Kingdoms of Faith

INTRODUCTION

The front line of a “clash of civilizations”; a foreign incursion on European soil; the theater of Reconquista, crusade, and Holy War; or a land of multireligious tolerance and convivencia—the history of Islamic Spain has been recounted many times, in many ways. Typically, the narrative begins with the arrival of the commander Tariq ibn Ziyad on the shores of Christian Spain in the year 711 and his dramatic defeat of its Visigothic rulers. Under the rule of Arab Umayyads, al-Andalus—Islamic Spain—blossoms. In this period Muslims, Christians, and Jews live here in concord, turning al-Andalus into a cosmopolitan Arabo-Islamic society, and making Córdoba, “the ornament of the world,” a magnet for scholars and scientists and a model of cosmopolitan enlightenment. Shortly after 1000, the empire collapses, and al-Andalus is fought over by crusading Christians seeking to “reconquer” Spain and by puritanical Berbers who persecute Christians and Jews. As the Christians triumph, the Muslims are corralled in the kingdom of Granada, the final enclave of Islam in Spain. This endures until 1492, when the “Catholic Kings,” Fernando and Isabel, conquer it, sending its defeated king, Boabdil, into exile, bringing to a close the history of al-Andalus and ushering in an age of intolerant oppression.

What almost all these histories share is the presumption that religion was at the heart of this history—that the Muslim and Christian principalities engaged in a contest defined by their religious identity and ideology. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are seen as protagonists in an operatic history, battling it out on the stage of the centuries. Reinforcing their supposed civilizational differences, Christians and Jews are presented as “Europeans” and Muslims as foreign “Moors.” It is a perspective that invites nostalgia and moralizing, and it is appealing precisely because of its melodramatic oversimplifications.

But as history, it has serious limitations. First, the roots of Islamic Spain must be sought not in 711, or even 622, when Muhammad struck out from Mecca, but in the broader world of the Mediterranean of Late Antiquity, of crumbling empires and encroaching “barbarians.” This was an era when Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, each diverse and divided, were only beginning the gradual processes of self-definition, processes in which they remained very much entwined. Nor can the end of Islamic Spain be pegged to January 1, 1492, when Boabdil handed over the keys of the Alhambra to Fernando and Isabel. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims remained in Spain until 1614, suffering discrimination, forced conversion, and eventually, expulsion. As for the Muslim conquest of al-Andalus, it was not part of a deliberate campaign of world domination and holy war. Its causes were complex and spontaneous, and it was driven as much by opportunity as by ideology. Likewise, the ideas of reconquest and crusade were later developments and invoked only occasionally when it suited the agendas of Christian powers. The era from 711 to 1492 was not a time of unremitting religious conflict; the Muslims and Christians of the peninsula spent more time at peace than at war and as much time fighting among themselves as against each other. Christian rulers did not typically expel the Muslims from the lands they conquered but tried to entice them to remain. And for the most part they did, choosing to live in their ancestral lands as subjects of infidel kings.

As for the Moors: the word refers to the inhabitants of Mauritania, the old Roman name for the area the Arabs would call al-Maghrib (“the West”), and which includes most of what is now Morocco and Algeria. People of this region were called Mauri by early Latin chroniclers, and this word emerged in the Spanish vernacular as moro. Eventually, moro simply came to mean “Muslim” in Castilian Spanish, although in English the word took on the additional, racialized baggage of the Elizabethan-era “Blackamoor”—the dark-skinned, African outlaw. The problem with using “Moor” or “Moorish” to refer to Muslims of medieval Spain is that it implies they were foreigners and ethnically distinct from the native population. In fact, relatively few foreign Muslims came to the Iberian Peninsula. Al-Andalus became Islamic through conversion, and the overwhelming majority were of indigenous descent—they were no more foreign and no less European than the Christians of Spain.

Of course, “Spain” itself is a misnomer when applied to the medieval period. The nation of Spain and its culture of today are modern, not medieval, phenomena. If the unity Spanish national culture presumes is ephemeral even today, in the Middle Ages it simply did not exist. For this period, it is better to say “Spains” when referring to Christian-ruled principalities. When “Spain” is used in this book it refers simply to the Iberian Peninsula—what the Visigoths and their Roman predecessors called Hispania, and what the Arabs called al-Andalus (probably a corruption of the Visigothic landahlauts, or “inherited estate”). In other words, the very use of the term “Moorish Spain”—an anachronistic Anglo-American invention—invites a racialized, romanticized, Orientalized, and inaccurate view of the history of al-Andalus and of Islam on the peninsula, one that has fed misconceptions and nurtured misrepresentations of this chapter of European history. The concept of “Europe” is equally thorny. It too is a modern concept. Like Muslims, who defined their larger sphere as the dar al-Islam (“the realm of Islam”), European Christians thought of themselves as living in “Christendom,” not “Europe,” and certainly not as “Europeans.”

Sorting fact from tendentious myths and conjecture is crucial, for Islamic Spain not only is an important element in the history of the Mediterranean world, of Europe, of Islam, and of the West, but also remains of great significance today. Many politicians and public figures—and not a few scholars—continue to view the history of the West as one of a conflict between two fundamentally incompatible civilizations: a Christian (or, very recently, Judeo-Christian) one, and an Islamic one. This view exercises tremendous appeal because of both its simplicity and its self-validating quality, and it is often invoked by pundits and demagogues of all stripes as a justification for aggression and repression. For others, al-Andalus presents an idealized vision of premodern enlightenment that we in today’s supposedly less tolerant world should emulate. But this too is a mirage. In Spain itself, right-wing politicians continue to draw on the ethos of La Reconquista—a potent national myth that conveniently justifies the domination of Castile over the other regions of the peninsula, even as tourist boards promote a sanitized vision of Spain as “the land of the three religions” and of Christian-Muslim-Jewish harmony.

There are good reasons for emphasizing the importance of religious identity in this history, starting with the rather obvious fact that we refer to Islamic Spain as “Islamic Spain.” Religious identity was, in many circumstances, the most important way in which people conceived of themselves. It dictated which legal regime they came under and—in theory—whom they could marry or have sex with, the professions they could practice, their social and economic status, what taxes they owed, what clothes they could wear, the foods they could eat, and all sorts of other details of daily life. There are many historical sources, both Christian and Muslim, that present this history as one of religiously fueled conflict, beginning with the earliest Latin and Arabic accounts of the conquest and continuing through the emergence of the tradition of Saint James “the Muslim Killer” (Santiago Matamoros), the Reconquista, the legend of the Cid, and the appeal to jihad by various Muslim rulers. Many of the wars were consecrated as Crusades by the papacy, and a half-dozen military orders, dedicated in principle to fighting the infidel, were founded here. Ordinary Muslims might serve as mujahidun, stationed in fortress-monasteries that dotted the frontier zone, whereas in Christian Spain, raiding became so much a way of life that historians have characterized it as a “society organized for war.”

That said, people are far too complex to be reduced to living caricatures of their religious ideologies. Religious identity was only one means by which individuals imagined their place in the world. They saw themselves also as members of ethnic groups, subjects of kingdoms, inhabitants of towns and neighborhoods, members of professions and collectives, seekers of knowledge, customers and clients, men and women, lovers and friends. And more often than not, these bonds of association bridged or overcame affinities individuals shared on account of religious orientation. Moreover, in a society divided formally by religion, one’s rivals and competitors, whether in personal, political, or financial matters, were typically members of the same faith community; consequently, one’s natural allies were often members of other groups. Conflict was waged more within these faith communities than between them. Thus, this is also a history rife with episodes of cross-religious and cross-ethnic solidarity; of alliances and friendships, whether of kings or commoners, that were forged between the faiths; and of collaborations carried out among poets, musicians, artists, scholars, scientists, and theologians of different religions.

However, these cross-religious relationships rarely make it into the historical narrative. Part of the problem is the nature of our sources. Most of our written evidence was produced by rulers, bureaucrats, and men of religion—wealthy, privileged males, who were themselves extraordinarily invested in the notion that religious identity was the foundation of society, and who also had vested political and personal interests in portraying history as a moral struggle between the followers of the true religion (that is, their own) and everyone else. In formal terms, the authority of rulers rested on their ability to present themselves as the legitimate upholders of the divine order, and so they tended to express their agendas in the language of faith. In an era in which people generally attributed the workings of the world to the will of God, historical events were often explained in religious terms, as God’s reward or punishment.

At the same time, the chronicles and histories that historians use as their data, and that constitute much of our surviving evidence, were written or compiled many years, often centuries, after the events they describe. As a result, they are distorted by hindsight, as well as by the prejudices, ideals, agendas, memories, aspirations, and convictions of their authors. Moreover, histories were not written as education or entertainment; they were political documents, intended to support the claims of the rulers, families, or individuals by glorifying the memory of their predecessors and establishing historical precedents for their policies. Exaggeration, distortion, and invention were deployed both consciously and unconsciously by medieval writers as they set out to describe the past to justify the present.

One of the jobs of the historian, then, is to assess the biases and inaccuracies built into these sources and to attempt to uncover the reality behind the proclamations, myths, legends, errors of fact, contradictions, and carefully crafted historical fictions that make up the record. The goal is to determine what really made people tick and what forces truly shaped events—even when the details can never be definitively established. The historian should not assess guilt, apportion blame or virtue, or moralize; the aim is merely to understand. Thus, no book can claim in good faith to be the “definitive,” “true,” or “real” history of Islamic Spain; there are simply too many factors to account for and too many uncertainties clouding the past. As enlightened and self-critical as we may be, historians today are not that much less vulnerable than our medieval counterparts to bias and presumption. Whether we realize it or not, we tend to write histories that reflect and reinforce our own ideals or play to those whom we see as our constituencies.

As for the present book, it represents a “new history” of Islamic Spain in two senses. First, rather than following the well-worn storyline of the rise and fall of al-Andalus, I have set out to build a fresh narrative from the ground up and have tried, as much as the economics of publication has permitted, to get behind the scenes and examine dynamics that are often obscured but are crucial in the formation of history: the stories of women, slaves, renegades, and functionaries. Second, I have based this study largely on the tremendous amount of innovative scholarship that has been carried out in recent years, particularly by scholars from Spain, North Africa, and Europe. Our understanding of al-Andalus has been transformed by new studies of texts, archaeology, and art history, but much of this has not yet reached English-speaking readers.

And finally, there is the question of faith. Both the Muslim and Christian principalities of the medieval Spains were consciously defined by their religious orientation, and for their constituents, religious community was the primary pole around which they constructed their social identity. But it was not the only one. And for much of this history, most of the rulers—and most of their subjects—often behaved in ways that defied the mandates of their religious ideologies. So, just how faithful were they? The answer, of course, is that they were no more or less faithful or idealistic than we are. They were people burdened by imperfections and plagued by self-contradiction, people capable of both great cruelty and tremendous generosity, of selfishness and of sacrifice, and of self-serving rationalization; ultimately, they were prisoners of their bodies, their ambitions, their vanities, and their appetites. In short, they were like us, and this is precisely what makes this history worth reading today.