What Islam did for Europe
Jason Webster
Published 17 April 2008
The conflict between Islam and the west can be traced back to a myth that
inaccurately painted
Muslims as the killers of a Christian hero. Now, scholars are beginning to
re*****s the
fundamental role that Muslims played in shaping western civilisation.
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe (570-1215)
David Levering Lewis W W Norton, 384pp, £17.99
Until very recently, suggestions that western civilisation owed much to
Islam were rejected out
of hand. "Europe", according to the orthodox model, was born out of a
marriage of classical and
Judaeo-Christian cultures. The missing element in this formula - the
Islamic component - was
ignored. During the first half of the 20th century a number of Arabists
challenged this view,
but their opinions made little popular headway. Today, however, thanks
largely to the current
friction between Islam and the west, new efforts are being made to
understand and interpret the
influence oriental culture has had, mostly via Spain, on its occidental
cousin.
Following the im****tant groundwork done by Salma Khadra Jayyusi's Legacy
of Muslim Spain, the
edifice of ignorance and prejudice is slowly beginning to crumble. "More
than ever before,
light needs to be shone on the long Andalusian aftermath that is
pressingly with us now," David
Levering Lewis concludes in God's Crucible. He is absolutely right.
Historians dealing with the impact of Islamic Spain have to address two
im****tant questions
with deep contem****ary resonance: the extent of Moorish influence over
medieval Europe, and the
nature of the society from which this sprang. Just how tolerant was it?
Were Christians,
Muslims and Jews in al-Andalus really able to live harmoniously together,
in convivencia, as
some claim? Or were the distinct communities continuously at war, with any
cultural interchange
between them being secondary or accidental?
Opinion is divided on this second point. Hardliners point not only to the
endless battles of
the Reconquest campaign to win Iberia back for Christendom, but also to
the many pogroms and
massacres of the time, and laws designed to separate and strictly limit
any contact between the
communities. Those more favourable to the idea of convivencia cite the
numerous instances of
cultural crossover and working together for the common good despite the
obvious tensions. In
10th-century Umayyad Cordoba, for example, Jews and Christians were able
to serve in high
government office; they were officially viewed as ahl al-kitab, or "people
of the book": those
whose faith was based on a written do***ent, such as the Bible or the
Torah, and hence
protected under Islamic law.
No one denies the underlying violence of the times: the question is
whether the three faith
groups ever worked consciously towards a more accepting society. Tolerance
over the Moorish
period was neither constant nor can it be viewed as having never existed
at all. The first
Moors arrived as warriors in 711, quickly finding wives among the native
population as they
settled down in their newly conquered territories. The last of them - the
Moriscos,
great-grandsons of this ethnically mixed people - were summarily expelled
in 1609 from a Spain
obsessed with racial purity and the threat from the Ottomans, farmworkers
and artisans given
just three days to leave after a presence in the country that had lasted
nine centuries. During
this period the whole spectrum of human interaction, from intimate contact
and interchange to
violent persecution, were in evidence. The mechanics of this ****ft are
perhaps the most
interesting question of all, and most relevant to today: the hows and whys
of the ebb and flow
of convivencia.
On the first question - Moorish Spain's impact on medieval Europe - the
new-generation popular
studies display a growing consensus. Finally the debt the west owes to the
Muslim world is
being recognised. Al-Andalus was in many ways the United States of its
day: an ethnically
diverse, political and cultural powerhouse that the rest of the western
world looked to for new
ideas and the latest trends, even while it sometimes resented, and even
rejected, this
influence. Everything from technology (the abacus, paper) to the latest
fa****ons (dark clothes
in winter, light ones in summer), foods (artichokes, sugar), pastimes
(chess) and new ideas
(higher mathematics, Averroės's innovative "rational" thinking) first
reached Europe through
Moorish Spain. The most celebrated point of entry for intellectual traffic
was the school of
translators based in Christian-controlled Toledo in the 12th and 13th
centuries, from where
Greek and Arabic learning rendered into Latin was able to penetrate Europe
and lay the
cornerstone of the Renaissance.
The picture is complex, as Europe was shaped through its acceptance and
its rejection of what
Moorish Spain had to offer. Although learning from al-Andalus eventually
helped to fill "the
occidental void", as Levering Lewis points out, paradoxically the
"Europenses" first began to
define themselves as a coherent group of peoples in direct opposition to
the Muslim forces
pu****ng over the Pyrenees during the course of the 8th century.
Charlemagne took up the challenge, and while most of his time was spent
dealing with the
obstinately pagan Saxons, the empire he built was forged in reaction to
the Moorish threat even
if, culturally, this held Europe back for centuries. "Abd al-Rahman's
Muslim Iberia was at
least four centuries more advanced than western Christendom in 800CE," the
author writes. "An
ironic in telligence from another planet might have observed that if
Carolingian Europeans
believed that Charles the Hammer's victory at Poitiers [in 732] made their
world possible, then
it was a fair question to ask whether or not defeat might have been
preferable."
This self-definition of Europe in opposition to Islam then became
entrenched by La Chanson de
Roland, in Levering Lewis's words "the Ur-text for the west". Although the
real Roland was
killed by Basques in 778 as Charlemagne's army retreated into France
across the Pyrenees, the
culprits in popular Christian imagination became the Moors, thanks to the
retelling of the
story in the French 11th-century epic: "The Chanson possessed
extraordinary psychic clout for
the men and women of the west, a powerful mytho poeia engirdling their
understanding of . . .
the martial imperatives of the True Faith." Appearing some 50 years before
Urban II summoned
the first crusade, La Chanson de Roland embedded the "otherness" of Islam
"deep within the
memory banks".
Despite making up only half of one chapter, this is perhaps the most
crucial section of God's
Crucible: both western self-identity and the narrative of its relation****p
with Islam have
grown out of a story that inaccurately paints Muslims as the killers of a
Christian hero. This
throws up many interesting and pertinent questions, not least about the
need to revise the
narrative if there is to be any substantive change in the present
situation, and the role of
stories - true or untrue - in the shaping of history. Unfortunately this
is territory that
Levering Lewis chooses not to explore, however briefly. It is to the
book's detriment that the
author sometimes appears to be on the point of reaching new and
interesting conclusions on his
central theme, only to leave the reader guessing.
Part of the problem is that the book has an identity issue of its own. The
subtitle - Islam and
the Making of Europe (570-1215) - is misleading: there is scant reference
to the crusades, and
none at all to Norman Sicily, both of which were crucially im****tant
centres of east-west
contact during this period, if overshadowed by Iberia. Spain is the
central theme, but we do
not reach it until a third of the way in. What comes before is a series of
lengthy and very
useful summaries of the history of clashes between Rome and Persia up
until the 6th century;
the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam; and the collapse of the Roman
empire and Visigothic
rule in Spain before the arrival of the Moors. The heart of the book then
provides a detailed
and well-told history of events in Umayyad Spain and in Charlemagne's
Europe during the course
of the 8th century, before passing more quickly through the 9th and
ru****ng on to the 13th
century and the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, shortly after which Moorish
territories were in
effect limited to the kingdom of Granada.
Again, prefacing the conflict between the west and Islam with the wars
between Rome and Persia
is fascinating in itself, and throws up some intriguing questions, yet
little is made of this.
Is the author hinting at much deeper origins to the divisions between east
and west, origins
predating Islam? Readers must draw their own conclusions. These are small
points, however. The
book would have been better served by tighter editing, but Levering Lewis
is a consummate
storyteller, and God's Crucible will help make this increasingly im****tant
period of history
more popularly accessible. For that, it is to be applauded.
Jason Webster is the author of "”Guerra! Living in the Shadows of the
Spanish Civil War" (Black
Swan)
http://www.newstatesman.com/200804170046
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