This is another illustration of the dangers of whitewashed history: it becomes the foundation for contemporary political action. Here is a columnist in a North Carolina paper saying with a straight face that "we could do far worse...than imitating Spain's Islamic era at its best." Oh really? I am confident that Sarah-Ann Smith (a "former diplomat"!) didn't really mean that we should institute a Sharia state with institutionalized discrimination against Christians and Jews -- but that's because the whitewash of history she has read (Menocal's Ornament of the World) didn't tell her, except briefly and breezily, that those were elements of Muslim Spain at all.
From the Asheville Citizen-Times, with thanks to Anthony:
My recent trip to Spain has prompted some thoughts about our post-Sept. 11, 2001, relationship to the Islamic world. A wonderful book, "The Ornament of the World" by Maria Rosa Menocal, had excited my interest in Spain's medieval Islamic period, and I had to see the relics of that beautiful culture for myself....More important than the remains of the buildings is the culture they recall. In Islamic Spain adherents of all the three great Western religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - coexisted under a government that recognized their common biblical foundations. The Islamic system protected and gave each a place in the society as a whole - a place more tolerant by far than that accorded Jews and Muslims in the succeeding Christian era, dominated by the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.
As Menocal notes, "This was the chapter of Europe's culture when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance ... it found expression in the often unconscious acceptance that contradictions ... could be positive and productive."
The era ended in 1492, with the Spanish Christian monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand conquering the Alhambra, the last Muslim stronghold, and also expelling the Jews from Spain (as well as financing Christopher Columbus's journey of discovery).
Some Jews remained, perhaps as many as half the total number, along with an Islamic remnant, both being required to convert to Christianity. But, for the Jews at least, as contemporary Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina notes, "those who stayed behind ended up as alien in their homeland as those who left ... scorned not only by those who should have been their brothers in their new religion but also by those who remained loyal to the abandoned faith."
Thus, Molina demonstrates, present-day Spain continues to struggle with a past characterized by a diversity that its Christian rulers spurned 500 years ago. The Muslim issue has again become one that must be dealt with, and not only in terms of the terrorist threat demonstrated so tragically in last spring's train bombings that killed 192 people.
Spain currently has an active Islamic population, reaching close to a million, whose needs the Spanish authorities realize they must consider. Spanish Prime Minister Zapatera [sic] has called for "an alliance of cultures" between the West and the Islamic world, to isolate the violent fringe.
In 2003 a new mosque was opened in Granada to serve the city's estimated 15,000 Muslims. It was financed in large part by a United Arab Emirates sheik, to show, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, he reportedly said, "that Islam is fundamentally moral rather than political in nature." At the opening ceremony Granada's deputy mayor expressed the hope that the mosque would promote the religious tolerance that characterized the city in the past.
This event was far from free of controversy. The mosque's construction was delayed for years, partly by the opposition and lawsuits of local residents. And since the March bombings, many Spaniards have been even more nervous about the increasing numbers of North African Muslim immigrants, since the main suspects in the bombings are Moroccans. Others, however, recognize the importance of a dialogue with moderate Muslims. Spaniards' ambivalence is currently being played out in the trial of suspected terrorists, at which the former and current prime ministers are testifying.
From the point of view of an ordinary traveler, it appears that the understandable nervousness in the wake of the March bombings has not resulted in a paranoid anticipation of repeated terrorist acts. And the tourist industry at least is more than happy to highlight the magnificence of the remains of Spain's Islamic past.
Back home, I keep thinking of Spain's experience, contemporary and historical, in all its complexity, and realize that, for better or worse, we're all in this post- Sept. 11 world together - Christian, Muslim, Jew and, yes, secularist.
And the only way to genuine peace and security, and freedom from fear, is through tolerant acceptance and appreciation of our differences and mutual encouragement of the best in all our traditions. We could do far worse in this respect than imitating Spain's Islamic era at its best.
And now for some reality about Muslim Spain, first from Menocal herself. Even she acknowledges in her book that the laws of dhimmitude were very much in force in this Islamic paradise of tolerance:
The dhimmi, as these covenanted peoples were called, were granted religious freedom, not forced to convert to Islam. They could continue to be Jews and Christians, and, as it turned out, they could share in much of Muslim social and economic life. In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax — no Muslims paid taxes — and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.
So much for a paradise of tolerance and multiculturalism. Historian Kenneth Baxter Wolf observes that “much of this new legislation aimed at limiting those aspects of the Christian cult which seemed to compromise the dominant position of Islam.” After enumerating a list of laws much like Menocal’s, he adds: “Aside from such cultic restrictions most of the laws were simply designed to underscore the position of the dimmîs as second-class citizens.” These laws were not uniformly or strictly enforced; Christians were forbidden public funeral processions, but one contemporary account tells of priests merely “pelted with rocks and dung” rather than being arrested while on the way to a cemetery.
Yet if such laws were on the books in al-Andalus, then a fundamental premise of Menocal’s thesis (or what others like Sarah-Ann Smith have made of it) is undercut. If Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together peaceably and productively only with Christians and Jews relegated by law to second-class citizen status, then al-Andalus has precisely nothing to teach our age about tolerance. The laws of dhimmitude give all of Menocal’s accounts of Jewish viziers and Christian diplomats the same hollow ring as the stories of prominent American blacks from the slavery and Jim Crow eras: yes, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were great men, but their accomplishments not only do not erase or contradict the records of the oppression of their people, but render them all the more poignant and haunting. Whatever the Christians and Jews of al-Andalus accomplished, they were still dhimmis. They enjoyed whatever rights and privileges they had not out of any sense of the dignity of all people before God, or the equality of all before the law, but at the sufferance of their Muslim overlords.
There is more on this in Onward Muslim Soldiers.
This is obscene... like a Christian priest extolling the moral greatness of Apartheid South Africa to an audience of black folks. Muslim invaders set Spain back a millenium by wiping out the remnants of the Roman legacy. They brought the artichoke , though. They started a war that would last for eight centuries. Even worse: They turned Spanish Christianism into a hotbed for Torquemada-like extremists. The hatred was mutual, mind you. Cordoba´s main economical activity was the trade of slaves kidnapped in Christian Europe.
I wonder if the reason why the Spanish Inquisition was so bad, was because of the repression and brutality of Islamic domination.
Will someone please email this thread to the editors of that rag to let them know what an utterly ignorant woman this Ms. Smith actually is?
I would do it myself, but I am exhausted with trying to keep the tide from comming in as nobody seem sane anymore. It is terribly demoralizing to witness the death of reason and all the rest which we identify with without throwing ones arms up and surrendering to those forces that seem beyond anyones control.
Resigned to dhimmitude
Andrew, I know exactly the exhausted feeling..it is horrible to watch the basis of one's just and bountiful culture being undone, but we must never get exhautsted. I tried to pick up your baton but from here in Africa the internet is too slow to get the links to this Caroolina papaer going.
Peter
Andrew, I know exactly the exhausted feeling..it is horrible to watch the basis of one's just and bountiful culture being undone, but we must never get exhautsted. I tried to pick up your baton but from here in Africa the internet is too slow to get the links to this Caroolina papaer going.
Peter
Muslim Tolerance… isn’t that an oxymoron?
Muslim Tolerance…. Kinda like talking about tall midgets… or even tempered maniacs…. Or sweet smelling pig pens…. Or intelligent chickens… or the peaceful religion of Islam.
Maybe she should have been traveling in the Netherlands rather than Spain…. Although I have recently been to both and I must say… I was not struck by how tolerant the Muslims are.
It's interesting that nobody talks about the Almoravid and Almohad chapters in the history of Andaluz. These, who swept in in the 12th century and later, were as bigoted and nasty as Ferdinand the Catholic, only on the other side. There is evidence that Moses Maimonides and his family, for instance, were forcibly converted to Islam by these fanatics and reverted to Judaism after relocating in marginally more toleratn Egypt.
The brightness of Ummayad Spain--fairly decent for its time, which isn't saying much, but falling far short of Tang China (7th-9th centuries AD)--was done in not by the Christian reconquista, but by the Muslims themselves.
Even so, Ummayad Spain was aplace where the testimony of a dhimmi didn't count in a court of law and the inferior status of the dhimmi communities was always evident.
I guess this idiot must think invading another country and occupying it for 700 hundreds isn't such a bad thing as long as muslims are doing the invading and occupying.
Letters to the editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times (e-mail form):
http://www.citizen-times.com/contact/letters.shtml
"The Corrosive Hagiography of Muslim Spain" by Andrew G. Bostom:
http://search.netscape.com/ns/boomframe.jsp?query=The+Corrosive+Hagiography+of+Muslim+Spain+Andrew+Bostom&page=1&offset=0&result_url=redir%3Fsrc%3Dwebsearch%26requestId%3D59bbc0ffc449e7bf%26clickedItemRank%3D4%26userQuery%3DThe%2BCorrosive%2BHagiography%2Bof%2BMuslim%2BSpain%2BAndrew%2BBostom%26clickedItemURN%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.afsi.org%252FOUTPOST%252F2003OCT%252Foct1.htm%26invocationType%3D-%26fromPage%3DNSCPResults%26amp%3BampTest%3D1&remove_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.afsi.org%2FOUTPOST%2F2003OCT%2Foct1.htm
Link to Bostom's article at bottom.
This woman is actually suggesting that we lie back and enjoy the rape of our lifestyle. Well, stupid woman, just stay off my feet when you are bowing and scraping to your new masters. I will be the woman who is fighting this tooth and nail. I have no intention of giving anything to allah's people. Neither in tax or respect. Everytime I see one of their women in that damned headscarf, I have to restrain myself. It is a symbol of the coming conflict that we didn't ask for, that we would rather avoid, but we will fight. I will NEVER bow my knee to their god allah (Satan). My children have been taught that to accept allah or his false prophet muhammad is to accept hell. There are more and more people that are awakening to the truth about the muslim invaders among us.
This is Ibn Warraq's penetrating analysis of the myth of Islamic "tolerance", appropriately titled "Islamic Intolerance". This is a MUST reference for refuting the misinformation campaign underway here in the United States:
http://www.islamreview.com/articles/islamicintolerance.shtml
The difference is that religious supremacism is not institutionalized in the West as it was and is in Islam - people are not subjected to civil and religious incapacitations on account of their religious beliefs. In a nutshell, the difference is one of EQUALITY.
BTW, one thing you never hear from the whitewashing crowd is that Islamic "tolerance" was not theoretically extended to atheists and agnostics. As Bernard Lewis once pointed out, that went beyond the pale of Islamic "tolerance".
I found this article on Jewish history in Spain from a site that promotes (one may say 'even celebrates') Jewish history, culture, traditions and celebrations. I was amazed (given the bias of the source) at the opening of the article:
The article goes into length about the premiere status and many accomplishments of the Jews under the caliphate. Indeed, credence is given to Sarah-Ann Smith's article.
However (and there always is a 'gotcha' when muslims are involved), please let the editor's of the Asheville Citizen times know that their esteemed journalist omitted a crucial fact of history, which may also be found in the linked article referenced in the above link:
Whenever and wherever muslims are in charge, history teaches the end results are the same, convert, leave or die.
Maria Rosa Menocal took her doctorate in "Romance" Philology. That is fitting, for "romance" is what this book is all about. Cordova. O, dejami llorar, a las orillas del mar – no, I mean Guadalquivir. Practically the waters of Babylon. If not yet a song, something titled “Cordova in mi Corazon” should be, for it can be the theme-song of the Al-Andaluz Lesson-In-Tolerance movement.
Picture this, as someone says on television. Three grave scholars, full of venerable learning, their days spent in study, now walk together -- one Christian, one Muslim, one Jew – not noticing the outer world, as they conduct their animated and earnest discourse about First and Last Things, as they wander through – oh, perhaps la Juderia, with the narrow alleys that serpentine between white-washed walls, and if they were listening to the outer world, and not to their spiritual, inner one, they too would hear the gurgle of the fountains hidden behind those walls, in those beautiful inner courtyards, and if they looked up, just a bit, they would see those red gitanillas flowing over the shallow wrought-iron balconies, and perhaps the Jew turns out to be Maimonides himself, who so loved Cordova (funny, isn’t it, that he hightailed on out of the “Ornament of the World,” fleeing first to Fez, where he lived in disguise, and then finally to Cairo) – didn’t he?
For those who care to find out more about The Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal – one can simply google “jihadwatch” and “Menocal” and “Posted by Hugh” – which will save me the trouble of reposting the same thoughts again. Her book hasn’t changed in the last year, so the comments remain as judicious – or as impossibly unfair, depending on your point of view – as they ever were. But what the hell—here I will simply reprint one of them, which gets in most of the points made previously:
“Maria Rosa Menocal's fantasy, The Ornament of the World, is a perfect compendium of all the nonsense that has been passed off as history about Andalucia. Her bibliography, incidentally, fails to mention any of the authoritative sources on the history of Muslim Spain -- in particular, it does not even list (much less give any sign of her having actually read it) Evariste Levi-Provencal. Instead, her notions of Spain are right out of the works of romantic fiction -- Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (tales indeed) and Chateaubriand's Le Dernier des Abencerages. What is fine for Chateaubriand -- I mean, for god's sake, some of his best passages in the Memoires d'Outre-tombe are entirely fictional (see his sonorous sentences about a visit to New England – the passage that begins “j’ai vu les champs de Lexington" -- where he never was). For the purposes of fiction it is acceptable; you know, il sospiro del Moro, the nobility of those Muslims, the wonderful way Maimonides was treated (why, then, did he flee Moorish Spain)?
The failure to list, or even be aware of, the most authoritative studies of Moorish Spain would be disturbing in a high school paper. What makes it more worrisome, and perhaps representative of the age in which we live, is that Menocal, in her dreamy desire to emphasize convivencia and to ignore the realities of Muslim rule and the real status of non-Muslims subjugated to that rule (she has not the slightest idea of what dhimmitude entailed, or why a Jew could be a court doctor or even high-ranking official, while all of his co-religionists would still be subject to humiliation, degradation, and the permanent insecurity that was apparent, for example, in the massacre of Grenada's Jews in 1066 -- and he himself could in a New York or Cordova minute be thrust down himself) is no goofy armchair historian, without access to a library. No, she is presented to us as the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale. Yale, as I understand it, likes to think of itself as having some standards. Where are they?”
Posted by: Hugh at May 10, 2004 10:22 AM
For other postings that add branches to the bonfire, google as indicated above. And do keep in mind that when Bin Laden mentions, as he has, “Andaluz,” and when the Saudis name an important street in Jiddah, as they have, “Al-Andaluz Street”(the American consulate, recently attacked, sits right on the corner of Andaluz and Palestine – and so do we, so do we), Bin Laden and the Saudis are not exactly thinking of that wonderful convivencia that Menocal celebrates, even if much of it is a Washington-Irving figment of her "romantic" imagination (theme for future doctoral candidates in "Romance" literature,but probably not at Yale: "The Dangers of Over-Reading, or When Fiction Becomes Fact: Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, and Maria Rosa Menocal") but of something quite different, something more like what they have -- at home.
I consider myself quite knowlegeable on the matter of life in Spain during the 'Reconquista' times and have read many books on the subject long before the muslim problem became such in our days.
There was a very interesting controversy between two eminent Spanish scholars (Americo Castro and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz)who for a decade disputed about the proverbial harmonious coexistence among the three cultures of which the city of Toledo (where, by the way, I was born) is one of the supreme examples. It did not take me long to realize that the proponent of the basic lie that harmony was (C. Sanchez Albornoz)gave a vastly mor compelling account of the kind of situation it all was. I cannot translate in minutes the narration he offers of a particular episode in which all the nobility in Toledo were massacred by a duplicitous muzzie who attracted them into a sort of 'brotherhood' celebration.
In short, Christians, Jews and Muslims hated each other thoroughly and the former never stopped killing to or being killed by the latter group all along the eigth centuries (EIGHT CENTURIES!) it took my ancestors to get rid of the muslim scourge.
No offence intended to the Jews but I want to rest my case on reminding everyone that it took just three months to The Catholic Kings Isabelle and Ferdinand to decree the expulsion of them once the last Mahometan king (Boadbil)had been dethroned in Granada.
So much for harmony!
That story is pure crap and the Spaniards who propose it are just dhimmies by other name.
I've already sent my letter to the editor of this Asheville newspaper.
I wonder if he'll have some other ignorant "citizen writer" telling North Carolinians that the American enslavement of Africans was a "good thing" and something to reconsider reinstating.
Ah, nothing like time to whitewash history and make us all yearn for "the good ole days."
More real history of The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries as it pertains to islamic Spain...
How was it again? "Those who don't learn history are bound to repeat it" or something..
Unfortunately the reading of the original posting has given me such a headache that I'm having trouble pulling my ideas together. I'll keep it brief.
For all of you who really, and I mean really, want to know something about the history of Spain in the middle ages, and the so-called peaceful coexistence of the three religions, I would advice a look into other sources, such as:
+ Serafín Fanjul, who has published "La Quimera de Al-Andalus", and "España contra el Islam", both published by Siglo XXI. Serafín Fanjul gives no rosy account of the relations between jews, christians and moslems in this period, and his opinion highly qualified, since he is the professor who holds the chair of Arab Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
+César Vidal, who has published "España frente al Islam: de Mahoma a Ben Laden" in La Esfera de los Libros. Vidal has 3 Doctorate Degrees in History, Philosophy and Theology obtained, by the way, in the US.
And if you want to get rid of all your prejudices and misconceptions about the Spanish Inquisition, you would do well with checking Jean Dumont, a French historian specialized in Spanish history, who has researched and published a lot on this topic. The Spanish Inquisition was amazingly benign if you compared to the rest of the Inquisitions in Europe, England and France included. Refreshingly enough, he gives numbers, instead of repeating parrot-like what other people wrote before him. He should be translated into English, although for some reason his publishers (even the French one, Critérion), always make sure that only a few thousands of books are printed per title. Always sold out, it should make you think. For those of you who think that Spain was in the middle ages ridden with racism and that Jews lived in awful conditions, it would surprise you to know that Ferdinand was actually of Jewis origin: he belonged to the rich and powerful family of the Henriquez, as was the case with many rich and noble families.