SPAIN AND ISLAM - THE MYTH OF AL-ANDALUS

During the late twentieth century, Western multiculturalists began to imagine utopias of cultural and ethnic "diversity," as they liked to put it, in which distinct cultures and civilizations would coexist harmoniously.1 This ideal became a prominent feature of cultural and educational institutions in western Europe and, especially, North America.

It was difficult, not to say impossible, to find an historical precedent for such a utopia, since all known civilizations have insisted on the primacy of their own culture, but some commentators have thought to identify such a unique society in medieval Spain. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, historians and writers evoked a mythical paradise in medieval Al-Andalus, which was declared to have achieved a culture of genuine tolerance, compared with which all the rest of Spanish history might be seen as a decline. A century later Américo Castro gave this a new spin from his American exile, in the several successive versions of his magnum opus imagining a unique situation of what he termed "convivencia." Most recently such an image of tolerance and cultural cross-fertilization has been eloquently evoked in a work by the Harvard literature professor María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World (2002).2 The title is taken from a comment by an eleventh century German nun, and the product is a sort of novel, written with considerable charm, consisting of a series of pen portraits of leading cultural personalities.

In this idyll, Christians and Muslims quarrel more among themselves than they do with each other, while cooperating with Jews in creating a unique multicultural paradise. There is, of course, always a serpent in the Garden of Eden, and in Menocal's case it takes the form of the fanatical Islamists of the two successive Moroccan empires that invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The intolerant domination of this hostile and unenlightened Other is perceived as beginning to put an end to the Andalusi utopia, though it is presented as considerately oppressing enlightened Muslims more than anyone else. Menocal's novel, presented as cultural history, exerted a strong appeal in the contemporary academy, with its pretensions to the multicultural. This is all the more the case since she never mentions the centuries of bloody conflict between Christians and Muslims, and the word "conquest" or "reconquest" never appears.

Menocal's book is but one of the most concerted expressions of the "myth of Al-Andalus" that has been propagated for a century and a half, acquiring renewed force in recent years. The Muslim invaders of 711 are portrayed as variously entering, incorporating, or colonizing the Iberian Peninsula (as if no one lived there), replacing a decadent and dreary band of elitist Visigoths — presumably all "dead white males" — who failed to achieve multiculturalism and deserve no respect. The reexamination of Visigothic history that has been carried on during the past two generations is conveniently ignored because it might complicate the introduction of this dream world.

The Muslim eruption into the Iberian Peninsula took place near the end of the first century of massive Islamic empire-building. Subsequent phases under other Muslim empires elsewhere would continue for a full millennium, into the seventeenth century.3 In extent the only equal in world history would be the conquests of the Mongols six hundred years later, while the duration was without parallel. Unlike the Mongols, the Arabs would soon construct a major new civilization, which would impose itself permanently on each of the many lands conquered, Islamized and in most cases Arabized, with the sole exception of Spain. Only in the Iberian Peninsula was a large territory both conquered and for the most part culturally and religiously Islamized, only to be reconquered and de-Islamized by a portion of its pre-Muslim inhabitants. This fact alone would have made Spain absolutely unique in world history, if the Spanish had never accomplished anything else .4

The rapidity of the Muslim conquest of 711-18, despite the limited numbers of the invaders, was due to the internal division of the Visigoths and their inability to mount a central or organized resistance, once the monarchy had been decapitated at the outset. By 718 politico-military control had been extended, albeit very tenuously, over the entire peninsula. From there the seemingly inexhaustible Muslim tide poured into France, establishing a limited control over its southwestern part, until a major defeat in 732. Even so, new raiding parties continued to cross into France during the next few years, these attacks coming to an end only because of the overextension and exhaustion of the invaders.

Military expansion has been a common feature of many different states and societies in human history. Islamic civilization was not the first to operate under a religious imperative for military conquest. What is unique, however, is that Islam is the only major world religion that categorically requires continuing military action against unbelievers, and its followers have been remarkable for the long persistence and, for centuries, the relative success, of their military conquests. In the West, North African Muslims would later conquer Sicily in the ninth century and continue assaults on western Europe into the fourteenth century. In the form of large-scale piracy and slave raiding, attacks would continue for half a millennium more, into the early nineteenth century. The assaults on eastern Europe began early in the eighth century (at approximately the time of the conquest of Spain) and would be continued by the Ottomans throughout the latter Middle Ages and beyond that until the end of the seventeenth century, becoming a major factor in east European underdevelopment.5

The obligation to "exertion" in jihad as military conquest of unbelievers was thus a constant feature of Islamic culture and practice for more than a thousand years, declining in modern times only as Muslim societies became categorically inferior in military terms. During the twentieth century the major Muslim power, Turkey, then turned to genocide against its Christian minorities. The numerous references in the Koran to the obligation to fight militarily and to kill on behalf of the faith constitute one of the most striking differences between Christianity and Islam. Mohammed also referred to personal spiritual struggle as the "greater jihad," and in modern times this spiritual interpretation has come more to the fore, but the military jihad was at no time forgotten and was always periodically revived by activists or political leaders, even though the great majority of ordinary Muslims have never participated in it.6

The new rulers of Al-Andalus would face militarily in three directions — to the north against Christian Europe (after the mid-eighth century meaning primarily the small, weak, new Spanish principalities), internally against all manner of domestic rebels, and later south and east toward the expansion of their power in North Africa and the west Mediterranean. Concern for the internal and southern fronts often provided a military respite to the new Spanish states, which they took advantage of for internal consolidation and the expansion of their own borders. When conditions permitted, the jihad was persistently invoked against these remaining Christian territories in the peninsula, though trans-Pyrenean assaults were eventually renounced as impractical. When Andalusi arms were successful, heads of slain Christians were regularly displayed on the walls of Córdoba, not the symbol of an especially tolerant society. On the other hand, after the 720s the Andalusi rulers made little effort to conquer completely the Christian resistance in the north, instead occupying new frontier positions or posting frontier garrisons. The goal of the frequent raids against the north, what was called the sa'ifa (Sp. "aceifa"), was rather to weaken the Christian enemy and to bring back slaves and booty.

The initial terms of the Muslims for subject populations tended to be relatively generous, a policy indeed virtually required by the limited numbers of the Muslims themselves at the beginning of their conquests. Aristocrats and other landholders who accepted Muslim domination without resistance were generally confirmed in the control of their properties. Freedom of religion was recognized for Christians and Jews, and initially the latter enjoyed greater opportunities than under the Visigoths, who had persecuted them severely. It has been suggested — though historians do not really know — that the obligations of the peasantry were no greater, and possibly even lighter, than under the Visigoths. Serfs, for example, were often transformed into sharecroppers, which may have eased their lot. These factors made it easier to accept the initial Islamic domination; the Visigothic allies of the invaders soon had to accept complete subordination, even though most continued to hold their original lands, so long as they obeyed.7

During the course of the eighth century, however, as the Islamic system was consolidated, its full features were introduced into the new realm known as "Al-Andalus." 8 The taxes paid by non-Muslims were regularized as a land tax and a separate poll tax, and religious activities were restricted. No new churches were allowed to be built, some of the existing churches were converted into mosques, and bell-ringing and any form of Christian religious activity outside of churches prohibited. The proselytizing of Muslims was punishable by death, and any Muslim who converted was liable to the same penalty. By the middle of the ninth century, as the Muslim population increased, Jews and Christians had to wear special clothing to indicate their religion. They could not marry Muslim women, could ride only on donkeys, had to give up their seats whenever a Muslim wanted to sit, and were denied equality in judicial procedures. The terms of this kind of "discriminatory toleration" slowly grew more oppressive with each passing generation.

Given the restrictions on and discrimination against Jews and Christians, did any real "convivencia" take place in Al-Andalus, beyond mere physical juxtaposition? Two kinds of convivencia of a sort might be found. One was cooperation at the elite level between individual Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who to some extent worked with each other and exchanged information regarding learned texts and scholarly interests. In addition, the Andalusi state frequently employed Christians in various capacities, just as the late medieval Spanish kingdoms employed Jews. There was also considerable economic contact, trade, and also the hiring of labor. None of this, however, in any way blurred the basic caste lines.

In the mixed population of the cities, there was a tendency to segregate neighborhoods, but this was sometimes impractical, so that there were sometimes Christian and Muslim households living side by side. We have little or no information as to how this functioned. The households were not equal, because the Christians paid much heavier taxes, might not enjoy the same standard of living, and were subject to significant discrimination, but at least they were permitted to survive. Muslim minorities — the Mudéjares, as they would be called — incorporated by the advance of the Spanish kingdoms (mainly in the thirteenth century) experienced much the same kinds of conditions, once they were part of the inferior, rather than the superior, caste. Friendly relations between individuals and families certainly took place, particularly in the mixed cities, but those friendly relations on the individual level never blurred the distinct caste lines for Andalusi or Christian society as a whole. For the most part, even in areas where populations were mixed, the castes remained distinct, and there were no systematic efforts to cross caste lines either in society or culture, for, with regard to anything beyond limited gestures, such a practice would have been tabu. Cultural elites, for example, hardly ever studied each other's religion.

Some Spanish historians have wished to see the Muslim Andalusis as to a considerable degree "Hispanized," that is, heavily influenced by the Christian society and culture whose members for approximately two centuries made up the majority of the population of Al-Andalus. There is little evidence of this. Since eventually the bulk of the Muslim population would be composed of Hispanic converts (the "white Moors," whose presence would later astonish European visitors to the peninsula), not the children of Middle Eastern or African immigrants, they undoubtedly maintained certain habits or customs that were not the same as those in Egypt or Iraq. But the entire structure of culture and of society and government became heavily "orientalized," reproducing fundamentally the same structures and mores to be found in the Middle East. Al-Andalus was not a "Western" or "European" variant of Islamic society in anything other than a geographic sense, but it simply became the westernmost projection of Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern society and culture. The great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun recognized that, at least in one sense, the Arabs were the worst overlords — compared with Romans, Greeks, or Persians — for they largely obliterated the languages and cultures of the areas that they conquered, with only a few exceptions, and to that extent did not maintain classic empires.

This was reflected not merely in religion and high culture, but at all levels of life from urban configurations and architecture to cuisine, clothing, and social and marriage arrangements. Noteworthy was the typical Muslim subjection of women, totally different from the situation in Hispano-Christian society, where women could inherit and to some extent maintain property in their own right, and eventually reign individually as monarch of an entire kingdom. In this regard Islamic civilization constituted a marked regression from the Roman civilization that it replaced in the south Mediterranean. Late Roman law permitted daughters to inherit equally with sons and present equal testimony in court, whereas Islamic law provides women with only a half a share in inheritance and assigns their testimony only half the weight of a man's.

Arab and Berber elites zealously maintained their native tribal and clan structures, based on strongly agnatic and endogamous relationships. The political structure of Al-Andalus represented the typical despotism of the Middle East, replete with the equivalent bureaucracy and slave soldiers, without any parallel in the European kingdoms of that era. Arab and other minority non-Hispanic groups always dominated the power structure, even after the breakup of the caliphate in the eleventh century. Descendants of Muslim converts formed no taifa or independent dynasties, all of whom were led by Arabs, Berbers, or Slavic slave soldiers.9 As Anwar Chejne puts it, Al-Andalus "was always an integral part of the literary and cultural mainstream of the East and, as such, was as Islamic as Syria or Egypt." 10 Historically and culturally, Al-Andalus followed the same chronological trajectory as the Arab civilization of the Middle East, reaching a plateau of acculturation in the ninth and tenth centuries, achieving its maximum cultural sophistication during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, then experiencing major decline, accompanied by conquest from without, in the thirteenth century.

It must be remembered that during the early formative centuries of the Christian kingdoms, from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, the great bulk of the independent Christian population did not normally live in direct contact with Muslims. The "Mozarab" Christians in Al-Andalus were much more affected, however, and by the ninth century were becoming increasingly Arabized or, if one prefers, "orientalized." Those who found this most repugnant seem to have emigrated to the north, if conditions permitted. Later, the Muslim, or Mudejar, minority incorporated into the Spanish kingdoms proved more resistant to Christian and Spanish influence, preserving its caste identity and culture to a greater extent than had the Mozarabs, though most of them eventually Hispanicized linguistically and lost the use of Arabic.

Eventually most of the native Hispanic population remaining in Al-Andalus converted to Islam. When did that take place? The only attempt to estimate this was carried out by the American historian Richard W. Bulliet, applying a technique that he had earlier used for Egypt, Syria, and Persia. Bulliet's rough calculation was that by 800 only about 8 percent of the native population had converted, a figure that increased to only 12.5 percent fifty years later. With the full crystallization of Andalusi society and culture during the ninth century, the rate of conversion began to accelerate. By 900 about 25 percent had converted, and 50 percent by 950. By the end of the tenth century the figure might have stood at 75 percent, by which time the population of Al-Andalus had become overwhelmingly Muslim. Small Christian minorities nonetheless remained until at least the twelfth century, until they were finally eliminated altogether by the Islamist empire of the Moroccan Almohads.11

In theory all Muslims form part of the umma, or general Islamic community. In practice, however, Muslim society has been riven by ethnic tensions, which in Al-Andalus were profound, as much or more than in any other Islamic land. Prior to the eleventh century, and even to some extent afterward, the elite remained Arab and looked down on the Berbers (the other principal group of Muslims of foreign origins) and the native converts, as well as on Christians and Jews. Other sectors of society responded with intense resentment, leading to sporadic revolt and great violence, as political division formed along geographic and ethnic lines. In theory, Islam, like Christianity, rejects racial discrimination, but reality revealed otherwise. The Arabs exhibited a powerful sense of caste and racial superiority, demeaning racially inferior "sons of white women," even though those same white women were the ones most greatly desired for Arab harems. Even the Muwalladun (Sp. "muladíes"), the native Spanish converts to Islam, were sometimes derided for their white complexions, compared with the Arab elite. Muslim society featured widespread slavery, which like the slavery of the Ancient World was multiracial, slaves being drawn from every race and ethnic group not Muslim, but black slaves from Africa normally occupied the lowest position. Andalusi society remained highly segmented, not merely among the religions, but in terms of the different categories of Muslims — the Arab elite divided by lineages, tribes, and districts from the Berbers (and their own internal segments) and the convert majority of native Hispani.

At its height, the high culture of the cities of Al-Andalus rivaled that of the great Muslim centers of the Middle East. The scholarly and scientific texts of Greece and Rome had generally been translated into Arabic by the tenth century, but it is a mistake to think that the classic manuscripts (Latin, Greek, Syriac, Persian) were preserved, for "infidel" texts, no matter how high the quality and originality, were generally destroyed after being translated into Arabic. The high culture that soon developed in the Islamic world was a "transfer culture," for the lands originally conquered by the Muslims — Syria, Persia, Egypt, and to some degree the Visigothic kingdom — all had active and vibrant high cultures. The rise of learning in the Islamic world was a matter of taking over these foundations, though, unlike the imperialism of Rome and some later Western imperialisms, Arab imperialism in most areas steadily erased native languages and largely suppressed independent native cultures. In toto, Arab culture borrowed much more from Syria, Byzantium, and Persia than Western culture would later borrow from it, but in its first mature phase fostered a level of learning, which, prior to the thirteenth century, surpassed that of western Europe. By the tenth century Muslim scholars were doing advanced work of their own in mathematics, astronomy, botany, geography, medicine, and other sciences. For several centuries they excelled in historical writing, but there was very limited development in humanist thought.12

Philosophical study was limited to a comparatively brief period, for Islam is a religion of orthopraxy and correct outward conduct, and discourages broader speculation or any extended inquiry into theology or philosophy, holding that there should be no debate or dissension among believers.13 The most famous Muslim philosophers, the Persian Avicenna and the Andalusi Averroes (Ibn Rushd), primarily wrote commentaries on Aristotle and other thinkers, failing to develop complete new systems of their own. Such commentary ultimately had its main impact on Western thought, which, unlike that of the Muslims, learned to study contrasting points of view.14 By comparison, Averroes had no significant influence on Islamic thought, which rejected his insights. There was very little in the way of original Islamic philosophy, for that was precluded by the literalism of the Koran and the resultant character of Islamic doctrine.15

By the thirteenth century, the Islamic and Western worlds were headed in different directions, as the margin of freedom and tolerance in the former shrank. The new Western universities expanded their activities, while the intellectual culture of the Islamic lands declined. The rigid, intolerant and anti-intellectual tendencies in Islamic religion and culture eventually became totally dominant. By about 1100, learning and science in the West showed the first signs of approximation in range and quality with that of the Islamic world, and by 1300 were pulling ahead.16 Subsequent cultural development in Muslim Persia and India was primarily artistic in character. The mark of a tolerant and creative civilization is to be able to deal with contrary ideas, something that the West was slowly beginning to do to a limited degree. Differences were becoming equally or more marked in economic organization and in technology, where by the fourteenth century the West was slowly becoming dominant. In later times, wherever Muslims lived side by side with other religious communities, whether as a majority or a minority, the latter would almost always show greater capacity for development and modernization.

As of the tenth century, the Andalusis excelled in high culture, in most of the practical arts, and in most aspects of esthetics. They had introduced Arabic numerals, certain advanced agricultural techniques, and a series of new fruits, vegetables, and other foods, as well as silk, paper, glass, and new kinds of ceramics. By the eleventh century, on the other hand, Spanish Christians were beginning to excel in military technology and in political development, their structures of law, rights, and civic institutions creating stronger internal solidarity than the ultimately more fragile Muslim despotisms.

The greatest failure of Al-Andalus was political. Generally speaking, there has been little political development in Islamic societies. Since Islam originated in the commercially sophisticated Middle East, commercial and property law in the sharia was at first more advanced than that of the West, but criminal law remained harsh and primitive, as it stands even in the twenty-first century. The sharia enshrines traditionalism and the status quo, underwriting a tribal and clan structure of Middle Eastern and Andalusi society, which precluded political evolution. The reinforcement of clan and tribal structures hardened the segmentation of Andalusi society, in which political loyalty was owed primarily to lineages, not to institutions. Classical Islamic thought had little theory of the state or of political development and representation. To a greater degree than most other systems, Islamic states rest on military and police power. The theory of Islamic society posits a kind of utopia but, as is the norm with utopias, in practice tends to foster despotisms.

Those who propose a picture of Andalusi society and institutions as "tolerant" and "convivientes" altogether fail to explain why Andalusi history was wracked by revolts of all kinds — by Berbers, by Muwalladun, sometimes even by the Arab elites. Though the Christian Mozarabs were generally, but not always, passive, the only sector of this highly divided and segmented society that did not rebel were the Jews, the smallest religious minority, totally lacking in military power. The only periods in which there were no internal revolts were the reigns of the most strongly despotic rulers, who governed with an absolutely iron hand and distracted many of their followers by their numerous attacks against the Christian principalities. Throughout the history of Al-Andalus, rebellions of all kinds were repressed vigorously, often with the utmost violence. Cordoban rulers never hesitated to carry out full-scale massacres of their subjects, without the slightest pretext of judicial procedure. This further explains why, once the central caliphal state collapsed early in the eleventh century, most of AI-Andalus found it itself increasingly defenseless, by comparison with the Christian principalities. Under the decentralized, rights-centered, partially representative institutions of the latter, nearly that entire society could be counted on for military service. The Andalusi despotism, by contrast, tried to disarm Andalusi society, which it fundamentally distrusted, relying on its own central Arab-based tribal units, stiffened by the typically Islamic "slave soldiers" and numerous mercenaries.

Spanish Christian rulers also had to quell numerous rebellions, but this was due above all to elite dissidence, not to ethnic segmentation. Their principalities were much more successful in building polities over the long run, with evolving structures of law, social rights, and a certain degree of broader participation and representation.

Slavery was a major feature of tolerant, "conviviente" Andalusi society, which maintained major international slave markets in Córdoba and other large cities. Mohammed declared that Muslims could not be held as slaves but otherwise explicitly approved slavery as an institution in Islamic society, the slave population to be made up of the many prisoners captured in Islamic military conquest and others purchased on the international market. The frequent "aceifas" launched against the Spanish principalities were designed to a considerable extent as slave raids.

Slavery in the Islamic world was multiracial, as in ancient Rome, non-Muslims from any ethnic or racial group being possible victims. A major new feature of Islamic slavery, however, was development of a large-scale black African slave trade. Black slaves had been found in Rome, but their numbers were very few, whereas the Arabs were the first to make the acquisition of sizable numbers of African slaves a major activity. The Muslims were also the first to categorize blacks as uniquely racially inferior and hence more naturally and appropriately enslaved. Arabs were thus not inhibited in seizing slaves from black Muslim tribes, as well.17 Whereas slavery largely died out in western Europe outside Italy, the influence of the Islamic slave-raiding border helped to sustain the presence of slavery in the Spanish Christian principalities, which imbibed the Muslim attitude toward black slavery and, by the close of the fifteenth century, would position themselves to surpass the Muslims in the African slave trade.18 Conversely, the most positive aspect of Islamic slavery was the encouragement of regular emancipation or the purchasing of freedom after conversion (even though this was not always observed in practice), so that multigenerational slave castes generally did not develop, even though slave markets thrived in the Middle East and Africa well into the twentieth century.19

Despite the persistence of military violence for eight centuries, relations between Spaniards and Andalusis were extremely complex. The entire period was punctuated by numerous official truces, though none lasted for more than a few years. For centuries, Islamic orthodoxy held that there could be no regular peace between the "House of Islam" and the "House of War," that is, the entire non-Islamic world, which was to remain under assault until it had been forced to submit to Islam (the word Islam itself means "submission"). It was soon deemed appropriate, however, to desist from military operations if an adjoining non-Islamic power was willing to pay some form of tribute. In the Iberian Peninsula, whenever practical reasons moved the ruler of the Islamic state (Umayyad, Almoravid, or Almohad) to a temporary truce with one or more of the Christian kingdoms, the customary bearing of minor gifts that accompanied any embassy was interpreted by means of a legal fiction as payment of "tribute," hence rendering the truce legitimate under Islamic doctrine.

The frontier between the two civilizations was hostile and violent, but also highly permeable.20 Spanish Christians developed a kind of familiarity of both military and political relations with the Muslims unknown beyond the Pyrenees. Rules of war often thus obtained surprised, even shocked, European Christians. When the latter helped the Aragonese to seize Barbastro in 1063, they proposed to subject the Muslim inhabitants to violent extortion, rape, slavery, or even death, but were restrained by the Aragonese, who told them that was simply not the way things were done. Roughly speaking, Spanish Christians seemed to have accepted Koranic rules of warfare, which allowed for such practices only if a city refused to agree to terms.

In times of truce both Christian and Muslim rulers, as well as opposition factions on both sides, did not hesitate to enter political deals and even cross-cultural alliances. On occasion, Christian rulers sought and obtained Muslim military assistance against either internal rebels or rival princes in other kingdoms, as did dynastic or aristocratic factions who rebelled against them. Andalusi rulers employed Christian mercenaries in their semiprofessional armed forces and also made use of Christian rebels against the northern kingdoms. By the eleventh century, as the Córdoba caliphate weakened, Muslim rulers or rebel factions sought and obtained Christian military intervention on their own behalf. Although cross-cultural political and military alliance was not the norm, neither was it infrequent, but simply one feature of a long and complex relationship that was always ultimately adversarial, but part of the time was peaceful and occasionally might even be complementary, rarely even intimate.

There was nothing uniquely Spanish about all this, for such practices have existed at times in every region in which Christian and Muslim states lived in conditions of at least relative equilibrium. Even Crusader states in Syria and Palestine sometimes formed such alliances, as much later did European governments with the Ottoman empire. None of that meant that either the Crusaders or the European states ever modified their primary identity, or were involved in any marked "cultural hybridiry."

To the extent that the medieval Spanish experienced any genuine convivencia, this did not take place in Al-Andalus, where Christians completely disappeared, but in the Reconquest Christian kingdoms from the late eleventh century on. The era from the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries has been called the "Mudéjar century," for by then the incorporation of Muslim minorities had reached its height, and a certain amount of cultural diffusion took place. In the conquered southern cities, Spanish architecture introduced its distinctive style of impressive facades but retained the existing Muslim configuration of narrow, winding streets with little public space. Christian architecture was considerably superior and had little to learn from that of the Muslims, but Andalusi or Mudéjar architectural decoration generally won favor and became a common Spanish motif during this era. The public baths that existed in medieval Spain were probably not so much a matter of Islamic influence as of the Roman tradition, for at that time they sometimes existed beyond the Pyrenees as well, being eliminated throughout Europe by the sixteenth century.

The general trend of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries was a slow but increasing assimilation to Spanish Christian culture, though much more on the part of the Jewish, than the Muslim, minority. The Jewish elite began to aspire to something equivalent to aristocratic status, while even in independent Granada, the last Muslim state, the upper class sometimes donned Christian-style clothing. Conversely, Castilian elites often found it modish to adopt bright-colored Muslim garb.

Ultimately, what took place between Christians and Muslims was a form of coexistence not equivalent to Américo Castro's convivencia. There were individual conversions, primarily of Jews and Muslims to Christianity, and also a certain number of mixed marriages (commonly of a Christian man with a Muslim woman), but the kind of cultural assimilation found among much of the Jewish population did not generally extend to Muslims. Technical borrowing in esthetics, economic production, and technology took place on both sides, but the Mudéjar minority showed no signs of general assimilation, even though it seems to have had a kind of hybrid culture, Islamic in its fundamentals of religion and thought, marriage and family, food and dress, though partially assimilated in its economic life. Bernard Vincent has judged that "Morisco and Christian culture clashed in nearly every respect. Their two styles of life were diametrically opposed. The inner organization of Morisco homes and the way houses were grouped in neighborhoods in no way resembled the way in which Christians did such things." 21 Christians were offended by the sounds of Muslim music and ceremonies, the scent of the perfume Muslims used, and the bright color of their clothing, whose style and tone were so different from the more austere Spanish manner. They found equally offensive such basic domestic practices as sitting on the floor to eat without tables, chairs, or benches, and sleeping on the floor in standard oriental style on mats rather than in beds. With the Moriscos, at least, the segmented culture of Al-Andalus continued into the seventeenth century.

Beginning in the fifteenth century, and even more in the years that followed, enemies of the Spanish kingdoms denounced Spanish society as racially and culturally bastardized, a mixture of Moors and Jews, hence inherently inferior to the strictly Christian societies of other parts of western Europe. By the nineteenth century, as denunciation and propaganda began to give way to more serious observation, there arose the only slightly more empirical notion of "oriental Spain," the only part of the West that was somehow also part of the East, because of the supposedly profound influence of the "Moors." (The common use of the latter term, by Spaniards and foreigners alike, would presumably have surprised and offended the Andalusis themselves. It probably reflected the fact that most foreign Muslims who entered the peninsula were Moroccan and other Berbers, not Arabs, and also stemmed from the continued massive Moroccan invasions between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.)

This raises the question — how much and what kind of influence did the Muslims have on Spanish culture, society, and institutions? The influence is often considered to have been profound, but was it really? The issue was at the crux of the quarrel between Castro and Sánchez Albornoz, probably the most famous two-man controversy in all Spanish historiography.

To begin with, there are approximately four thousand words in Castilian and other peninsular languages that are derived from Arabic (with rather fewer in Catalan), having to do specifically with such areas as geography, economic practices, basic technology, and administration. They are almost all words for things, rather than for sentiments (although there are a few for the latter, as well), and entered the vocabulary primarily between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Spanish occupied nearly all of Al-Andalus and incorporated a sizable Muslim minority.22 The vocabulary of Castilian is, however, quite large, and such words — though among those frequently used — amount to a very small percentage of the total. Grammar and syntax remained totally unaffected. Obviously Arabic had some influence, but whether this could be considered a profound influence is more doubtful.

Spanish culture, on the one hand, and the country's institutional theory and practice, on the other, are all of the west European type. There is some Islamic influence in Spanish literature, but again the degree is quite limited, having to do with certain medieval poetic forms and plotlines. No influence may be found in religious culture, theology, or church organization and administration, or in philosophical thought, high culture, or political philosophy and practice. The fact that an occasional term of Arab origin may appear in the roster of administration positions is a technicality, not an oriental model. Even Spanish diet reveals only modest traces of Andalusi or Mudejar influence, rejecting the semivegetarian Andalusi cuisine and most of its favorite foods, such as couscous, which has no place in Spanish diet, which conversely always featured pork, like that of other Europeans.

Popular songs and music have no Arab meter, and in fact Spanish music, even of the earlier period, could not be played on the typically Muslim instruments. The oldest of the well-known Spanish, mainly Andalusian, dances originated no earlier than the sixteenth century. Similarly the origins of flamenco and cante jondo, the "lerele" style, are modern Andalusian, and traditional gypsy, a style that first began to emerge in the Jerez-Cádiz triangle toward the end of the eighteenth century, achieved its full form in Seville and some of the larger Andalusian cities soon after the middle of the nineteenth century, from where it soon spread to Madrid. It does have certain oriental roots, but the orient from which part of flamenco stems is the musical culture that the gypsies brought from India, not the Arab Middle East.

In the late Middle Ages, the principal influence or expression of Muslim culture in Spanish lay in certain areas of esthetics, most especially in the decorative style generally called Mudéjar. This lasted for approximately two centuries as architectural and other kinds of decoration for buildings whose plan and character, however, were not those of Muslim Granada but of Christian Spain. "Mudejar style" remained a Spanish form that was revived early in the twentieth century.

Proponents of "romantic Spain" would nonetheless argue that Spanish "psychology" reveals considerable oriental influence. To what precisely would such an observation refer? Its proponents usually point to such qualities as rhetoric, emotionality, spontaneity, frequent dissidence, and lack of cooperation, or any one of a number of other things. Richard Ford, in his famous Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), tried to be more precise than most, pointing to such qualities as hospitality, gratitude, fear of contamination or of the "evil eye," of women sitting on the floor of churches, and of the "resignation" of the Spanish. Occasional individual traits might be noticed, such as a greater tendency of Spanish women to cover their faces, or a special flourish, such as the contraction "q.s.p.b." (standing for "que sus pies besa" — who kisses your feet — a rhetorical gesture not common in other Western discourse). When totaled up, however, it is rather thin stuff, since many of these characteristics might be found in other European countries in varying degrees. On the other hand, Spanish essentialists, beginning to some extent in the sixteenth century, have held that Spanish psychology is in fact a kind of racial constant since pre-Roman times. Is either contention — the "orientalist" or the "essentialist" — correct? Is either verifiable or an empirical hypothesis capable of falsification? This would seem doubtful, since each rests on vague but sweeping generalizations that cannot be empirically verified. Many of the things that seemed so "different" about the Spanish during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries were the consequence not of orientalism but of the relative traditionalism of Spanish society, slower to undergo the changes experienced by the rest of western Europe. This is not to deny that Spanish society has its idiosyncrasies, as do all others, but those customs or attitudes that can be determined to have stemmed directly from the Muslims are quite limited.

Culturally, the ethnic group that at first benefited from Islamic dominion were the Spanish Jews, who enjoyed both greater tolerance and greater opportunities than under the Visigoths, so that Al-Andalus witnessed a flowering of Jewish culture. As early as the late tenth century, however, intolerance and oppression began to mount. By the late eleventh century, Jewish attitudes were changing from a preference for Muslim rule to an equidistant attitude toward Christians and Jews, and by the second half of the twelfth century had begun to swing toward a pro-Christian orientation, by that point finding greater tolerance and opportunity under Christian rule.23 From that time stemmed the pronounced Hispanization of peninsular Jewry.

The frontier conflict with Islam did not end with the conquest of Granada in 1492. Compared with the fifteenth century, the struggles of the first seven decades of the sixteenth century were equally or sometimes even more intense. The Testament of Isabel la Católica commended the crusade and the continuation of the Reconquest into North Africa to the Castilians, something initiated nearly three centuries earlier by Fernando III el Santo. The most difficult battles of the sixteenth century were those fought with the Turks in the Mediterranean, where the Habsburg forces gained their most famous victory (Lepanto), but also suffered their worst and most costly defeats, indeed the only notable reverses suffered by Spanish arms during that period. It is calculated that during the early modern period as many as 150,000 Spaniards were taken prisoner by Muslim pirates.24 The historical literature is full of accounts of English, Dutch, and French pirates attacking Spanish shipping in the Atlantic, but overall the most costly piracy was the continuous Muslim assaults of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Through the eighteenth century the Spanish crown retained not only its Moroccan plazas but also the key city of Oran as well, but the most notable defeat suffered under Carlos III, when the Spanish empire reached its greatest geographical extent overseas, was the effort to seize Algiers and put an end to its slave raiding.25

The long confrontation with Islam was in some ways the major formative factor, as well as the major de-formative factor, in Spanish history. The Muslim conquest of the eastern and southern Mediterranean was a world-historical disaster, removing much of the ancient Greco-Roman world from the eventual course of civilization, largely destroying the original languages and culture of these regions, and thus consigning them to an oriental civilization that after five centuries became stagnant. It destroyed the possibility of any organic evolution of the original Hispano-Visigothic culture, which was, as we have seen, as advanced as any in western Europe. Spanish society then formed itself around a new militant culture that, though remarkably open to international influences in the Middle Ages, also developed aspects of a caste culture, partially peripheral to the European core of which it formed a part. The strongly orthodox Catholicism of the medieval Spanish guaranteed their place in the new Western culture of Latin Christendom, and they would not undergo the fate of other Christian societies to the south and east. This frontier culture, however, focused on military and, later, imperial priorities, failed to develop fully all the institutions that would become common to the Western core, and the consequences helped to set Spanish society on the differential path it trod during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Spanish society has been criticized for not fully reciprocating Islamic "tolerance," but that in fact is exactly what it did. The Spanish did not respond to the fanatical intolerance of Almoravids and Almohads in equivalent terms, but throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and after, maintained the traditional system of discriminatory toleration. In that period they were more, not less, tolerant than the Muslims, and occasionally even allowed public prayers from Mudéjar minarets. In Castilian law, oaths sworn by members of all three religions at one time had equal legal value, and in early Castilian law the death penalty for killing a Jew was equivalent to that for killing a Christian, even though the long-term trend was for increasing judicial discrimination. It was precisely this situation of having maintained the system of partial toleration that placed Spanish society in a historically unparalleled situation, a situation that by the fifteenth century, faced with the European drive toward unified polities combined with the continued danger from the Islamic frontier, had become a peculiar kind of predicament.

In this regard it is interesting to compare the policy of France during the early modern period. The French crown at one time formed an official alliance with the Ottoman Empire, abetting Muslim piracy against the Spanish and Italians (a policy that in fact went much further than the provision of sanctuary to ETA terrorists in the late twentieth century). Generally sheltered from Islamic assault, the French were the first Western society to develop a sort of Islamophilia among the intelligentsia, beginning as early as the seventeenth century (dissonantly co-existing with the policy of the French monarchy to consider itself a kind of heir of Spain as sword of Catholicism and leader of Europe), leading to a series of admired, uninformed, and uncritical writings during the century that followed.

Some tendency toward sentimentalization could be seen in Spanish attitudes during the later Middle Ages, particularly in literature, with expressions of "maurofilia" versus "maurofobia" (admiration for vs. dislike of Moorish culture) in the sixteenth century, but the modern tendency toward idealization originated in the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment critique of traditional Western Christian society. Such criticism was itself absolutely unique, with no real equivalent in any prior civilization in human history. Enlightenment attitudes were themselves profoundly contradictory, a pronounced racism co-existing with a proclaimed universalism. This marked the beginning of the concept of the idealized Other in Western culture, together with that of the Noble Savage, as supposedly enlightened oriental viewpoints were invoked to criticize Western institutions, beginning with Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, the Spanish equivalent being Cadalso's Cartas marruecas, though Cadalso revealed no particular knowledge of Morocco.

"Eurabian" concepts were later formed by some Spaniards in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some — not all — of the Spanish Arabists whose work began with Francisco Codera in the nineteenth century showed a tendency to idealize Muslims, preferring to call them "Españoles," rather than "andalusíes." This represented an attempted "Hispanization" of a non-Western culture, motivated in part perhaps to give greater prestige to that field of study. Conversely, in the Arab world from the nineteenth century on there developed a pronounced idealization of Al-Andalus as a lost paradise, and most recently Al-Qaeda has announced its recovery as a major priority.

By the twenty-first century, Al-Andalus has become one of the parts of the historically Islamic world that has been thoroughly studied, if not indeed the most thoroughly studied of them all. Many texts have been translated, and there is a sizable volume of scholarly literature, though writing for the broader public remains deficient. Serafín Fanjul counted 822 books published in Spain between 1970 and 1990 that in whole or in part were dedicated to Al-Andalus, ranging from folletos to multivolume works, but not including an even larger number of articles.26

The weak Spanish imperialism in northwest Africa during the first half of the twentieth century developed its own distinctive tropes, though in this regard it is important to distinguish between what was common to many European imperialisms and what was specific to Spain. French imperialism in North Africa and the Middle East often posited a special French relationship with the Islamic world, for whom France bore a special role of protection and mission civilisatrice, yet earlier French contacts had been modest compared with those of Spain. The "Moroccanism" that developed among some Spanish imperialists between 1910 and 1945 was distinctive, for its most extreme proponents presented the bizarre notion that the Spanish and Moroccans were not merely historically but also socially and culturally closely related. The most categorical even insisted that they were the northern and southern branches of the same people, but the Spanish were more advanced, which gave them the right and the duty of tutelage over Morocco. Versions of this concept were part of official diplomatic discourse during 1940-41 when Sir Samuel Hoare, the new British ambassador to Madrid in June 1940, was taken aback, to say the least, when Col. Juan Beigbeder, the foreign minister, assured him that "Spaniards and Moors are the same people." A somewhat different longwinded version of this trope by Franco bored Hitler almost to tears at Hendaye.27 Spanish claims on Morocco, and the peculiar terms in which they were often justified, represented an interesting example of the way in which romantic myths can be made reality in the imagination of political actors. Ultimately, however, the only thing particularly Spanish about this was the specific form of the myth.

The real influence of Islam on Spain was rather different from the way in which it has usually been portrayed. The most important consequence was to confer on Spain a historical role of frontier and periphery, which was different from what the peninsula had experienced prior to the eighth century. Under Rome and its Visigothic successors, the peninsula had been part of the core of late Roman civilization. In the new Western civilization of Latin Christendom, which was just emerging at the time that the kingdom of Asturias was being formed, the Spanish principalities would at first be more marginal and would require half a millennium to assume full participation in the core. For centuries a somewhat marginal and highly militarized periphery, the Spanish principalities would for a long time be unable to achieve the full cultural, educational, and economic level of the core areas of the West, something that they approximated only after a lengthy historical evolution. This harsh history helped to form and to fertilize the great expansion of energy and creativity that took place at the end of the Middle Ages, but it was probably not unrelated to the frustrations that followed.

NOTES

1. These multiculturalists, however, also expected all those participating in "diversity" to have the same political principles, derived from the late modern, politically correct West.
2. M. R. Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, 2002).
3. E. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism. A History (New Haven, Conn., 2006), presents a good brief account of Muslim military expansionism across the centuries, while P. Fregosi, Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries (Amherst, N.Y., 1998), is broader yet.
4. The literature concerning Spain and the Islamic world is enormous. P. Damián Cano, Al Andalus: El Islam y los pueblos ibéricos (Madrid, 2004), offers a good short survey, while the long conflict, with special attention to the Reconquest and the twentieth century, is narrated in C. Vidal Manzanares, España frente al Islam: De Mahoma a Ben Laden (Madrid, 2004).
5. I. V. Gaiduk, The Great Confrontation: Europe and Islam through the Centuries (Chicago, 2003), presents a broad survey that includes eastern Europe.
6. See M.Bonner,Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, N.J., 2006).
7. R. Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710-797 (Oxford, 1989), is the second volume of the multivolume Blackwell's History of Spain edited by John Lynch and effectively summarizes and analyzes the data available at the time of writing, though new studies continue to appear.
8. "Al-Andalus" means, approximately, "the West," although the etymology is not clear.
9. On the complete predominance of oriental culture and forms, see P. Guichard, Al-Andalus: Estructura antropológica de una sociedad islámica en Occidente (Barcelona, 1976). The key study of the initial phase is P. Chalmeta, Invasión e islamización: La sumisión de Hispania y la formación de al-Andalus (Jaén, 2003). T. F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (Princeton, N.J., 1979), is also useful. Guichard's De la expansión arabe a la Reconquista: Esplendor y fragilidad de Al-Andalus (Granada, 2002), presents one of the best general portraits of AI-Andalus.
10. A. G. Chejne, Muslim Spain: Its History and Culture (Minneapolis, 1974), iv.
11. It should be remembered that a subject Christian population, much of it also speaking a form of vernacular Latin or early Romance, survived in the northern Maghrib during the same time period as that of the Mozarabs of Al-Andalus. Although its territory had begun to shrink and decline as early as the fourth century, much of the Romanized area of the northern Maghrib had been firmly Christian in religion (even more so than some parts of Roman western Europe) and at times in close contact with Visigothic Hispania. Under Muslim domination it suffered the same pressures and fate as the Mozarabs, and also succumbed to the Almohads by the twelfth century.
12. On the initial achievements of Islamic culture and the place of Islamic society in history, see M. G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of lslam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), and Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History (Cambridge, 1993).
13. J. Van Ess, The Flowering of Muslim Theology (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), is a good introduction.
14. Though for centuries San Isidoro was probably read by proportionately more people, Juan Verner has observed that in his influence on Western philosophy Averroes was the most influential thinker born in the Iberian Peninsula, even if he was not "Spanish" but Muslim.
15. Though there is no doubt that Averroes was widely read, in recent years there has been a growing tendency to question the importance of Muslim cultural influence on Western thought and development, and even to question the significance of its role in transmitting ancient texts. See S. Gouguenheim, Aristóteles y el Islam: Las raíces griegas de la Europa cristiana (Madrid, 2009).
16. According to one study, cited in J. Verner, El Islam y Europa (Barcelona, 1982), 71, of the major Muslim writers and scientists studied in western Europe during the fifteenth century, eight had been born in the eleventh and eight in the twelfth centuries, but only two in the thirteenth and one in the fourteenth centuries, by which time Muslim intellectual culture was fading.
17. A brief treatment of black slavery in Al-Andalus and elsewhere in the Islamic world may be found in R. Segal, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York, 2001).
18. J. H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (January 1997): 143-65, calls attention, in my judgment correctly, to the importance of the influence and example of Islam in the early development of slavery among the Spanish and Portuguese.
19. B. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East:: An Historical Inquiry (Oxford, 1992).
20. J. Rodríguez Molina, La vida de moros y cristianos en la frontera (Alcalá la Real, 2007).
21. B. Vincent, "La cultura morisca," Historia 16 18 (October 1977): 78-95. The standard work on religious differences is L. Cardaillac, Moriscos y cristianos: Un enfrentamiento polémico (1492-1640) (Madrid, 1979).
22. E. K. Neuvonen, Los arabismos del Español en el siglo XIII (Helsinki, 1941), found that only one-half of 1 percent of the total vocabulary of literary Castilian in the thirteenth century stemmed from Arabic, but this does not account for additional Arabisms in local vocabularies, or the addition of further Arabisms in the later Middle Ages.
23. See E. Alfonso, "La construcción de la identidad judía en al-Andalus en la Edad Media," El Olivo 23.49 (1999): 5-24.
24. The fate of the enormous number of Spaniards and other west Europeans seized and enslaved during the early modern period — amounting in toto to possibly as many as a million people — is treated in R. C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (New York, 2003). On the Spanish experience, see E. G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison, 1983), and J. Martínez Torres, Prisioneros de los infieles: Vida y rescate de los cautivos cristianos en el mediterráneo musulmán (siglos xvi-xvii) (Barcelona, 2007). The most famous prisoner was Cervantes, whose captivity in Algiers has been recounted recently by M. A. Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale (Nashville, 2002). This experience was formative in the career of the great writer, and he referred to it frequently, in quite negative terms, though it did not prejudice him against Muslims, as evidenced by references in his classic novel. For that matter, one of his conceits was that Don Quijote had been translated from the work of "Cide Hamete Benengeli, historiador arábigo." And in the Middle Ages, the Arabs had produced great historians, more than — for example — great scientists.
25. A. Torrecillas Velasco, Dos civilizaciones en conflicto: España en el África musulmana: Historia de una guerra de 400 años (1497-1927) (Valladolid, 2006), 345-90, and, more broadly, M. Arribas Palau, Las relaciones hispano magrebíes en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, 2007).
26. S. Fanjul, Al-Andalus contra España: La forja del mito (Madrid, 2000), 86. See also his La quimera de al-Andalus (Madrid, 2004).
27. For these and further examples, see chaps. five through eight of S. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II (New Haven, Conn., 2008).

By Stanley G. Payne (translation) in "Spain, A Unique History", The University of Wisconsin Press, USA, 2011, (Originally published in Spain by Jesús Cuéllar as "España, Una Historia Única", Ediciones Temas de Hoy, S.A., 2008), chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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