We cannot be entirely sure how Muslims, Christians, and Jews regarded one another. Certainly, statements of enmity predominated, but these may not represent the reality of everyday life.37 But all the evidence suggests that even when there was no active antagonism, the communities wanted to remain separate. Moreover, what David Nirenberg calls the “background static” of violence “never receded from practical consciousness. It influenced the daily actions and strategies of minority and majority alike: what clothes to wear, what route to take to work, how to accuse an enemy of a crime—the list is endless.”38 The negative views each group held about the others were often reciprocal. Muslims believed viscerally in the other castes’ unbridled sexuality.39 Christians believed the same about Jewish and Muslim sexuality. In the last of the Siete Partidas, the Castilian law code of the early fourteenth century, the jurists consider the case of Jewish men who have intercourse with a Christian woman: “Jews who live with Christian women are guilty of great insolence and boldness, for which reason we decree that all Jews who, hereafter, may be convicted of having done such a thing shall be put to death.”40 The Muslims were subject to the same penalties. In all medieval societies sexual transgressions were considered subversive of the entire social order. An English edict of 1417 declared that “the illicit works of their lewd flesh [are] to the great abomination and displeasure of God.”41 But for Christian, Jew, and Muslim alike, sexual acts across the boundaries of caste were a higher order of wickedness, akin to sodomy. Peter Damian’s castigation of sodomitical acts in his Liber Gomorrhianus (c. 1050) conveys an attitude applicable to both manifestations of illicit carnality: “It pollutes the flesh; it extinguishes the light of the mind … it is this which violates sobriety, kills modesty, strangles chastity and butchers irreparable virginity with the dagger of unclean contagion. It defiles everything, staining everything, polluting everything … it permits nothing pure, nothing clean, nothing other than filth.”42
An infinity of traps and entanglements lay at the heart of convivencia. Sexual temptations across the caste boundaries were the most dangerous and contaminating. However, we should read the law codes and prohibitions less as a representation of what actually happened, and more as an effort to prevent the dangers of uncontrolled proximity. Islam never prohibited marriage between Muslim men and women of the other castes, while concubines or slaves were used sexually by men without regard to their faith. By law the children of Muslim men were supposed to follow the faith of their father. But the realities of human life, in the past as in the present, did not always correlate with the prescriptions of the law. All those instances that I have cited are from a period when the very concept of a mixed society had come to seem dangerous in the extreme, and these crimes were, I suspect, as much metaphors of the risks implicit in godless mixing as a serious attempt to prohibit actual conduct.43 In the minds of the pure in spirit only an absolute separation or isolation of Christian, Jew, and Muslim could achieve what they sought to accomplish by writ and the threat of punishment.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE CITY, TOWN, OR VILLAGE IN AL-ANDALUS was divided along invisible lines. Each community had its own zone, which outsiders might enter at their peril. Equally, through a fragile social consensus, other areas would be common ground: these might be a marketplace, a road, places where water was drawn or where clothes were washed.44 In Islamic Spain, the tribal element was added to the presence of the non-Muslim castes, and that too could provoke violence. There was a word in Arabic, nefra’a, to describe the “sudden panicky ‘snapping’ ” that breaks the peace of the suq.45 Convivencia could continue only so long as the physical or cultural barriers were not breached.46 Then there were also episodes of heightened religious or social tension, in which the sense of division between Christians, Jews, and Muslims was accentuated. But the daily practice of life was closer to what Américo Castro described as “integralism.”47 In defining “integralism” Castro fell back on cultural stereotypes for both Christians and Muslims.48 “The Moslem feels himself in things, the Hispano Christian feels things in himself, in his person.” For Castro, Muslims were poets and dreamers, Christians were activists: “The Spaniard speaks of himself, of his body, of his pleasures, and of his afflictions. Everything is justified and takes on value the moment it is referred to his person.”49 He found it hard to define how these two opposites interacted. But applied to these shared communities of Al-Andalus, with their endless internal boundaries and barriers which crisscrossed and intersected with one another, the idea of integralism makes sense. Cordoba or Seville, with its hundreds of districts and quarters, was a patchwork.
Arab, Berber, Christian, and Jewish zones were juxtaposed, their boundaries partly permeable and partly not.50 Linguistically certainly, and to a degree culturally, the various peoples of the cities were integral in the limited sense defined by Castro, but they also remained separate and isolated within their separate groups. Religion was often not the sole determinant: Arabs and Berbers, both Muslim, remained apart in their clans, and frequently fought each other. Christians and Jews stayed within the bounds allocated to them by the laws of Islam, but even within their communities there were distinct gradations of wealth and status.
The success of convivencia depended on this segmentation, on a settled social structure that permitted multiplicity. However, no effective grand theory has emerged from the long history of Al-Andalus after 711, and to talk of convivencia as a fixed and settled entity, as Castro did, is a mistake. It was a structure of concession in which there was a dramatic imbalance of power between the majority and the minorities. When that balance changed, then the former basis for coexistence vanished. In reality, the terms were constantly shifting in the equation between the minority and majority populations.
But it is also true that, with the qualifiers I have already indicated, first Islamic and then Christian states in the peninsula successfully accommodated minority populations. For the first three centuries, Christians coexisted with Muslims in Al-Andalus, and for the second three centuries, the Christian states of the north came to pragmatic arrangements with their Muslim minorities. However, there were two periods of great stress in which compromise was deliberately abrogated. One relates to Christians under challenge as a minority within an Islamic state, and the other to an embattled Muslim community within a Christian state. The first took place in the ninth century in Muslim Cordoba, where Christians deliberately sought martyrdom to redeem their early failure to resist Islam. The second was in Christian Spain throughout the sixteenth century, with its first epicenter in the old Kingdom of Granada. Here the victorious Christians decreed a radical policy of mass conversion. It ended with the ethnic cleansing of all the descendants of the “Moors.” The first episode—the martyrs of Cordoba—I shall discuss now. What came to be called the Morisco problem appears in the succeeding chapters. But both, I believe, revealed the consequences of fracturing the unspoken assumptions that had allowed convivencia to work. Here the lessons for the Balkans and the Levant today are very clear.
The Muslim population in Al-Andalus grew very rapidly during the first two centuries after the conquest. In the eighth century, Muslims were a small and isolated garrison. As they intermarried with the local population the number of Muslims by birth grew steadily. But the bulk of the growing Muslim community were not immigrants from North Africa or their children, but converts from Christianity. There were both individual conversions and the adherence of whole families, and perhaps even whole towns and districts, but there was no pressure for forced conversion. Christians and Jews were allowed to practice their faith but they were marginal, outside the main body of society in both economic and social terms. The demands that Islam made on its adherents were no greater than those of Christianity, and conversion was an attractive option, for non-Muslims were second-class citizens within Islamic society. As we have seen, in practice many of the more rigorous restrictions on Jews and Christians were not enforced, but the sense of inferiority, whether enforced by law or not, d
id not disappear.
In the mid–ninth century, however, there was an attempt among the more zealous Christians to arrest the erosion in their numbers and to stress the separation between Christians and Muslims. The Christian martyrdoms in Cordoba quickly formed what literary critics would term a topos, an easily recognized point at which a historical incident expanded to assume legendary or mythical proportions. These events for Christians came to epitomize the inevitable hostility between the two cultures. They magnified the antithesis between them so as to dramatize and laud the cultural identity of one community, and to demonize the other. Over time, and by accretion, these tales of a historic reality were transmuted into a potent subliminal sense of a fearsome, dangerous, alien power—a complex image built upon biblical prophecy, upon the shadowy character of the Antichrist, and upon a daily experience of the Muslim presence that seemed to exemplify all of these elements. In this mythopoeia, the events—the Muslim conquest and the martyrdoms—are added like new meat to a stockpot.51 They strengthened the mixture, blending, and eventually merging, into the simmering. In Christian theory this was, indeed, the wonderfully reinvigorating effect of the blood of the martyrs, as it spread and revived the Christian community. The tales of the martyrs, long after their sacrifice, were one of the most potent elements in the spiritual armory of the true believers.
Each individual understood the stories in his or her own way. The process is perhaps explained as “dissemination,” in the way that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida intends the term. In his view, the way that language is used means that each use—dissémination—disrupts any possibility of fixed or settled meanings. Every time a word is employed it generates a new and subtly different accretion. So the use of language is endlessly destabilizing: “The force and form of its disruption explode the semantic horizon.” There is no limit or end to this process of transformation, no telling what its effect might be. Derrida calls it “an irreducible and generative multiplicity.”52
In its historical context, the martyrs of Cordoba movement (like the myths of the hero king Pelayo) provided a “generative multiplicity.” As we shall see, one martyrdom stimulated another, not through any obvious mechanism but apparently spontaneously. Yet the spontaneity was conditioned by the way in which the seed of martyrdom took root, and by the way in which the rapidly evolving legend of the martyrs was disseminated. What becomes significant here is not the fine detail of the events in Cordoba but their mythopoeic potential. These symbolic acts were resonant and effective in the Iberian peninsula long after the precise historical context in which they had emerged had disappeared. By that point they had become generic, and applicable in a multitude of circumstances. Perhaps symbolic acts, myth, and legend are more potent in some cultures than in others. Iberia (like the Balkans and the Levant) seems, over the centuries, to have been highly susceptible to these influences, where the dead past enters the living present. This process is evident in the stories of the fall of the Visigothic kingdom that were disseminated and formed the foundation myth of Christian Spain.
The ease of the conquest and the speed with which many native Christians converted to Islam led to the growth of a flourishing Arabic culture and to the decay of Christian society. In the eyes of zealous Christians, only self-sacrifice could redeem what Christian vice had permitted in the first place. To make the self-destruction of the martyr more plausible, the horrific consequences of the fall had to be accentuated. This was not easy. Al-Andalus, with some exceptions, fulfilled its Qur’anic obligations to its non-Muslim minorities. Jews and Christians paid the poll tax and were allowed to exercise their faiths. The Christian martyr movement of the mid–ninth century was a protest against increasing assimilation, rejecting the slow decay of both their culture and their faith. Among Christians in the great cities of Al-Andalus, Arabic had replaced Latin as the sophisticated language of culture, while an amalgam of Arabic, Romance dialect, and Berber became a language of home and the street.53 A rich young Cordovan, Alvarus, became the biographer of Eulogius, himself the recording angel for the Christian martyrs of Cordoba. Alvarus conveyed a deep sense of loss in Christian culture.
My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the works of Mohammadan theologians and philosophers not in order to refute them, but to acquire correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be found who reads the Latin Commentaries on Holy Scriptures? Who is there that studies the Gospels, the prophets, the Apostles? Alas, the young Christians who are most conspicuous for their talents have no knowledge of any literature or language save the Arabic … The pity of it! Christians have forgotten their own tongue, and scarce one in a thousand can be found to be able to compose in fair Latin to a friend.54
Alvarus observed two attitudes toward Islam among contemporary Mozarabes. He was not talking about those souls, the muwallid—Christians who had converted to Islam. The majority of Christians recognized the power of Islamic culture, and sought to benefit from it. A minority aimed to create an impenetrable wall around the Christian community. In the manner of dissident and revolutionary groups throughout history, the members of this minority created a demonic enemy as a myth to sustain their resistance. They did so through the traditional weapon of the weak: symbolic action, propaganda by the deed.
The deed was to be martyrdom, which would serve to construct a black legend of an Islam that put the martyrs to death. In this image of Islam, two elements prevailed: the first was sensuality, and the other cruelty. Muslim cruelty, it was suggested, had a habitual viciousness about it. Violation of virgins, destruction of altars and holy books, and wanton slaughter were crimes all on a par. The commission of one implied a propensity for all the others. The factual details of the martyrs’ movement can be simply stated. Over a period of nine years, forty-eight Christians came to the capital of Al-Andalus, Cordoba, and deliberately brought a public death upon themselves by denouncing the Prophet Mohammed as a false prophet. Similarly, blaspheming in a Western Christian country, as did many pagans and heretics, would also have attracted a capital penalty. The first to die was rather different from the others, and his story illustrates the nature of the relationship between the religious groups in the city before the movement for self-martyrdom began. He was a Christian priest called, appropriately, Perfectus. Fluent in Arabic, he often talked with Muslims in the market, and it seems clear that matters of belief and faith were frequently discussed. One day he was asked what he thought of their Prophet. At first he demurred, for he recognized the danger, saying that they intended to entrap him, and have him put to death. They denied this, and guaranteed they would not denounce him. He then told them that Christians considered the Muslims’ Prophet as “the servant of Satan.”
Perfectus overstepped the boundary between what was permissible and what was not. There is no indication in Alvarus’s account of why he took this fatal step. Initially those with whom he had debated let it pass, but by doing so they were implicated in his blasphemy, and later they shouted out in the market that he had blasphemed against the Prophet.55 Perfectus was then taken before the judge (qadi). When his guilt was proved according to the law, he received the only sentence possible: death. After many months, on April 18, 850, he was finally brought out for execution before a ribald crowd celebrating the end of Ramadan. Facing the sword of the headsman, he shouted out loudly time and again, “Yes, I did curse your Prophet, and I curse him now. I curse him as an impostor, an adulterer, a child of Hell. Your religion is of Satan. The pains of Gehenna await you all.” Only the falling blade silenced his firm and strident declarations.
The Christians of the city reclaimed his body from the execution ground and reopened the ancient tomb of St. Acisclus, a saint who had suffered martyrdom under the emperor Diocletian (and who would be reburied, centuries later, in what had become Perfectus’s own church). There, led by the bishop of Cordoba, an elaborate ceremony was held as the corpse was interred as a new martyr amid the hallowed bones of the established s
aint. This was a deeply symbolic act, physically conjoining the earlier saint, a martyr, with his successor, Perfectus. Soon after, another Christian called John was whipped after being accused of taking the Prophet’s name in vain.56 That he was not condemned to death, although many Muslims demanded it, indicated that the legal authorities were not seeking to conduct a purge of Christians or inflame Christian opinion. Rather, it seems, the reverse. The judge interpreted this new instance as leniently as he could, and was criticized for it.
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 11