Download PDF | Marin, Manuela - The Formation of al-Andalus, Part 1_ History and Society.-Taylor and Francis Ltd _ Routledge (2016).
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GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
Since the days of Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), generally regarded as the founder of Islamic studies as a field of modern scholarship, the formative period in Islamic history has remained a prominent theme for research. In Goldziher's time it was possible for scholars to work with the whole of the field and practically all of its available sources, but more recently the increasing sophistication of scholarly methodologies, a broad diversification in research interests, and a phenomenal burgeoning of the catalogued and published source material available for study have combined to generate an increasing "compartmentalisation" of research into very specific areas, each with its own interests, priorities, agendas, methodologies, and controversies.
While this has undoubtedly led to a deepening and broadening of our understanding in all of these areas, and hence is to be welcomed, it has also tended to isolate scholarship in one subject from research in other areas, and even more so from colleagues outside of Arab-Islamic studies, not to mention students and others seeking to familiarise themselves with a particular topic for the first time. The Formation of the Classical Islamic World is a reference series that seeks to address this problem by making available a critical selection of the published research that has served to stimulate and define the way modern scholarship has come to understand the formative period of Islamic history, for these purposes taken to mean approximately AD 600--950.
Each of the volumes in the series is edited by an expert on its subject, who has chosen a number of studies that taken together serve as a cogent introduction to the state of current knowledge on the topic, the issues and problems particular to it, and the range of scholarly opinion informing it. Articles originally published in languages other than English have been translated, and editors have provided critical introductions and select bibliographies for further reading. A variety of criteria, varying by topic and in accordance with the judgements of the editors, have determined the contents of these volumes. In some cases an article has been included because it represents the best of current scholarship, the "cutting edge" work from which future research seems most likely to profit. Other articles-certainly no less valuable contributionshave been taken up for the skillful way in which they synthesise the state of scholarly knowledge. Yet others are older studies that-if in some ways now superseded-nevertheless merit attention for their illustration of thinking or conclusions that have long been important, or for the decisive stimulus they have provided to scholarly discussion.
Some volumes cover themes that have emerged fairly recently, and here it has been necessary to include articles from outside the period covered by the series, as illustrations of paradigms and methodologies that may prove useful as research develops. Chapters from single author monographs have been considered only in very exceptional cases, and a certain emphasis has been encouraged on important studies that are less readily available than others. In the present state of the field of early Arab-Islamic studies, in which it is routine for heated controversy to rage over what scholars a generation ago would have regarded as matters of simple fact, it is clearly essential for a series such as this to convey some sense of the richness and variety of the approaches and perspectives represented in the available literature. An effort has thus been made to gain broad international participation in editorial capacities, and to secure the collaboration of colleagues representing differing points of view. Throughout the series, however, the range of possible options for inclusion has been very large, and it is of course impossible to accommodate all of the outstanding research that has served to advance a particular subject. A representative selection of such work does, however, appear in the bibliography compiled by the editor of each volume at the end of the introduction.
The interests and priorities of the editors, and indeed, of the General Editor, will doubtless be evident throughout. Hopefully, however, the various volumes will be found to achieve well-rounded and representative syntheses useful not as the definitive word on their subjects-if, in fact, one can speak of such a thing in the present state of research-but as introductions comprising well-considered points of departure for more detailed inquiry. A series pursued on this scale is only feasible with the good will and cooperation of colleagues in many areas of expertise. The General Editor would like to express his gratitude to the volume editors for the investment of their time and talents in an age when work of this kind is grossly undervalued, to the translators who have taken such care with the articles entrusted to them, and to Dr John Smedley and his staff at Ashgate for their support, assistance and guidance throughout. Lawrence I. Conrad
INTRODUCTION
Manuela Marin
THE HISTORY of the Iberian peninsula in the Middle Ages is distinguished from that of the rest of Western Europe by a fact whose significance and consequences are even today the subject of debate: the presence of what has been called, for want of a better term, an "Arab-Islamic society". Under the name "al-Andalus", this society occupied a geographic territory of varying area that gradually shrank in the course of the nearly eight centuries (711- 1492) of its historical existence.
The articles selected for this volume, in accordance with the character of the series to which it belongs, cover only the period comprising the "formation of al-Andalus", that is, the chronological stage lasting from the conquest in 711 to the apogee of Cordoban Umayyad power in the tenth century. The historical changes that came about over the nearly three centuries that make up this period are of singular importance not only for the history of the Iberian peninsula, but also for the history of the European continent and of Arab-Islamic civilisation as a whole. And although many an Arab and Western scholar have devoted their attention to this particular period-as to the history of al-Andalus in its entirety-their numbers have always been exceeded by the number of Spaniards working on an historical phenomenon that has not been easy to integrate into the "national" history of their own country.
This explains why the bulk of the articles included here are the work of Spanish authors. The bibliography at the end of the introduction reflects a similar situation, though to a somewhat lesser degree: of a total of 79 authors listed, 29 are non-Spaniards. As with any c~mpilation that attempts to be anthological in nature, the selection of works is not an easy task, and no matter how objective ov.e may hope to be, the final choice inevitably reflects personal predilection. In the present instance, the difficulty was augmented by the norm of this series, whereby chapters from books by single authors may not be included.
This will explain the absence of general studies on the history of al-Andalus or the specific chronological period dealt with in this volume. In any event, the final selection reflects the notable increase in research in recent years; eleven of the nineteen articles herein were published after 1990. This has been paralleled by general works on al-Andalus, which have seen an increase throughout the 1980s and 1990s that can only be described as spectactular. Largely unrecognised outside Spain, this growing output has been favoured both by internal factors (such as new methodologies, critical revision of traditional historiography, quantitative and qualitative growth in the input deriving from the material record, e.g. archaeology) and by external ones (greater opportunities for publication, institutional support for the holding of scientific congresses and meetings, interest on the part of regional governments in the "recovery" of their own unique local history). To a lesser but also significant degree, there has been an increase in the publication (or republication), both in Spain and the Arab world, of Arabic sources that have a bearing on al-Andalus.
The reader will have to keep this in mind, particularly in connection with the articles whose publication dates are oldest and which cite editions of texts with have since been superseded by more recent editions. Such is the case with Ibn Bassam's DhakhZra or al-Maqqar!'s Nafo al-tib, both books whose earlier editions have now been replaced by editions by IJ:tsan 'Abbas, 1 or the FatJ:t al-Andalus, whose second edition2 has rendered the first useless. To these new editions, one must add the appearance of previously unpublished texts by, for example, Ibn I:Iab1b,3 al-RushatJi or the anonymous author of Dhikr biliid al-Andalus. 5 The bibliography provided at the end of this introduction, deliberately limited to 100 titles, is intended to provide the interested reader with information to supplement what can be found in the articles selected here, although it can in no way be regarded as an exhaustive listing. In this bibliography there have been included a certain number of reference works or overall histories of al-Andalus. 6 Among these works, the pioneering effort of Reinhart Dozy is still of interest, although many of his views are naturally superseded by contemporary historiography, and it contains some factual errors due to the limited amount of sources Dozy could use in his time. Dozy's history has to be checked against the work of E. Levi-Provenc;al, for many years the standard book of reference for the history of al-Andalus up the eleventh century. 7
In recent times, Anglo-Saxon scholarship has contributed notably to the expansion of Andalusi studies, although perhaps the more influential-and controversial-work has been that of Pierre Guichard.8 It also seemed useful to include in the bibliography several titles that are representative of what might be called "regional studies" and which examine the Andalusi history of a specific geographic zone from its beginnings to its extinction.9 But the bulk of the bibliography is devoted to rounding out and expanding on the predominating themes in the articles selected for this volume. These articles reflect, in any case, points of view that do not always coincide and are occasionally opposed outright, for the intention is to offer to the reader a taste of the richness and diversity of research, not a uniform or monolithic vision. A reading of these articles will also reveal the profound changes which have taken place in Andalusi historiography, changes and new perspectives that are impossible to set forth in detail here. However, it is perhaps worth emphasising the one theme that underlies them all: the progressive surmounting of the old concept of "Spanish Islam" as the defining characteristic of al-Andalus. Also present in the terminology (one sees more and more reference to "al-Andalus" and less to "Muslim Spain"), the most recent approach to understanding the mediaeval history of the Iberian peninsula no longer considers it necessary to justify the history of al-Andalus solely in terms of its Hispanisation.
It is difficult to escape a certain deep-rooted historiographical residue, but it must be admitted that what was most characteristic of the "Orientalist" vision of the Arab-Islamic past of the Iberian peninsula (and which, paradoxically, revolved around its de-Orientalisation) can now be regarded as a historical cliche that is at best only repeated through sheer intertia. It may be necessary to deal here in some detail with this question, deeply related to the origins and development of Arabic studies in Spain and still conditioning much of what is being written today. From the beginning of what has to be considered as the "scientific" school of Spanish Arabismthat is, from the time of Francisco Codera (1836-1917), al-Andalus became its main field of study. Accompanying the colonial penetration of Spain in Morocco, a side-line of North African studies was felt to be needed, but it never properly flourished inside academic and university circles. With very rare exceptions, the bulk of the Spanish Arabists' production, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of our century, is dedicated exclusively to the Islamic past of the Iberian peninsula. Moreover, for the founders of the "school", namely Codera, his disciple Julian Ribera (1858-1934) and the latter's student Miguel Asin Palacios (1871-1944), their research was founded upon two fundamental and intertwined basic points: the importance of al-Andalus for the history and culture of Spain, and the vindication of "Spanish Islam", a different and westernized kind of Islam. Both historical conditions and ideological stands help to explain this first orientation of Spanish Arabism, which was to have a heavy influence in later developments.
As a nation, Spain was born in the struggle against Islam, and the Islamic element in the national culture was therefore rejected, despised or ignored. The study of this part of the Spanish past had indeed attracted some scholarly efforts in the centuries following the conquest of Granada in 1492, but it had always lacked the kind of standing that Classical studies held in academic circles. The Islamic period in the history of the Peninsula was widely felt as an unfortunate accident, an interlude that had interrupted the normative development from Roman times to medieval Christianity, as in other European countries. Felt as an alien intrusion into the RomanVisigothic-Christian legacy, Islam did not properly belong to the Spanish memory.
Within this framework, it is easier to understand how Spanish Arabists in the nineteenth century-and beyond-turned to the Hispanisation of alAndalus as a legitimizing tool for their field of research. When Francisco Codera was elected a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, his choice of subject for his inaugural lecture is revealing in this respect: "The Importance of the Arabic Sources for the Knowledge of the State of the Vocabulary in Spanish Languages or Dialects from the Eighth to the Twelfth Century". In this and in other works, always of a high scientific standard, and many still useful today, Codera was trying to emphazise the interest of knowing Arabic and Arab history in the Iberian peninsula for the history of Spain, in an effort to convince his colleagues in academe of the benefits to be derived from this kind of study. His disciple, Julian Ribera, took a further step.
For Ribera, the Muslims living in al-Andalus were in fact Spaniards, who happened to convert to another religion: "The Muslims in the Peninsula", he wrote, "were Spaniards, Spaniards in race, Spaniards in language, Spaniards in character, tastes, tendencies and talents." 10 "Muslim Spain" became, in this way, a more acceptable entity for academe and the world of learning in Spain. In this interpretation, the Spanish element had, in fact, dominated the Muslim component of al-Andalus, and the result of their combination was an original product, something that did not belong properly to the world of Islam, but to the history of Spain. Pride in the material remains of Andalusi culture, such as the Alhambra or the Great Mosque in Cordoba, was perfectly justified, their authors being Spaniards who happened to be Muslims, but who had preserved their true essential character as descendants from the Roman-Visigothic stock. Islam, in the Iberian peninsula, was something different from Islam in North Africa or in the East, and its most original features were due to the beneficial influence of Christianity and the Roman heritage. Mutual influences were also acknowledged, once the basic fact of the "originality" of al-Andalus was accepted and its history subsumed within the superior entity of Spanish history.
Asin Palacios, for instance, devoted much of his intellectual effort to the study of the relationships between Islamic and Christian mysticism (one of his most important books called, significantly enough, El Islam cristianizado ("Christianized Islam"), 11 is a study of the great mystic Ibn 'Arabi). The role of al-Andalus in the transmission of scientific knowledge to Europe or its influence in Christian art and institutions became favourite fields of inquiry, not to mention the question of the "popular" Arabic poetry including words or lines in Romance language (the kharjas). To conclude, al-Andalus was, for many years, studied not for what it was, but for what it has represented in the history of Spain. The reader of the articles included in this volume should bear in mind this historiographical background in order to understand the different approaches of their authors. Roughly speaking, the last twenty years have seen a reassessment of this traditionalist interpretation of the history of al-Andalus.
The image of a "Spanish Islam" is gradually disappearing from the overall picture of scholarship, and with it, the ideological stand which emphasised the Christian and Hispanic elements in these peculiarities as a way of rejecting their Islamic, Arab and Berber components. The conquest of Hispania by an Arab-Berber army in 711 is described in the Arabic chronicles (such as those analysed by Emilio de Santiago and Maria Jesus Viguera in their respective articles, Chapters 1 and 2) as the event that opened a new historic era. As befits such an inaugural moment, it was inevitable that around it there should become erected, in both ancient and modern accounts, a mythical reconstruction of the facts. 12 Even today, the very name "al-Andalus" continues to be the subject of debate, to which has been added the theory proposed by Heinz Halm (Chapter 3). The conquest of 711 marked, as noted above, the entire medieval history of the Peninsula with a character that differentiated if from the rest of medieval Europe.
The consideration of Arab-Islamic culture as profoundly alien to the real "essence" of Hispania lies at the root of the most extreme of the "continuity" theories for the interpretation of the medieval history of the Peninsula. From this perspective, nothing really changed with the arrival of Islam, which quickly adapted itself to the pre-existing realities, conserving many of them and transforming others to become a new cultural entity which had little to do with it Eastern origins. The debate between continuity and discontinuity, which still causes rivers of ink to flow, has particularly made itself felt in recent years in connection with questions such as kinship structures, rural settlements and the transformation of cities. This is because what seems undeniable is that, no matter how many elements of continuity between the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods one may discern, al-Andalus meant the appearance in the Iberian peninsula of new economic and social structures that rested on their own particular ideological framework.
In this new society, which came into existence little by little, Eastern models of tribal association and kinship predominated, both within the elites that ruled the country and in the colonial settlements that had a specifically military character. In a great urban nucleus like Cordoba, and in the more truly Islamised world of the 'ulamii ', ethnic origin soon began to count for less than individual merit. Diverse views of all this can be seen in the articles by Miguel Cruz Hernandez, who does not hold with the persistence of tribal structures in al-Andalus (Chapter 4), Eduardo Manzano (Chapter 5) and Luis Molina (Chapter 6).13 Among the new elements incorporated into the peninsular population beginning with the conquest of711, perhaps none has aroused so much scholarly controversy as the Berbers. The article by Pierre Guichard included in this volume (Chapter 7) marked the start of a reconsideration of the history of the eastern and south-eastern regions of the Peninsula, which proposed a strong Berber presence in these parts of al-Andalus, though this theme had not been entirely absent in earlier research.l4 Nevertheless, Guichard's contribution of greatest historiographical novelty, often based on the archaeological record,15 has proved to be the linking of population centres of Berber origin with specific styles of settlement and occupation of the territory in the eastern regions of the Iberian peninsula. However, to what extent this model of settlement may have existed in the rest of al-Andalus is something still needing to be proved.
The establishment of Islam and the juridical system derived from it gave rise to the appearance, in al-Andalus just as in other regions of the Muslim world, of special statutes for Christians and Jews. For the period of the formation of al-Andalus, it is the Christians (the Mozarabs) who have attracted the greatest attention among scholars (for example, one of the many articles by Mikel de Epalza on this subject has been selected for this volume, Chapter 8), attention which is perhaps not proportional to the documentary material available on these religious minorities and which, in very specific instances, has been underlain by strong ideological motives. 16 The voluntary martyrs of ninth-century Cordoba continue to be a focus of attention, 17 while in the region of Valencia there have sprung up opposing views on the very existence of Mozarabs and a supposed Mozarab language; once again, strong political nuances are present in certain cases, linked to the inter-regional struggles of contemporary Spain. 18 The articles by Alfonso Carmona (Chapter 9), Sonia Gutierrez Lloret (Chapter 10) and Leopolda Torres Balbas (Chapter 11), in different ways and from very diverse angles, deal with the question of the urban development of al-Andalus. 19 Here the theme of continuity between Late Roman and Islamic urban structures, and the extent to which there was a complete break between the two, crops up once more.
It is in this area where resort to archaeological documentation is indispensable, above all in those instances where there is a lack of textual information about urban settlements, 20 though the Arabic sources have also been profitably exploited in this respect. 21 It does seem clear that the "central" power exerted control over the hinterland from the cities, and that the urban nuclei operated as the centres from which the process of Islamisation (involving more than just the religion proper) spread outward. It is no accident that the bulk of the new Andalus1 cities were created between 822 and 961, a period which coincided with the expansion of the Umayyad state out towards its periphery, its attempt to bring those areas under definitive control (an attempt which had its ups and downs) and the spread of Arab-Islamic social structures. Naturally, all this was accompanied by the exercise of military and fiscal control, with Cordoba finally gaining the upper hand after the crisis at the end of the ninth century.
Maribel Fierro, using as her starting point an earlier work by Manuel Acien, 22 reflects on this crisis in some depth in her article in this volume (Chapter 12); the economic aspects, linked to the circulation of currency, are examined by Alberto Canto (Chapter 13).23 While the study of the cities has benefited from a long tradition of research, the world of rural society has only recently begun to feature in studies on al-Andalus. The article by Manuel Aden (Chapter 14) included in this volume analyses the fortified settlements in the south of al-Andalus within a broader view that includes an analysis of the global social changes experienced throughout the territory. However, the bulk of the recent studies that deal with the rural sphere24 have focused on the eastern and south-eastern regions of the Iberian peninsula, and as a result the conclusions that have been drawn cannot be generalised, for the time being, to the territory of al-Andalus as a whole. 25
In the Arabic sources, the fields and cities of al-Andalus are inscribed within the cartography of political power and military strategy. From an early time the territorial division of the country was organised around the existence of frontier zones, a question analysed by Jacinto Bosch (Chapter 15), who believed that the thaghr acquired a pronounced political reality in the tenth century. 26 From Cordoba, the Umayyad emirs held a sway over these frontier regions that was often tenuous or even non-existent; the crisis at the end of the ninth century shows how the internal tensions in Andalusi society in part led to centrifugal movements which affected nearly all of al-Andalus. This crisis has been interpreted as one result-among others-of the ongoing attempt to construct an "Islamic" state that began, primarily, in the reign of 'Abd al-Ra}:tman II (822-52).
It was then that a state apparatus began to be created, an apparatus that the Arabic sources describe in great detail and one of whose instruments, the ~ii~ib al-madina, is scrutinised by Joaquin Vallve in this volume (Chapter 16). It was also 'Abd al-Ra}:tman II who initiated the gradual removal of the ruler from the sight of his subjects, thus establishing a system of ceremony which is analysed by Miquel Barcelo (Chapter 17); at the apogee of the U mayyad caliphate, the caliph had become a presence that was invisible and at the same time omnipresent in the manifestation of his power. The Umayyad state apparatus functioned by means of a complex bureaucracy and an army situated on the fringes of society. This explains the fragility of a system which had to confront, especially from the eleventh century on, other societies that were "organised for war," as was the case of the Christian kingdoms in the northern part of the Peninsula. 27 Both in Cordoba as well as in other lesser cities, the administrativebureaucratic complex was superimposed on very diverse social groups, with some of whom, such as the 'ulamii', areas of control were divided up. Outside this sphere, and thus scarcely present in written sources, were the common people, artisans and merchants, though there is some record of this sector of the population through the material traces of its activities or documentation of a juridical nature.
The extent of the former is revealed in the studies on trade with the East by Juan Zozaya, an illuminating example of which is included in this volume (Chapter 18).28 But the world of the written word-one that has therefore been, at least in part, preserved to the present day-pertains particularly to the scholars, who from an early time committed the collective memory to paper. Thanks to this fact it is possible to reconstruct, through the rich field of Andalusi biographical literature, not only the process by which the Islamic sciences were transmitted, but also other social phenomena such as kinship relations and family structure within these social groups, as demonstrated by the article by Marfa Luisa Avila that is included m this volume (Chapter 19).29 The swelling interest, both inside and outside Spain, in the history of alAndalus and the Andalusis is yielding an ever-growing bibliography of which this volume can offer only a sample.
The diversity of interests, methodologies and ideological orientations which this history encompasses enriches its interpretation, as the selection of articles that is presented here makes apparent. Even so, it is obvious that one must flee from an eclecticism which blindly accepts any one of the possible visions of al-Andalus, given that this historical fact, like many others, has been made to serve the particular interests of all those who have studied it. Having passed from fact into historical, cultural or social myth, al-Andalus has at one extreme come to represent all that is alien and hence inimical, while the opposed extreme sees it as the model for a way of life which exists only in the present-day imagination of those who formulate it. In the meantime, the historian endeavours to reconstruct, over the foundation of the preserved documentary evidence, something of what Andalusi society may have been. It is hoped that the present volume will contribute to an understanding of that task.
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