It's hard to have a fruitful dialogue when one side has contempt for the other. One dhimmi even dared not to speak Arabic. From the Telegraph, with thanks to Susan:
A conference called to further mutual understanding between Christians and Muslims over their shared history on the Iberian peninsula has been marred by catcalling and acrimony. The meeting was summoned by the Spanish royal family and the socialist government as a "congress of dialogue" with representatives of the Arab and Jewish world.It was held in Cordoba, a jewel of Islamic Spain and a springwell for the enlightenment that led to the historic period of conviviencia when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony.
The conference organisiers, led by the financer of the event, the Kuwaiti tycoon Abdul Aziz al-Babtain, set out to confront stereotypes of Islamic extremism.
But even the supposedly benign field of Islamic poetry and the history of Andalusia - known to the Moors and to modern Arabs as al-Andalus - touched raw nerves.
An academic speaking in English was heckled by jeering Arabs even though there were extensive translation facilities. In the end, he spoke in Arabic.
But the peace was shortlived. There was more shouting when European historians touched on Islamic sensibilities by discussing the more liberal era when Muslim women did not wear the veil. An African Muslim was also heckled for complaining of Arab dominance of his faith.
The only Jew to speak was heard in polite silence, but it was assumed that was because he was preaching the destruction of Israel, which he described as an apostatic state: a point of view which presumably went down rather well with the audience. It was uncertain, though, how this squared with the seminar's title of "Arab-Islamic civilisations and the West: from Disagreement to Partnership".
The organisers described the event as a success but the angry tone of the debate will have disappointed Spain's new government.
"It was held in Cordoba, a jewel of Islamic Spain and a springwell for the enlightenment that led to the historic period of conviviencia when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony."
Tripartite harmony in Al-Andalus, that old myth again? When will people, and historians in particular, be honest and forthright about this? There was never peaceful co-existance in Muslim Spain, there was in reality 800 years of war, oppression and persecution of dhimmis, constant fighting between the Arab ruling classes and the majority Berber Muslims, and the usual Muslim wars between provinces under disparate "princes" each struggling for dominance over the other.
Only Muslims consider this kind of constant warring peaceful.
This is no surprise. That a minority Muslim population can bully a majority Spanish population through intimidation and uncivilized behavior.
It is easy to imagine that they operate beyond the relm of fear for their own safety and use our principles of fairness and cultural universality as a societal bludgeon,slowly desensitizing the Spanish masses until a revival of Al-Andalus is a real possibility.
Who can forget how the body of the Spanish police officer Francisco Javier Torronteras, was dragged from his crypt, burned and hacked after the March 11th attacks by "vandals".
That is the mentality of the foe we are facing. they will not rest until Eurabia makes Al-Andalus possible. Then the statue of St. James, the Moor Slayer will go the same way as the ancient Buddhist statues in Afganstan.
Islam, the monkey-see, monkey do faith
Yes, it's all happening in vintage 2004 "socialist" Spain that uninvites US troops from the annual national military parade and welcomes ex members of Franco's Blue Division who fought on the Nazi side on the Eastern Front,like the Bosnia division of the Waffen SS, raised by Haj Amin El-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem under the Palestine Mandate.
Didn't the organizers know what "building bridges" means in Islam? It means that kaffirs must sit passively by and listen to the Muslims puff themselves up endlessly about how great their "culture" and religion are, while also listening passively to them denigrate and demean your own culture and religion.
The myths about Islamic Spain (known collectively as the "myth of Andalucia") have their origins in the romantic writers of the early 19th century. Just as Sir Walter Scott, venturing beyond Scotland, painted a completely fictional portrait of the "noble Saracens" tutoring thhe Christians in chivlarous behavior, so the myths of wonderful toleranet Andalucia owes its existence to two highly imaginative works by convincing writers,"Tales of the Alhambra" by Washington Irving and "Le Dernier des Abencerages" by Chateaubriand. The latter, of course, thought nothing of making things up even about his own life -- as some of his entirely fictional trips set down as fact in "Memoires d'Outre-Tombe."
The apotheosis of this is the dreamy effort of Maria Rosa Menocal, entitled "Ornament of the World," which purports to be about Cordoba, where "three faiths" worked harmoniously blah-blah-blah a lesson and hope for our age blah-blah-blah Maimonides blah-blah-blah. Now the first thing to know about this impressionistic fantasy is that it completely ignores, does not even mention in its bibliography, any of the major scholarly works on Muslim Spain -- including those of Evariste Levi-Provencal, of Dufourcq, of Bousquet, of many others. It ignores a good deal else as well, including Maimonides' own words: "...the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they..."
This is particuarly disturbing because this book received all sorts of praise, including some uncharacteristic guff from Fouad Ajami. The author is a "professor at Yale" and the "Director of the Whitney Humanities Center." Well, no one takes academic standards very seriously anymore, what with Cornel West being snapped up at Princeton, and Rashid Khalidi offering his PLO propaganda at Columbia, and the "post-colonial hegemonic discourse" still apparently in full swing. And one cannot here resisit the temptation of noticing that more than one teacher of literature has publicly expressed his long-past-receiving-of-tenure version of a deathbed conversion, and publicly admits that all that theory, that post-hegemonic discourse, whether of the Derrida-delirium, or Saidian swamp variety, was a monstrous error, and that one would do better to teach students in this audiovisiual age to read books with attention, affection, and a well-stocked mind. (See Frank Lenticchia, et al, who have attempted to express more or less the same thing).
Islamic Spain was far from being a paradise. Cordoba was no "ornament of the world." Maimonides had to flee the city because of the persecution of the Alhohads, but as Andrew Bostom points out in his "The Corrosive Hagiography of Muslim Spain," even before the Alhomads, the treatment of non-Muslims was dismal. When the Jewish viziers Samuel ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph were both murdered, and then the entire Jewish community of Grenada -- home of the "Alhambra" of which Washington Irving sung -- it was not something without deep Islamic roots.
A well-known jurist and poet of Muslim Spain may have helped to promote the Grenada massacres in his famous anti-Jewish poem:
"Bring them [the Jews] down to their place and Return them to the most abject station. Thjey used to roam around us in tatters Covered with contempt, humiliation, and scorn. They used to rummage amongst the dungheaps for a bit of a filthy rag To serve as a shroud for a man to be buried in...Do not consider that killing them is treachery. Nay, it would be treachery to leave them scoffing."
In all of the history of Islam, in all the 1400 years of conquest, there is only one story where there is even a colorable claim for "tolerance" and that is Muslim Spain. But Richard Fletcher's "Moorish Spain" and the scholarship of Levi-Provencal and others, all show that this "tolerance" was born from the Romantic poets-in-prose, such as Irving and Chateaubriand, and is directly contradicted by the historical evidence. The records of the Muslim jurists, such as Ibn Abdun, confirm the myth of tolerance. In his opinion on the treatment of the Christians and Jews of Seville Ibn Abdun insisted that "No...Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristorcrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to accost them with the greeting, 'Peace be upon you'.. In effect, 'Satan has gained possession of them, and caused trhem to forget God's warning. They are the confederatses of Satan's parth; Satan's confederates will surely be the losers! (Quran 58:19). A disstinct sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recongnized aand this willbe for them a form of disgrace." This has not prevented such Muslim apologists as Abdul Rauf t prevent the Muslim apologists such as Abdul Rauf from starting their own little "Cordoba Dialogues" and suchlike; it does not prevent the sentimental and sloppy, such as Menocal, from adding their embarrassing mite (if I were she, I would try to recall all copies of the book, or at least publicly announce that she will never, ever, publish a book without doing her homework again -- and write that on the blackboard at the Whitney Humanities Center 100 times, to be followed by a lesser mea culpa from Fouad Ajami for the blurb he gave her -- if he does not know the truth about Andalucian Spain, he is certainly capable of learning it), and it will not prevent Zapotero and other Spaniards from wanting so desperately to believe that once upon a time, in an ancient land called Andalucia, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived happily together.
When the new mosque in Grenada was opened with on July 10, 2003, marking "a return of Islam to Spain," a conference was held in Granada at the same time. Andrew Bostom notes in one of his several articles on the myth of Andalucia that "the keynote speaker at this conferec,e Umar Ibrhaim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, implored Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by switching to gold dinars, and ceasing to use Western currencies), while the German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told attendees not to adapt their Islamic religious practices to accomodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment) values."
Oh, al-Andaluz, al-Andaluz. Cordoba, and the red gitanillas flowing over the balconies above the whitewashed walls flanking the narrow alleys, and from outside one can hear the pleasing plash of fountains in the inside hidden courtyears, and one can see, in one's imaginative mind's eye, venerable old scholars, one Muslim, one Jew, one Christian (in a kind of backdated Benetton ad), walking together, talking animatedly of philosophy and spiritual manners, in an atmosphere of the highest mutual regard and understanding -- for that was Al-Andaluz, wasn't it? -- and the smell of the orange blossoms, and in the distance a glimpse of the Guadalquivir, and....fill in the rest yourself, courtesy of the Tourist Board of Spain or your own imagination.
The Myth of Andalucia originates in the Western Romantic movement. And it is also linked with the human need to believe in a Golden Age; in the Western world, this myth has been summed up by Harry Levin, in his essay on "The Myth of the Godlen Age in the Renaissance." (The same "myth of the Golden Age" has a Muslim version -- the Sunna or behavior of Muhammad, and the kind of life the Prophet and the Companions led, which was perfect in all respects).
And nowadays, in an age which we think of as tough-minded, realistic, skeptical, and so on, the dreamily romantic myth-making about Islam lives on for geopolitical reasons. It is difficult to face reality and a threat that will not disappear, not through word-conjuring, nor logic-chopping, nor further protesting-too-much that Islam is a "religion of peace and tolerance." Too much evidence, and more of it every day, suggests the opposite.
So we are left with a myth of Al-Andaluz that requires ignorance of the facts to survive, and many -- Menocal is hardly alone, and hardly the worst offender -- are happy to oblige. Yet even these romanticizers who write of Al-Andaluz as the great exemplar of tolerance, also consider it to be, at best, a unique example in the long 1400-year history of Islam -- which already is a way of admitting that the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam in general was not a paraidse of "tolerance" and fruitful mutual accomodation.
How pleasant it would be to make of history what it was not. How wonderful to think that at least once, just once, in the whole long history of Muslim conquest, there really was one spot where there was real tolerance, not the tolerance that is purchased by the Christians and Jews through payment of the jizya, and submission in a hundred ways to a crushing regime of permanent degradation, humiliation, and physical insecurity. No wonder it is not only non-Muslims who like to imagine such a world, but also those Muslims who feel they must stick with Islam, they cannot jettison that belief-system with which their entire civilization, their ancestors, and they themselves are so identified, and so must create, or must believe in, a mythical world of past tolerance that is now being "ruined" by these Bin Ladens and the others who have "hijacked a great religion."
Oh, the Will to Believe is strong. One wants to believe in Eden, and Santa Claus, and Endless Peace (das ewige Frieden), and once upon a time living happily ever after, in the thrice-nine kingdom, over hill and down dale, and the princesse lointaine awakened by her prince, and in the "buzzin' of the bees/In the cigarette trees/Near the soda water fountain/At the lemonade springs/Where the bluebird sings/On the big rock candy mountain."
Dream-worlds do no harm -- except in cases of civilizational peril. If dreams, about the past or about the present, prevent sensible measures from being taken to prevent mass war, and to prevent the disappearance of one's own imperfect, silly, but still-wortth-defending Infidel civilization, then the hollowness of those dream-worlds, whether the creation of Romantic writers or of slapdash historians, aided by a publishing industry without standards, must be exposed.
The reality of Muslim Spain should be based on a familiarity with Levi-Provencal and other scholars of that period. One's views should not consist of repeating phrases about "how wonderfully people of all faiths got along in Andalucia -- gosh, why can't we just do that again." Schoolgirl gush is not permissible in current grim circumstances. Some "congress of dialogue." Some "springwell (sic) for the enlightement." Some convivencia.
For me the mythical "pax al-Andaluz" is synonymous with the Reconquista which began with the victory of Pelayo at Alcama in 718 A.D. and ended with the expulsion of Boabdil of Granada on January 2, 1492 A.D. marking the end of the 780-year Moorish infestation. They did it then, we can do it now.
To Hugh- Thank you, thank you thank you and another 1000 thank you's.
I've heard the "how peaceful and tolerant moorish spain was before those awful christians destroyed it" a million times, now I've got a superb handle on how it really was, I can follow up with some study on the points you raised.
I've heard the islamintern line on spain from people who haven't even an inkling of what islam is, the people who trot out "but islam is a religion of peace" like bloody stepford wives because they've heard it from the media over and over again.
You, being light years in advance of someone like myself in knowledge and understanding of islam and it's imperialist agenda, must cringe inside when you listen to the bleating of the dhimmilambs, how do you control yourself?
Kundalini yoga, composing clerihews, Kripke S5 modal logic, and a stiff drink with dinner.
DAMN!!!!!
I'm hopeless at yoga, dunno what a cleryhew is, not sure if if I've ever encountered Kripke thingummywhatsit and I don't drink (no religious reason, it doesn't agree with my metabolism)
I guess I'll stick to the herbal tea and swearing loudly, usually works.
Thanks again for the always informative and enlightening posts, your time and patience in providing such crucial information is greatly appreciated.
Seems to be a common theme. Whenever these sorts of "dialogues" are held, if you don't spout platitudes about Islam, you're booed and jeered. That's if you're lucky enough to be allowed to speak or even into the country in the first place. Correct me if I'm wrong, but speakers like Daniel Pipes have had major battles to be "allowed" to speak. Mr. Shoebat wasn't even allowed into Canada and had to speak via video-conferencing. Then Concordiastan University in Montreal has had a few such run-ins with your feral, rabid anti-free-speech loony-left/Islamic types when it came to Jewish speakers being allowed to speak. I'm sure there are quite a few more examples.
They basically bully us into silence. Hard to get the right message out when you're threatened or stopped from saying anything in the first place. How did we get to this point? I thought the West was about free speech?
"The scholar Hugh
One of the few
With courage to call a spade a spade
And put all others in the shade
(Not for him the taquiyya
Of those who issue the fat(i)wa)
Clerihew: 4 lined poem, usually about a person or character, aa, bb with first a usually the person's name. Metre often mangled, as above.. where is the poetess when you need her?
Typical Islamic reaction. Aggressively demanding "respect" and "tolerance" for their "beliefs" and "culture" while giving none back. And they wonder why people don't like them.
Setanta-
Go raibh mile maith agat a chairde.
is mise le meas,
saoirse.
What have we here? A devotee of Myles na gCopaleen, outward bound for Booterstown and points south, I presume?
I should of course, never be surprised at your scholarship, Hugh, but dare I express just a frisson of delight at your taking the trouble to render the eclipsis in the writers name 100% correctly, with a small "g" and a capital "C"?
And to think that one of the adherents of the ROP on another thread has called us all ignorant f***s.
As you yourself have outlined on other posts, think what we stand to lose, should this new dark age triumph over us.
Hugh, it's late here in England, outside it's dark and the rain is falling steadily. But I'm going to go to bed a happy man because your above post was fantastic. The way you combine your knowledge of islam with your lyrical descriptions of past events and places (real and imagined) make your posts a joy to read. Your eloquence and knowledge make me realise that we ARE on the right side in this war. Any plans to combine your posts into book form ?
Saoirse, a chara,
Nil ach cupla focal agam....
Never could get through Flann O'Brien - I must lack a gsoh!
Is mise le mhor meas
Setanta
Setanta - Excellent!, I thought you'd have some of the mother tongue, given the posting name of the big "C" before he took up the job with Culann.
No harm in a cupla focal to add a little Celtic flavour, just goes to show that the enemies of jihad are many and various.
Plus I've realised my own stock of focals needs sharpening up, I wrote Chairde instead of Chara.
Nice to talk to you, adh mor ort agus slan go foill.