Culture in the Time of Tolerance: Al-Andalus as a model for our own time

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

The story [of al-Andalus] as we conventionally hear it begins in 711 with the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar, but that is the wrong year to remember. If you tell the story not as a foreign invasion but rather as the foundation of a new polity in a new land, the foundational years are really 750 and then 755-56. Armies had crossed the strait and settlers settled nearly the whole of the Iberian peninsula beginning in 711, but that first generation of Muslims in medieval Europe was, unsurprisingly, mostly made up of outlanders: frontiersmen who had little notion of anything other than being at the furthest outer reaches of a civilization--the Maghreb, the "Wild West"--whose center was months' travel away, in Damascus.
But in 750 a dramatic revolution occurred in Damascus. The ruling family--the Umayyads, who for a hundred years had been the caliphs, heirs to the Prophet himself--was not only overthrown but brutally massacred by the Abbasids. One plucky young scion of the royal family managed to escape and elude capture for five years, although he was being hunted by the unforgiving Abbasids. Like most or perhaps all new regimes, the Abbasids felt a powerful urge to create their own legitimacy, breaking from the past they were replacing. They wanted no trace of the older caliphate--indeed, they even moved the capital itself, abandoning glorious but distinctly Umayyad Damascus and moving the center of the Islamic world east to Baghdad. Abd al-Rahman, the prince who was the single Umayyad survivor, miraculously escaped by going west, to the farthest frontier of the then-young and inchoate empire to find refuge among his mother's people, the Berbers. But by the time he got there, many of these tribesmen had settled across the strait from their ancestral North African lands. Abd al-Rahman decided he too would find a new home in those territories already called al-Andalus. In 756, with barely a whimper of opposition from the man who believed himself the emir, the governor, Abd al-Rahman moved into the old city of Córdoba and declared it the new House of the Umayyads, the legitimate continuation of the ruling family that the Abbasids thought they had exterminated and replaced. Here, on the banks of the Guadalquivir--the wadi-al-kabir or "big river"--there took possession of the consciousness of this new place a bitter rivalry with Baghdad's claim of descent from the Prophet and the first caliphs.

Once again we are victims of that anachronistic habit of telling history looking backward, as if while it happens it is inexorably going toward its inevitable outcomes. Among the many things about the centuries-long presence of Islam in Europe that are obscured by this, by the fact that the center of Islam was not permanently moved to southern Europe, are all the ways in which the Andalusians thought they were the real thing. Beginning with that first, triumphant, Anastasia-like young man, an Umayyad who believed the Abbasids were illegitimate and murderous pretenders, al-Andalus was in their own minds the authentic continuation of the cultural and religious traditions of Islam. Within a very few years of establishing himself in Córdoba and resigning himself to permanent exile, Abd al-Rahman began to build the most visible symbol of the survival of the Umayyad polity and of the rise of Andalusian Islam - the Great Mosque of Córdoba, which, unlike that in Seville, has mercifully survived the early modern period's virulently anti-medieval biases. Few mosques in the Islamic world speak so eloquently, or so loudly, to that sureness of being at the center of God's universe.
God's universe, in al-Andalus, had three principal and interlocking features which are at the heart of its importance for us, and which were in its own time at the heart of that culture's extraordinarily vigorous well-being: ethnic pluralism, religious tolerance, and a variety of important forms of what we could call cultural secularism--secular poetry and philosophy--that were not understood, by those who pursued them, to be un- or anti-Islamic. Of course, all three are inherently possible in Islam. One might even say they are inherently mandated by Islam. But few Islamic polities have done it as well as al-Andalus did, nor for as long, nor with greater long-term impact and dazzling results. The Christian Alcazar and the Jewish synagogue we have just looked at are two of its most visible tokens, but they are far from unique.
So let us look at these core qualities and values that so shaped medieval culture. Beginning but not ending with the line of Umayyad caliphs who, after Abd al-Rahman I--himself half-Syrian and half-Berber--were almost without exception the sons of former Christian slaves from the far north, the Muslims of al-Andalus were striking in their ethnic diversity. The leadership and much of their sometimes imaginary ancestry were Syrian; most of the foot-soldiers were first-generation, immigrant Berbers; and the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula, from whom within a few generations the majority of the Muslims descended, in part or in whole, were ethnically no different from those who remained Christian: Celto-Iberians and Romans and Visigoths. There were also substantial communities of Jews who had arrived in Iberia with the Romans and who had been notoriously abused and even enslaved by the last of the corrupt Visigothic governments. The Jews were certainly not the only group in the eighth century optimistic that the Muslims would be more benign rulers than the Visigoths had been. The number of Muslims in Iberia grew exponentially during the next several hundred years not because more "Arabs" came to live there, but because the original inhabitants of the peninsula converted to the dominant faith in overwhelming numbers.
The unconverted Christians and Jews, called the dhimmi, of al-Andalus, were thus not very different ethnically from their brothers and neighbors who did convert; and soon enough they were not very different in other crucial ways, since Christians and Jews were thoroughly and mostly enthusiastically Arabized within a relatively short period of time. The Andalusian Christians were even called the Mozarabs or must'arab, or "wanna-be-Arabs" and there is a wonderful Latin lamentation from Alvarus, a ninth-century churchman of Córdoba, complaining that young Christian men can barely write decent letters in Latin but are so in love with Arabic poetry that they can recite it better than the Muslims themselves. Identity, here as in the rest of medieval Europe, was a very complex thing and many people did not shy away from embracing what would seem impossibly contradictory to others--to Alvarus, for example, or to us moderns, nurtured from the Renaissance on to believe that harmony and unity and coherence are good and advanced things.