María Rosa Menocal
 

 María Rosa Menocal is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. This is the text of a lecture given at the closing dinner of the Middle East Legal Studies Seminar (MELSS), Istanbul, Turkey, May 9, 2000. These remarks were all adapted from material in Menocal's book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown and Company, 2002). 

 The story [of al-Andalus] as we conventionally hear it begins in 711 with the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar, but that is the wrong year to remember. If you tell the story not as a foreign invasion but rather as the foundation of a new polity in a new land, the foundational years are really 750 and then 755-56. Armies had crossed the strait and settlers settled nearly the whole of the Iberian peninsula beginning in 711, but that first generation of Muslims in medieval Europe was, unsurprisingly, mostly made up of outlanders: frontiersmen who had little notion of anything other than being at the furthest outer reaches of a civilization--the Maghreb, the "Wild West"--whose center was months' travel away, in Damascus.

 But in 750 a dramatic revolution occurred in Damascus. The ruling family--the Umayyads, who for a hundred years had been the caliphs, heirs to the Prophet himself--was not only overthrown but brutally massacred by the Abbasids. One plucky young scion of the royal family managed to escape and elude capture for five years, although he was being hunted by the unforgiving Abbasids. Like most or perhaps all new regimes, the Abbasids felt a powerful urge to create their own legitimacy, breaking from the past they were replacing. They wanted no trace of the older caliphate--indeed, they even moved the capital itself, abandoning glorious but distinctly Umayyad Damascus and moving the center of the Islamic world east to Baghdad. Abd al-Rahman, the prince who was the single Umayyad survivor, miraculously escaped by going west, to the farthest frontier of the then-young and inchoate empire to find refuge among his mother's people, the Berbers. But by the time he got there, many of these tribesmen had settled across the strait from their ancestral North African lands. Abd al-Rahman decided he too would find a new home in those territories already called al-Andalus. In 756, with barely a whimper of opposition from the man who believed himself the emir, the governor, Abd al-Rahman moved into the old city of Córdoba and declared it the new House of the Umayyads, the legitimate continuation of the ruling family that the Abbasids thought they had exterminated and replaced. Here, on the banks of the Guadalquivir--the wadi-al-kabir or "big river"--there took possession of the consciousness of this new place a bitter rivalry with Baghdad's claim of descent from the Prophet and the first caliphs.

 Once again we are victims of that anachronistic habit of telling history looking backward, as if while it happens it is inexorably going toward its inevitable outcomes. Among the many things about the centuries-long presence of Islam in Europe that are obscured by this, by the fact that the center of Islam was not permanently moved to southern Europe, are all the ways in which the Andalusians thought they were the real thing. Beginning with that first, triumphant, Anastasia-like young man, an Umayyad who believed the Abbasids were illegitimate and murderous pretenders, al-Andalus was in their own minds the authentic continuation of the cultural and religious traditions of Islam. Within a very few years of establishing himself in Córdoba and resigning himself to permanent exile, Abd al-Rahman began to build the most visible symbol of the survival of the Umayyad polity and of the rise of Andalusian Islam - the Great Mosque of Córdoba, which, unlike that in Seville, has mercifully survived the early modern period's virulently anti-medieval biases. Few mosques in the Islamic world speak so eloquently, or so loudly, to that sureness of being at the center of God's universe.

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. The Christian Alcazar and the Jewish synagogue we have just looked at are two of its most visible tokens, but they are far from unique.

 So let us look at these core qualities and values that so shaped medieval culture. Beginning but not ending with the line of Umayyad caliphs who, after Abd al-Rahman I--himself half-Syrian and half-Berber--were almost without exception the sons of former Christian slaves from the far north, the 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 Córdoba, 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.

 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 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 (an era that in Arabic, since Muhammad, is referred to by that half-poetic, half-theological characterization of the Jahiliyya or "The Age of Ignorance") 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 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 [...] 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 Córdoba 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 Córdoban Jews in exile, almost certainly out of the Córdoban 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.

 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.

 And Tony is a descendant of the blue-tiled patios with orange trees and fountains that were first built to ward off homesickness by the Sevillians, Granadans, and Córdobans who were the majority of the settlers of that part of the New World that includes California. And some of you are the descendants of everything that found refuge in the East instead. 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. Maimonides was a Jew and a "Greek"--the second Moses and a rational philosopher--both with equal love and authenticity, and he wrote "The Guide for the Perplexed" in Arabic.

 But why should I say these things when there was an Andalusian who said them much better? Ibn 'Arabi, still revered today among Muslims as the greatest of Sufis, was a twelfth-century Sevillian who was a slightly younger contemporary of the Córdobans Maimonides and Ibn Rushd. The philosophers will, I hope, forgive my giving the last word to the poet, and to one of his loveliest love poems, a poem where the line between erotic and spiritual love is not at all clear, and whose final verses embody so much of this Andalusian ethos.

A white-blazed gazelle
Is an amazing sight,
Red-dye signaling,
Eyelids hinting,

Pasture between breastbones
And innards.
Marvel,
A garden among the flames!

My heart can take on
Any form:
Gazelles in a meadow,
A cloister for monks,

For the idols, sacred ground,
Kaaba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Qur'an

I profess the religion of love;
Wherever its caravan turns
Along the way, that is the belief,
The faith I keep.

Like Bishr,
Hind and her sister,
Love-mad Qays and the lost Layla,
Mayya and her lover Ghaylan.

--Translation by Michael A. Sells, available in Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn `Arabi and New Poems (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2000).