[Editor's Note: The Muslim expansion reached Spain in
711 when Tarik bin Ziad conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula.
Spain (Arabic al-Andalus) became one of the centers of Muslim
civilization, and the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba reached a peak
of glory in the tenth century. Spain remained at least partially
under Muslim control until 1492 when Granada was conquered by
Ferdinand and Isabella, soon followed by the expulsion of
unconverted Moslems and Jews and the infamous Inquisition. Muslims,
Christians and Jews lived in al-Andalus in an atmosphere of
tolerance, with concerns concentrated on enhancing learning, the
arts, sciences and trade. Cordoba became one of the most
sophisticated cities in Europe at that time. However, despite the
fact that "al-Andalus" existed in one form or another for nearly
eight centuries, it is largely obscured from view because of
present emphasis on political and ideological narratives rather
than cultural history.]
Mandated Arab Tolerance
[…] God's universe, in al-Andalus, had three principal and
interlocking features which are at the heart of its importance for
us, and which were in its own time at the heart of that culture's
extraordinarily vigorous well-being: ethnic pluralism, religious
tolerance, and a variety of important forms of what we could call
cultural secularism-secular poetry and philosophy-that were not
understood, by those who pursued them, to be un- or anti-Islamic.
Of course, all three are inherently possible in Islam. One might
even say they are inherently mandated by Islam. But few Islamic
polities have done it as well as al-Andalus did, nor for as long,
nor with greater long-term impact and dazzling results. . . .
[T]he Muslims of al-Andalus were striking in their ethnic
diversity. The leadership and much of their sometimes imaginary
ancestry were Syrian; most of the foot-soldiers were
first-generation, immigrant Berbers; and the inhabitants of the
Iberian peninsula, from whom within a few generations the majority
of the Muslims descended, in part or in whole, were ethnically no
different from those who remained Christian: Celto-Iberians and
Romans and Visigoths. There were also substantial communities of
Jews who had arrived in Iberia with the Romans and who had been
notoriously abused and even enslaved by the last of the corrupt
Visigothic governments. The Jews were certainly not the only group
in the eighth century optimistic that the Muslims would be more
benign rulers than the Visigoths had been. The number of Muslims in
Iberia grew exponentially during the next several hundred years not
because more "Arabs" came to live there, but because the original
inhabitants of the peninsula converted to the dominant faith in
overwhelming numbers.
The unconverted Christians and Jews, called the dhimmi, of
al-Andalus, were thus not very different ethnically from their
brothers and neighbors who did convert; and soon enough they were
not very different in other crucial ways, since Christians and Jews
were thoroughly and mostly enthusiastically Arabized within a
relatively short period of time. The Andalusian Christians were
even called the Mozarabs or must'arab, or "wanna-be-Arabs" and
there is a wonderful Latin lamentation from Alvarus, a
ninth-century churchman of Cordoba, complaining that young
Christian men can barely write decent letters in Latin but are so
in love with Arabic poetry that they can recite it better than the
Muslims themselves.
Identity, here as in the rest of medieval Europe, was a very
complex thing and many people did not shy away from embracing what
would seem impossibly contradictory to others-to Alvarus, for
example, or to us moderns, nurtured from the Renaissance on to
believe that harmony and unity and coherence are good and advanced
things.
One of the least appreciated features of Islamic culture, that
vital part of it that comes directly from the poetry-loving and
word-worshipping desert culture of the pre-Islamic Arabs, is the
way that from the beginning it embraced the possibility of
contradiction-as, I believe, poetry-centric cultures are bound to
do. F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said that the test of a
first-rate mind was the ability to hold two contrary ideas at the
same time.
By that measure, which I think is essential for there to be true
religious tolerance and the sort of cultural vitality that can come
from that, Andalusian culture, and by extension much medieval
European culture, was first-rate indeed. There are dozens and
dozens of wonderful examples of this, little-known because we tell
the story as if they, like us, were striving to be unified
creatures: ergo, Arabs spoke Arabic, religious people were pious
and would not have cultivated erotic poetry, and Christians spent
all their time crusading against the enemy.
The Golden Age of the Jews
Let me tell you a story to try to debunk some of this. It is the
story of the Golden Age of the Jews. Not "A" golden age but "The"
Golden Age, and its first chapter, if we tell the story right, is
in Mecca. The story explains not only why that amazing synagogue
(Figure 2) was built in Toledo but also why the wealthy and
educated nineteenth-century Ashkenazy Germans who settled in New
York sometimes built synagogues that look like mosques. It all
makes sense, but only if we begin with poetry. Much of the history
of the stunning poetry of the pre-Islamic period . . . is lost in
the desert sands, but stunning shards do survive of an oral poetic
tradition of great complexity and refinement. The poems are usually
referred to as odes or, more revealingly, as the "suspended" or
"hanging" odes, a curious expression from the most telling anecdote
about them. Whether it is historical or apocryphal, the anecdote
recounts that the many Arabian tribes held an annual poetry
competition when they congregated in Mecca. The winning poems would
be embroidered in gold on banners and then hung on display at the
ancient shrine, that impenetrable black rock at the heart of the
city.
Perceived as the house of God, that mysterious black rock would
eventually become the symbolic heart of the new religion as well,
the Ka'aba that pilgrims still circumambulate in Mecca and toward
which Muslims pray. When Muhammad came in from the desert and stood
in that town pronouncing the revelation he had received from God,
he was a Prophet whom God had instructed to "recite" (the opening
words of the Qur'an and "Qur'an" itself mean
"Recitation"). But he was also conspicuously a part of that oral
tradition, with a highly developed reverence for the power of
poetic language.
Muhammad's arrival at the heart of pagan Mecca to preach, to recite
verses, many of them powerfully lyrical and hermetic, was an act
that in and of itself had eloquent resonance, that was clearly a
part of that public poetic tradition that had hung banners
embroidered with poems in the village square. The love of the
language itself was a key part of that pre-Islamic Bedouin culture
that first received and shaped the new religion. These desert
warriors were also poets (and great lovers of poetry) of
extraordinary delicacy and sentimentality. And, as the story of the
hanging odes illustrates, nothing was prized more highly than
language itself, the inevitably complex and contradictory language
of poetry; nothing was more worthy of being turned into gold and
placed at the center of Mecca itself. Until, that is, Muhammad's
uncompromising monotheism stripped that pagan place of its idols,
but, perhaps incongruously, left what might have been the most
powerful idol of all, poetry itself. Poetry, both pre-Islamic
poetry, and afterward, poetry that was from the
Islamic period but was still uncompromisingly secular, not only
survived the coming of Islam but flourished. Indeed, the
pre-Islamic odes were collected by Islam's first
generation of scholars and then canonized as the only hermeneutic
key capable of
unlocking the linguistic treasures of the Qur'an.
The extraordinary political, economic, and social well-being of the
Jewish communities of al-Andalus was enabled by the very generous
interpretation of the dhimma-the mandate that the other "Peoples of
the Book" be protected-by the Umayyads, and after them, by
what we might call the neo-Umayyads, the competitive city-states,
Christian and Muslim alike and not aligned at all by religion, that
replaced the caliphate. These political factors are well known and
invariably cited as the keys to the spectacular cultural success in
virtually every area that justifies the title "golden" for the
period, although why it was that the Andalusian Muslims understood
the dhimma in ways that seem extravagant is not much talked
about. But in any case, the post-Solomonic revival of Hebrew as a
language for secular poetry, which is the earth-shaking
transformation of Jewish culture unique to that time and place,
cannot be understood merely as the result of progressive social
policies and most of all cannot be understood without understanding
that first-rate poetic culture that was Arabic. The centrality of
Arabic poetry in the life of all educated men in
al-Andalus meant that the educated Jewish community came to know it
and write it and in some profound way covet it, because it was so
at odds with their own relationship to Hebrew, with which they had,
for hundreds and hundreds of years, a dried-out, formal, purely
liturgical relationship. Pious Muslims could recite the Qur'an in
God's own sacred language, but for the Muslims God did not hoard
His language or keep it locked up in His temples, and so those same
Muslims could also do a thousand different things in Arabic.
Most of all, they could read and write and sing love poetry. God,
it turned out, had a first-rate mind Himself, and perhaps not only
tolerated but enjoyed contradictions, didn't even mind being made
love to in the same language that you might use for your lover. Any
more than He minded-the Jews learned this too then-that his good
servants in Baghdad wanted to speak that impossibly rational and
unbelieving language-philosophy-that had been invented by the
Greeks. The Abbasid caliphs thus devoted extraordinary time and
energy and money to making Greek into Arabic, to making Aristotle
too a vital part of the happily inconsistent conversations of the
Muslims.
The Richness of Contradictory Identity
The profound Arabization of the Andalusian Jews was due in great
measure to those contradictory, first-rate values of Arabic culture
itself, and to the especially generous acceptance of paradox in
al-Andalus. Tolerance of "others" is one thing, and a very good
thing indeed, but the effects of taking pleasure in contradiction
within one's own identity can be even richer. It became possible to
be a pious Jew who could recite a pre-Islamic ode or a homoerotic
poem or take the peripatetic tradition seriously, in great measure
because pious Muslims did it. The community of Jewish intellectuals
and leaders absorbed and came to believe in the fundamental moral
of the story: internal tolerance of contradictory identity is the
basis of a superior and first-rate language and identity. And so it
was that the Andalusian Jews began, in the first part of the tenth
century, to cultivate Hebrew as a language that could transcend the
devotional and theological uses to which it had been limited for
time nearly immemorial.
For the first time in a thousand years, Hebrew was brought out of
the confines of the synagogue and made as versatile and
ambidextrous as the Arabic that was the native language of the
Andalusian Jewish community. Almost miraculously, Hebrew was once
again used as the language of a vibrant and living poetry, what we
call secular and vernacular, because the immensely successful Jews
of al-Andalus decided that their God and His language too should be
great enough, first-rate enough, to transcend prayer, to not mind
sharing the language of erotic love. Why should Hebrew too not be
the vehicle for contradictory ideas? It was because devout Jews had
learned to love the same heterodox love poetry in Arabic that pious
Muslims loved to recite that it became possible to read a Biblical
text like the Song of Songs with its full compliment of erotic
charges, and even to decide that what had once made Hebrew great
was precisely that ability to write poetry that not only lay
outside the synagogue, but that might well contradict the teachings
of the synagogue. A new Age of David was brought into being, and in
one of the hundreds of remarkable poems of al-Andalus, the Jewish
poet Ismail Ibn Nagrila even says it aloud: "I
am the David of my Age."
That David of his age was also, by the way, the Jewish vizier of
the Muslim city of Granada at the turn of the eleventh century, and
for two decades the enormously successful military leader of its
armies. We know about his exploits, and thus about Granada's
victories against other Muslim cities, from various sources but
especially from the poetry he wrote. Ibn Nagrila is mostly
remembered by his formal title, the Nagid, for he was also leader
of the Jewish community of Granada. It was he, a first-generation
refugee from Cordoba at the time of the disastrous fall of the
caliphate, who almost immediately began building a substantial
castle on the hill that the Jewish community had settled. Samuel
the Nagid laid out a new and far fancier place for the Jews living
on that hill, part fortification and part cultural show of force;
and after him, his son would expand it decoratively, laying out
elaborate gardens on the adjacent grounds. But little remains of
their eleventh-century buildings, the palace and gardens built by
two generations of Cordoban Jews in exile, almost certainly out of
the Cordoban conceits that had created the Great Mosque and the
fairy-tale-like gardens of the caliphal palatine city of Madinat
al-Zahra, almost certainly in the Umayyad style that was
loved, and missed deeply. Some believe, but others do not, that the
unique fountain in the Court of the Lions is a survivor from those
original Jewish palaces. But nothing is sure because palace and
gardens alike were thickly, spectacularly built over, layer upon
layer, until they became the fabled Alhambra of the Nasrids, the
last Muslims of Spain. Eventually it would directly inspire the
most gorgeous synagogue of Christian Spain, where it is not so
strange, after all, to see verses from the Qur'an on the
walls.
Destroyed Harmony
Even in 1492 it might all have come out differently. Isabella was a
direct descendant of the Castilians Peter the Cruel and Ferdinand
III and Alfonso the Wise, all of whom had lived and reigned and
prayed in their very first-rate capitals of Toledo and Seville
where God had no problems with Arabic on the walls or with Jews as
counselors. On the first of January, Isabella marched up that hill
of Granada first settled by the Jewish vizier of Muslim Granada,
dressed in what the chronicles call "Moorish clothes" and
accompanied by a husband arranged for her by her own Jewish
advisers, many of whom walked up that hillside with her. The
Capitulation Agreements she signed, in the gorgeous main reception
rooms of the Alhambra- which she took over as her own casa
real and in which she would live-incorporated the same sort of
generous dhimma that Andalusians apparently expected in principle,
a guarantee of religious freedom for the Muslims of Granada. The
tragic events of the rest of that year, which make all of these
things painfully ironic, should
not seem to us inevitable and long-sought, as we are taught, but
rather as they seemed to those who lived through them: radically
incomprehensible. For this catastrophic event the Muslims had no
useful analogue, and thus no great consolation. But the Jews did,
and the last day of their expulsion was carefully made to coincide
with the anniversary of the destruction of the temple, the 9th of
Ab, which that year happened also to be the day in early August of
1492 that Columbus left the port of Palos. When he landed in the
New World, his official translator was a Jew, presumably by then
"converted," who spoke Arabic to the no-doubt baffled Tainos in
Cuba. I am a descendant of that conversation […]
Many of the refugees from the catastrophe-the evitable, not the
inevitable catastrophe-of 1492 in Granada, must have been reassured
as they sailed into Istanbul, into the extraordinary port that is
visible from here, across the water, to see that the old first-rate
God lived here, that His Church had been made over not too many
years before with lovely, paper-thin minarets. Hagia Sophia, the
heart of Eastern Christianity, was transformed in 1453 into a
mosque, and an iconic mosque at that. The Ottomans also made a new
home for the Jews, who arrived with their Haggadahs (one of
which was recently re-rescued from the barbaric shelling of the
Oriental Institute of Sarajevo) and their fifteenth-century
Spanish, which their children speak to this day; and many of the
Andalusian values in Islam found refuge and appreciation here too,
including the extraordinary boatload of love poetry in Arabic that
had for so long been the pride and joy of so many
Spaniards-Andalusians, Sephardim, whatever we call them-for whom
the language of the poetry you recited, and the name of God in your
prayers, and the clothes you wore, and the science you believed in
did not have to "harmonize" with each other and could even argue
with each other and violently disagree and still be loved and
authentic.
Reprinted by permission of the author and Yale Law
School.