Arabs")
maintained their Christian faith without renouncing their love of Arabized |
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Cordoban culture.
Though "Reconquest" history
would ultimately "sanctify" the mozarabs as its resistance
fighters, Menocal urges that they be seen as representative of
a more "complex cultural truth" and a crucial component
of the cultural hybridity that led Toledo to be called the "Jerusalem
of the West" in the 12th and 13th centuries.
This "golden age" of cultural harmony and production in the 11th and
12th centuries was made possible by declarations of political and religious independence
in preceding years. In the 10th century, the Umayyads proclaimed themselves the
true Caliphate of the Muslim world; the Jews, at around the same time, set themselves
apart from the Eastern rabbis in Baghdad. At the time of the Muslim schism, Córdoba's
post of foreign minister was occupied by a Jew, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, attesting
to the degree of intercultural commingling that flourished in Arabized Umayyad
culture.
Civil war would soon rip the Caliphate into
23 independent city-states, each opposed to the next, paving the
way for rich cultural production, on the one
hand, and political strife, on the other. Ismael ibn Nagrila, known in Hebrew
letters as Samuel the Nagid, was the Jewish general of his Muslim city-state's
armies who is also known as the innovator of a new Hebrew lyric form. Menocal
emphasizes that such innovations were made possible by a process of "cultural
symbiosis" in which Jewish codes of propriety were mitigated by the
admixture of an Arabized sensibility, which distinguished clearly between
poetic expression—even
that of illicit love—and piety.
The invasions of the orthodox Muslim Almohads
and Almoravids, however, destabilized this culture of religious
tolerance and cultural hybridity. The majority
of the Arabized Jewish population took refuge in Castilian territory, particularly
in
Toledo, enriching the cultural fusion that was then thriving in that center
of translation and philosophical Arabic studies.
Toledo's cultural hybridity is evident in the
affinities of its philosophical thinkers from the three faiths,
Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, and Aquinas, who
Menocal argues had more in common with each other than they did with
those of their
own religions who insisted on fundamentalist monotheistic belief. The
tomb of Fernando
III of Castile, father of Alfonso X, reflects this cultural cohabitation:
emblazoned on its sides are inscriptions in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and—the
newcomer at
the time—Castilian.
Menocal traces this cultural pluralism to the "adab" ("belles-lettres")
tradition of the Islamic world. Alfonso X's 13th-century Toledo was very self-consciously "new-Umayyad" in
its vision of empire as a translatio imperi achieved through the absorption of
multiple cultures.
Once again, this imperial model is in marked
contrast to the rigid concept of the "Reconquest," an understanding of cultural dynamics that resonates
more with the enemies of this hybrid culture, defenders of the "pure identity" of
all faiths. The story of the Umayyad legacy is entirely another than such fundamentalism,
and, for Menocal, bears the all-important message that "culture should always
be able to trump ideology."
Ibn 'Arabi of Murcia, a 12th-century Sufi,
is the author of the following love poem that, in Menocal's eyes,
sums up the tolerant and inclusivist
cultural values of the Umayyad tradition:
A white-blazed gazelle
Is an amazing sight,
Red-dye signaling,
eyelids hinting,
Pasture between breastbones
And innards.
Marvel,
A garden among the flames!
My heart can take on
Any form:
Gazelles in a meadow,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Kaaba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of a Torah,
The scrolls of the Qur'an.
I profess the religion of love;
Wherever its caravan turns
Along the way, that is the belief,
The faith I keep.
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