Download PDF | (The New Middle Ages) Simon R. Doubleday, David Coleman (eds.) - In the Light of Medieval Spain_ Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past-Palgrave Macmillan US (2008).
235 Pages
FOREWORD: “WELCOME TO
MOORISHLAND”
Giles Tremlett
I
t is September 2006 and my e-mail is filling up with the normal mixture
of news bulletins, invitations, and unwanted junk. Amongst the invitations, are some of the latest, often heated, comments from online opinion
columns in the debate over a new charter of self- government for Catalonia,
approved three months earlier, its historical references going back to 1359.
There is also an invitation to the presentation of a new book by New York
University’s H. Salvador Martínez on the co-existence of Muslims, Jews,
and Christians in thirteenth-century Spain that has come to be known
since the 1940s as convivencia. Finally, in the unwanted junk category,
comes an e-mail from the town of Buitrago del Lozoya, fifty miles north
of Madrid, which boasts a walled city first built by Muslims. It invites me
to attend the town’s medieval fair. This, bizarrely, is to be themed around
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or, more accurately, the blockbuster
films being made of the story; it is to be complemented by fictional elves,
orcs, and hobbits visiting from the Middle Earth.
All three e-mails have something to say about Spain’s relationship to
its own medieval past. They do so in different and overlapping ways,
but they give an idea of the multiple forms in which the medieval resurfaces in contemporary Spain. On the one hand, there is the “historicalpolitical” form, of which the Catalan charter is a shining example.
This
is a country that differs viscerally over much of its own history. “Few
Europeans have disagreed so much about their own country as Spaniards,”
warns Henry Kamen. “The difference of opinion, centering both on culture and on politics, dates back to at least the eighteenth century and is still alive today. It affects the way Spaniards look at their past and write
about themselves, their history and their literature.”1
Spanish politicians
have proved themselves quite ready to seek ammunition for contemporary debates from real or imagined versions of the medieval period.
Accompanying this conspicuously politicized element of the presence of
the medieval, on the other hand, lies the “historical-cultural” dimension, including the academic and encompassing a genuine interest in the
country’s heritage. But let us turn first to the “theme park medieval,”
embodied in its Tolkienian version at Buitrago.
The theme park version of medieval Spain—based on commercially
motivated and sometimes false, idealized, or dramatically skewed notions
of history—is there to make euros out of the past. It ranges from some
film and television depictions of that period to the hard-nosed schemes of
tourism departments in countless Spanish cities, provinces, and regions
for whom medieval Spain is, first and foremost, a marketing tool.
If it is
true that politicians and, to a certain extent, historians themselves can be
accused of shaping the medieval past in response to their own interests,
in theme-park-medieval Spain almost anything goes. From the “City of
Three Cultures” in Toledo to the “Routes of al-Andalus” or the newly
denominated “Route of El Cid,” exploiting the past is seen as a key way
of tapping into the tourist sector that accounts for 11 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
One of the main manifestations of this process is what I call
Moorishland, the semifictional version of Spain’s past where exotic offerings of orientalism-with-tapas are combined with “nostalgia” tourism for
Sephardic (Spanish-rite) Jews, and where Charlton Heston’s El Cid meets
the sun-loungers of the Costa del Sol beaches. Spain’s Moorish history
is happily raided to provide a narrative that will attract visitors, above
all foreigners. Granada provides one of the most conspicuous examples.
For many years the Alhambra, and the narrow, winding streets of the
Albaicín district were the sum of its Moorish offering to tourists. Now
the streets of the Albaicín boast couscous restaurants and gift shops selling Moroccan knick-knacks, as if they had always been there. While
the restaurants serve typically Moroccan food, the gift shops actually
import much of their material directly from Morocco. On one recent
visit, I found the shops of Granada stocked with exactly the same goods
as those I had seen being sold in the square in Chefchaouen, at the start of
the Rif Mountains in Morocco, just a few months earlier.
I was delighted.
The lamps I could not fit into my suitcase in Morocco were easily stowed
in the back of my car.
Granada’s transformation into Moorishland is relatively new. A
decade ago, at least one of the same shops that was now selling Moroccan knick-knacks had been devoted to selling Christian religious figures,
crucifixes, and estampas of the Virgin Mary. One travel writer puts it like
this:
On some streets of the Albaicín you’d be forgiven for thinking that the
Moors are still holding sway here. The Calderería Baja is lined with
Moroccan-style tea shops offering mint tea and honey pastries. These
establishments, along with book stores selling Arab texts and shops stocked
with Moorish-style crafts, are a sign of the Granadinos’ renewed interest in
their Islamic past. There is even a hammam, an Arab public bath offering
an atmosphere which recalls Moorish times, among trickling fountains
and dazzling tile work.2
Recent reinventions of medieval Spain are not driven exclusively by
financial factors. In the kitsch, colorful “Moors and Christians” festivals
of Valencia and Alicante provinces, for instance, other elements are at
play. Anthropologists would probably point to the ritualization of an
ancient conflict or the playing with concepts of the Moorish “other.”
For the casual observer, it is also obvious that some very Spanish characteristics are at play—a love of ritual, the reaffirmation of community,
and, simply, that very Spanish pastime of having fun in large groups.
And the only medieval event that many granadinos themselves seem keen
on celebrating is the Toma de Granada, the capture of Granada in 1492,
a fiesta that takes place every January 2 in a revindication of the city’s
Christian status. Amongst those who turn up to the celebrations every
year is a small group from the ultra-right Falange party. A group of
intellectuals and artists, including Amin Maalouf, Yehudi Menuhin, and
Ian Gibson, have tried to have the fiesta changed, but mayors of all political colors have refused to budge. “If they want to wear turbans, then
they should come to the Three Kings parade,” said one mayor, referring to the Epiphany celebrations when three people dressed up in Arab
costume play the part of the magi and hurl handfuls of boiled sweets
into the crowds.
The fiesta illustrates a decidedly ambiguous relationship
with the past. “Islam can be as profitable a thing as any other religious
or political phenomenon. But it looks somewhat ridiculous when politicians try to exploit our history with the message ‘visit Andalusia and
Granada, a beautiful Moslem and Jewish land, but without any Jews or
Moslems in it,’ ” Tomás Navarro, a journalist from Granada, observes in
his La Mezquita de Babel.
3
But the fact that this “beautiful Moslem and Jewish land” is often
primarily a convenient source of profit is clearest at the headquarters of
the Grupo Al-Andalus, a business set up to exploit Spain’s Moslem past
for tourism. The group has opened hammam-style baths in Granada, Madrid, and Cordoba and is moving into tearooms, restaurants, and
hotels. In Madrid’s case there is evidence that the renovated baths being
run by the company may actually be Roman in origin. That, I suspect,
does not market quite as well. Tourists, and Spaniards themselves, think
of Spain in terms of al-Andalus not—as they might in Britain—in terms
of the Romans; far better, then, to make your baths Arabic. The narrative of convivencia in its most idealized form is especially valuable to
the marketers. I once asked the tourism councilor at Segovia’s city hall
whether she believed in convivencia. “Not really,” was her reply. “Except
when it is useful.” That same week Segovia was playing host to parties
of tourists who had come for a special day of events to mark the city’s
Jewish past. As reflected by the Web site “reddejuderias.com” (which
belongs to the Red de Juderías de España), the Sephardic legacy in fact
provides especially rich pickings. In November 2006, the Web site featured a “three cultures” medieval fair in Cáceres, courses in Sephardic
cooking for entrepreneurs and restaurateurs in Ávila, courses on Jewish
history for people in the tourism business in Córdoba, and information
on an exhibition dedicated to kosher wine and medieval Jewish Spain by
a museum in La Rioja. Despite its rather obvious attempts to promote
tourism, the Red de Juderías states that it is “a non-profit public association with the goal of protect the urban, architectonic, historical, artistic
and cultural Sephardic Heritage of Spain.”
This in turn brings us to the “historic-cultural relationship” of
the Spanish with the surviving expressions of the medieval: in art, for
instance, and especially in architecture. The architectural presence of
the medieval—the proliferation of medieval cathedrals, convents, and
monasteries and the few remaining synagogues and mosques—is pervasive.
In 2005 workmen renovating a building in Porto, northern
Portugal (medieval Portugal and Spain are often hard to differentiate)
discovered a walled-up sixteenth-century synagogue, allegedly one of
those built to cater for the tens of thousands of Jews who flooded across
the Portuguese border after they were expelled from Castile. “The house
of worship was hidden behind a false wall in a four-story house that
Agostinho Jardim Moreira, a Roman Catholic priest, was converting
into a home for old-age parishioners,” the Associated Press news agency
reported at the time:
Father Moreira, a scholar of Porto’s Jewish history, said that as soon as the
workers told him of the wall, “I knew there had to be some kind of Jewish
symbol behind it.” His hunch was confirmed when the wall came down
to reveal a carved granite repository, about five feet tall, arched at the
top and facing east to Jerusalem. It was the ark where the medieval Jews kept Torah scrolls. Decorative green tiles in the ark further confirmed
the age of the ark when experts dated glazing to a method used in the
16th century.4
The cultural impact of medieval architecture is impossible to measure
and difficult to overestimate. Antoni Gaudi (1852–1926), the modernist Catalan architect whose Sagrada Familia cathedral is still under
construction in Barcelona, was deeply inspired in both an architectural
and a religious sense by the Cistercian monasteries of the Catalan countryside. Equally, at the time of writing a novel based around the construction of Barcelona’s Santa María del Mar church—La Catedral del Mar, by
Ildefonso Falcones—is the country’s bestselling novel. In this way, the
past enters the realm of the familiar.
As the remarkable survival of a marrano community in the Portuguese
hill-town of Belmonte indicates, the medieval past also continues in
more human forms.
This crypto-Jewish community survived right
through to the 1980s, when they were “rediscovered” by mainstream
Judaism. Subsequently, rabbis from elsewhere have tried to persuade
them both to observe more orthodox forms of Judaism; in the 1980s,
many of the adult men were circumcised. One of the most curious religious legacies of the medieval period is the survival of a Spanish Roman
Catholic community that defines itself as Mozárabe. Based in the city of
Toledo, and with a community of some 2,000 families spread around
Spain and the world, the Mozarabs consider themselves the true heirs of
the Christian tradition bequeathed by the Visigoths and surviving among
the Arabized Christian communities under Moslem rule. They even
have their own religious brotherhood (cofradía) in Toledo, established
in 1966, the “Ilustre y Antiquísima Hermandad de Caballeros Mozárabes de
Ntra. Sra. de la Esperanza de San Lucas.” Isolated from Rome during the
years of Moslem domination, Toledo’s Mozarab community held on to
liturgical elements that had developed separately in the Iberian peninsula in the fifth to eighth centuries. Under the Moslem rulers who took
over the city in 711 they were allowed to continue worshipping, being
divided into six parishes. When the city was conquered by Alfonso VI
of Castile in 1085, they found that many of their practices had been
banned by Rome more than two centuries earlier. Eventually a compromise was reached and the six Mozarabic parishes were permitted to
hold on to their liturgy.
The so-called Rito mozárabe was conserved in
these parishes through to the beginning of the sixteenth century. By
this time, however, the community and the liturgy appeared in danger of extinction. Cardinal Cisneros then appeared as savior, creating
a committee that researched the manuscripts and produced both the Missale Gothicum mixtum and the Breviarium gothicum. A Mozarabic chapel
was also created at the cathedral. The six parishes still formally exist,
though only four now have buildings and the Mozarab parish priests
now have personal, rather than territorial, jurisdiction over their widely
scattered parishioners. The community has held on to parish registers
and tazmías with censuses of Mozarab families.5
In 1992 a new HispanicMozarab Missal was published, after nine years of investigation spent,
especially, recovering lost material. Pope John Paul II celebrated a mass
in the Vatican using the Missal. “We believe it was the first time that
the Mozarab Mass had been celebrated by the Pope,” the Archdiocese of
Toledo proclaims.6
Yet this apparent medieval “survival” is surely not politically innocent. It seems probable that the Church’s continued support of the
Mozarab “community”—from the age of Cisneros, though the Franco
era to that of John Paul II—reflect a sustained attempt by Christian Spain
to stretch its narrative back through the period of Muslim domination
to the Visigoths (just as the modern-day Muslim Spanish converts discussed in Lisa Abend’s and David Coleman’s essays later in this volume
also seek to stress continuity). This reintroduces us to the hotly contested “historical-political” dimension of the medieval Spain in contemporary political discourse, exemplified by the new Catalan charter of
self-government, the Estatut, approved by referendum in June 2006. The
charter’s Preamble begins by stating that Catalonia has been shaped over
the course of time through the energy of many generations, traditions,
and cultures that found in Catalonia a land of welcome.
The Catalan
people, it continues, have maintained a constant will to self-government
over the course of the centuries, embodied in such institutions as the
Generalitat, created in 1359 by the Catalan Corts (representative estate)
held that year in Cervera. But political autonomy for Catalonia does not
go down well everywhere, and once again, the arguments can turn on
history. Catalan politicians were indignant when, in 2003, the head of
Spain’s Constitutional Court, Manuel Jiménez de Parga, claimed that in
the year 1000 his native Andalusia had boasted fountains of colored or
perfumed water while other self-proclaimed “historic communities” (by
which he meant Catalonia and the Basque country) in Spain “did not
even know what washing themselves at the weekend was.”7
Elsewhere, too, the debate over Spain’s regional tensions frequently
provokes recourse to the medieval. In my book Ghosts of Spain, I told
the story of Iñaki, a history teacher in the Basque country, who found
a pupil handing in an illustration of the battle of Roncesvalles complete
with Basque soldiers carrying the Ikurriña, the Basque flag inspired by
the Union Jack in the late nineteenth century.8
The cultural subtext is an unconscious, but telling, misuse of history and symbols: “The
men who invented the Ikurriña (Sabino Arana, founder of the Basque
Nationalist Party) were right in their insistence that a Basque nation/
people existed in the Middle Ages. Here they were, centuries earlier,
carrying their flag as they saw off yet another invader.” A radical Basque
separatist rereading of the battle of Roncesvalles can also be found in
the pages of Por qué luchamos los vascos, written by a prisoner from the
armed separatist group ETA—Fernando Alonso Abad. The same desire
we see today to deny the existence of a Basque people was already patent in those years, Alonso writes in relation to the account of the battle
of Roncesvalles given in the Chanson de Roland, which claims it was
Muslims, not Basques, who carried out the attack. The book devotes
several pages to the attempt to prove that the medieval Kingdom of
Navarre was, in reality, a Basque state. This kingdom is seen by Alonso,
and presumably by others prepared to use violence in order to fight for
a separate Basque nation, as “the moment of greatest expansion of the
Basque state.”
The death of Sancho III, king of Pamplona, is presented
as “the origin, along with other factors, of the state of partition and
national domination that the Basque country is living through, eight
centuries later.”9
It is, though, the memory of medieval al-Andalus that continues to be
most politically contentious, especially in a context shaped by the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and by those of “11-M,” the
commuter train bombings that killed 191 people in Madrid on March 11,
2004. “If you take the trouble to focus on what Bin Laden has written
and stated in recent years,” former prime minister José María Aznar of
the conservative Partido Popular (PP) declared in his inaugural lecture at
Georgetown University, “you will realize that the problem Spain has with
Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism did not begin with the Iraq Crisis”:
You must go back no less than 1,300 years, to the early eighth century,
when a Spain recently invaded by the Moors refused to become just
another piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its
identity. This Reconquista process was very long, lasting some 800 years.
However, it ended successfully. There are many radical Muslims who continue to recall that defeat, many more than any rational Western mind
might suspect. Osama Bin Laden is one of them.10
Two years later, at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank,
Aznar would denounce as a “stupidity” the Alliance of Civilizations
between the West and the Islamic world being promoted by the socialist government of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero. Wading into the
polemic surrounding references to Islam made by Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg, Aznar maintained that double standards were being
applied when judging Islam and the West. “Many people in the Muslim
world are demanding an apology from the Pope for his speech. I have
never heard a single Muslim ask me for forgiveness for having conquered Spain and maintained their presence in Spain for more eight
centuries,” El País newspaper reported him as saying.11 Mr. Aznar’s
views were diametrically opposed to those, including the Moslem
converts discussed in Lisa Abend’s essay in this volume, who take a
strongly inclusive view of Spain’s Muslim past.
As in the case of his
Georgetown lecture, Aznar’s remarks at the Hudson Institute provoked
angry debate, in which his ideological opponents also invoked the
experiences of medieval Spain. “Aznar says that no-one has asked his
forgiveness for the invasion of 711, but I say that he, Aznar, who appears
to be a direct descendent of sons of Witiza, who betrayed the legitimate
power of Don Rodrigo by handing people over to the Saracens, has
never asked me for forgiveness,” a professor of history and geography
at the University of Valladolid, Marcelino Flórez, wrote in reference
to the Visigoth leaders who lost control of Iberia to the Moslems.12 On
the same opinion page in El País, Manuel Ángel García Parody, a highschool teacher from Cordoba, invited Aznar to attend “my modest little
class at a high school in Cordoba, if he does not mind the school name
of ‘Alhaken II.’ This ‘Moslem occupier’ owned a library of 400,000
volumes at a time when Christian Europe was hardly a shining example
of culture and knowledge. . . . Al-Andalus is an essential part of this previous plurality that is my country, of this country about which he talks
so much but appears to know so little.”13 The novelist Juan Goytisolo
was moved to irony, asking who Aznar thought should be asking forgiveness given that neither Tarik nor Musa, nor any of the Umayyads,
were still around. Perhaps it should be Morocco, or the Arab League
and the Islamic Conference, he mused.14
Amidst such highly publicized polemic, the academics who study the
cultural dimensions of Spain’s medieval past can hardly hope to escape
the shadow of contemporary politics. Faced with this fact, what is the
proper role of the intellectual engaged in research on medieval Spain?
Is a traditional commitment to scholarly “detachment” appropriate in
times of high tension, or rather, as Simon Doubleday will suggest in his
“Introduction” to this volume below, do such claims to objective “neutrality” themselves raise difficult ethical questions? Scholars of medieval
Spain are indeed confronted with a political minefield. Yet—perhaps
uniquely in Europe outside the Balkans—they also find themselves in
the privileged position of working in an area that actually has some real
impact on political debate.15 And that is so whether they like it or not.
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