[Sca-cooks] Here is something of interest from the NY Times.

[Huette von Ahrens]

Was the Islam of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
 
NY Times, Published: September 27, 2003
 
GRANADA, Spain - A dispenser of iced lemonade
sits invitingly by the door of
the newly whitewashed building - hospitality for
summer visitors coming to
the first mosque built in Granada in over 500
years.
But looming over the freshly planted garden,
seeming to quiver in the
furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra,
a 14th-century Muslim
fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything
this mosque is not: ancient,
battle-scarred, monumental. It seems at once a
reminder of lost glories and
a spur for their restoration.
It may also inspire darker sentiments. For it was
from the Alhambra's
watchtower that Christian conquerors unfurled
their flag in 1492, marking
the end of almost eight centuries of Islamic rule
in Spain. Less than a
decade later, forced conversions of Muslims
began; by 1609, they were being
expelled.
That lost Muslim kingdom - the southern region of
Spain the Muslims called
al-Andalus and is still called Andalusia - now
looms over far more than the
new mosque's garden. And variations of "the
Moor's last sigh" - the sigh the
final ruler of the Alhambra supposedly gave as he
gazed backward - abound.
For radical Islamists, the key note is revenge:
in one of Osama bin Laden's
post-9/11 broadcasts, his deputy invoked "the
tragedy of al-Andalus." For
Spain, which is destroying Islamic terrorist
cells while welcoming a growing
Muslim minority (a little over 1 percent of
Spain's 40 million citizens),
the note yearned for is reconciliation.
The sighs have also included a retrospective
utopianism. Islamic Spain has
been hailed for its "convivencia" - its spirit of
tolerance in which Jews,
Christians and Muslims, created a premodern
renaissance. Cуrdoba, in the
10th century, was a center of commerce and
scholarship. Arabic was a conduit
between classical knowledge and nascent Western
science and philosophy. The
ecumenical Andalusian spirit was even invoked at
this summer's opening
ceremony for the new mosque.
That heritage, though, can be difficult to
define. Even at the mosque, the
facade of liberality gave way: at its conference
on "Islam in Europe," one
speaker praised al-Andalus not for its openness
but for its rigorous
fundamentalism. Were similar views also part of
the Andalusian past?
The impulse to idealize runs strong. If Andalusia
really had been an
enlightened society that combined religious
belief with humanism and
artistry, then it would provide an extraordinary
model, offering proof of
Islamic possibilities now eclipsed, while
spurring new understandings of the
West. In Spain, that idealized image has even
been institutionalized. In
Cуrdoba, a Moorish fortress houses the
Museum of the Three Cultures. There
was once a time, the audio narration says, when
"East was not separated from
West, nor was Muslim from Jew or Christian"; that
time offers, it continues,
an "eternal message more relevant today than ever
before." In one room,
statues that include the 12th-century Jewish sage
Maimonides; his Islamic
contemporary the Aristotelian Averroлs; and
the 13th-century Christian King
Alfonso X are illuminated as voices recite their
most congenial
observations.
A more scholarly paean is offered in "The
Ornament of the World: How
Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of
Tolerance in Medieval
Spain,"(Little, Brown, 2002) by Maria Rosa
Menocal, a professor of Spanish
and Portuguese at Yale University. Ms. Menocal
argues that Andalusia's
culture was "rooted in pluralism and shaped by
religious tolerance,"
particularly in its prime - a period that lasted
from the mid-eighth century
until the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 1031. It
was undermined, she
argues, by fundamentalism - Catholic and Islamic
alike.
But as many scholars have argued, this image is
distorted. Even the Umayyad
dynasty, begun by Abd al-Rahman in 756, was far
from enlightened. Issues of
succession were often settled by force. One ruler
murdered two sons and two
brothers. Uprisings in 805 and 818 in
Cуrdoba were answered with mass
executions and the destruction of one of the
city's suburbs. Wars were
accompanied by plunder, kidnappings and ransom.
Cуrdoba itself was finally
sacked by Muslim Berbers in 1013, its epochal
library destroyed.
Andalusian governance was also based on a
religious tribal model. Christians
and Jews, who shared Islam's Abrahamic past, had
the status of dhimmis -
alien minorities. They rose high but remained
second-class citizens; one
11th-century legal text called them members of
"the devil's party." They
were subject to special taxes and, often, dress
codes. Violence also
erupted, including a massacre of thousands of
Jews in Grenada in 1066 and
the forced exile of many Christians in 1126.
In fact, throughout Andalusian history - under
both Islam and Christianity -
religious identity was obsessively scrutinized.
There were terms for a
Christian living under Arab rule (mozarab), a
Muslim living under Christian
rule (mudejar), a Christian who converted to
Islam (muladi), a Jew who
converted to Christianity (converso), a Jew who
converted but remained a
secret Jew (marrano) and a Muslim who converted
to Christianity (morisco).
Even in the Umayyad 10th century, Islamic
philosophers were persecuted and
books burned. And despite the Cуrdoba
museum's message, Maimonides and his
family fled Muslim fundamentalism in
Cуrdoba in 1148 when he was barely in
his teens. Averroлs was banished from
Cуrdoba about 50 years later.
Tolerance may have left less of a cultural mark
than intolerance: the
historian Joel L. Kraemer has suggested that in
Andalusia, a sense of
precariousness inspired mysticism, esoteric
teachings and a "prudent
dissimulation" before Islamic superiors.
And what of Andalusian cultural interchange? Ms.
Menocal cites the ways
Islamic styles appear in Spanish synagogues (one,
in Toledo, even
incorporating Koranic inscriptions) and in the
14th-century Christian palace
the Real Alacazar in Seville. But far from
exhibiting convivencia, these
resemblances display the power of a culture as
dominant as American popular
culture is now: it is imitated even if otherwise
opposed.
None of this, though, reduces the impulse to
idealize Andalusia. One reason
may be that it looks so good given what followed.
In the 1391 pogroms in
Christian Spain, for example, an estimated
100,000 Jews were killed, 100,000
converted and 100,000 forced to flee - a prelude
to the 1492 expulsion of
all Jews and the 17th-century expulsion of all
Muslims. In comparison, many
societies might resemble paradise.
But there was also something intrinsically
astonishing about Andalusian
culture. A visitor feels that instantly in its
surviving buildings. They,
too, invite idealization, but their power has
little to do with notions of
tolerance or liberality.
In the great mosque of Cуrdoba, for
example, begun in the eighth century,
the geometric effects are breathtaking. Cascading
matrices of arched stone,
which once framed thousands of worshippers, lead
the eyes outward toward the
ever-receding edges of perceptible space. Later
Islamic styles retain that
sense of enclosure and complexity: filigreed
ornamentation surrounds arches
and windows, shaping the inner world as much as
framing the outer one.
But these varieties of Islamic style, far from
reflecting a humanistic
vision, suggest a world governed by the rigors of
the intellect and the
strictures of law. That world, whether in a
mosque or a palace, presumes
submission and declares mastery. It also seduces,
for within its
all-encompassing bounds, playful ornamentation
and speculation take flight.
But the individual is not the focus of attention.
The position or status of
the individual is. This is quite different from
the humane ideal so often
attached to Andalusia's name. The outcome is not
a version of tolerance,
though at its best it can offer a version of the
sublime. The viewer is
absorbed in a formal world that overwhelms,
inspiring awe with intricacies
that seem beyond comprehension.
The Alhambra is a monument to the Andalusian
sublime. It is a pillared
paradise, calmed by the murmur of fountains. The
throne room, dazzling with
mosaics of sunlight and filigree, is crowned with
a wooden model of the
Islamic heavens.
But the Alhambra is hardly a model for
contemporary aspirations. It does not
frame the world; it divides it. It is both a
fortress and a palace,
thrusting a grim, forbidding face outward and an
ornamented countenance
inward. Its aggressive facade and precious
interior are irreconcilable. It
was the last Muslim redoubt in a Christian realm,
an embodiment of the
Moor's last sigh.
And when this monument to a culture's grand,
expansive dreams and its quest
for reflective purity finally fell, the
Christians understood the message in
their own way. In 1492, the year of its fall,
Queen Isabella and King
Ferdinand triumphantly met in Alhambra's halls
and there committed
themselves to both expansion and exorcism: they
sent Columbus away on his
voyage and expelled the Jews from Spain. The
resulting sighs and
satisfactions are still being sorted out.
 
 

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Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they 
shall never cease to be amused.

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