Res nulius

Res nulius

Since September 11, and arguably since the death of Franco, al-Andalus has become a major theme in historico-political debates about Spain, Europe, and relations between “the Islamic world” and “the West”. In many ways it seems to me that this is a good thing because it is predicated on a rejection of the ideas that we can only know our world from the present we see around us and the notion that we are necessarily morally superior to our forebears. There are aspects of the appropriation of Andalusi history which are pretty problematic, one of which I want to discuss today, but even then such accounts are challenged by others and thus, one hopes, a more nuanced historico-political conversation develops.

The book I wish to look at is Gustavo de Aristegui’s La Yihad en España: La obsesión por reconquistar Al-Ándalus [Jihad in Spain: The Obsessive Idea of Reconquering Al-Andalus] (Madrid: La esfera de los libros, 2005). De Arestegui seems well-qualified to write on such a topic in that he is a career diplomat who has served in the Arab-Islamic world, whilst also working as an academic in International Relations and has published opinion pieces in the Spanish and international press. I won’t be able to address the totality or complexity of his case here, but I want to look at one particular passage on the political consequences of historical work which surprised me. The reason it surprised me is that it forced me to reconsider what I had regarded as being some pretty surely- and strongly-held views of my own.

Anyhow, here is a rough translation of the passage in question (392-93):

It is critical for my argument that we make it clear that the identity politics of radical nationalists [jihadists] serve the Islamic historical thesis that Spain did not exist at the moment of the Arab conquest, that it was a kind of blank state [res nulius] which was occupied and made into a state by Muslims. One of the consequences of this narrative is that the Reconquista is seen as an aggressive crusade or form of colonialism. Such a view is held even by moderates such as Ziauddin Sardar and it, of course, coincides with expansionist and imperialist designs of contemporary Jihadists.

Now the reason why this passage has startled me somewhat is that it made me doubt how blank that ‘blank state’ of Iberia was in 711. The traditional view of anti-nationalist, anti-Francoist historians, has been that Iberia was something of a ‘blank slate’ and the reason that we have believed this is because of the battles which took place between so-called continuity and discontinuity historians. The former group alleged that the Reconquista was a good thing because it re-established the ‘natural’ Gothic and Christian Spanish identity which had been disrupted by Arabs and Muslims, while the discontinuity theorists contended that much of Spanish identity was in fact forged at the time of al-Andalus (evidenced in food, language, architecture, pastimes, artistic styles, philosophy etc etc). Now, reading de Aristegui, I wonder if the liberal discontinuity historians have in fact taken things too far. After all, to the inhabitants of Iberia in 711 C.E. their land was by no means a blank slate – it was a place of normality and a place with a rich, cosmopolitan history, with distinct Gothic, Roman, Phoenician and indigenous Iberian cultural facets.

De Arestegui’s citing Ziauddin Sardar in this context also interested me. I am a big Sardar fan and consider him one of the most important current writers on Islamic culture, most especially in The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur which is perhaps the best “travel” book I’ve ever read. That said, the more I read Sardar, and most especially in his autobiography, the more I am suspicious of his politics, or rather the political implications of his account of his faith. Even clever and complex people can have dubious political views and I am more and more convinced that Sardar’s lifelong quest for an Islam which he can live with, has repeatedly led him to a narrow and constricting account of faith which is just like the one identified by De Arestegui that we find in jihadist literatures which call for a just reconquest of al-Andalus by Muslims. Now I am not saying that Sardar would advocate such ideas, if only because they are silly, but de Arestegui has a point when he says that Sardar’s ideas feed effectively into jihadist rhetoric. Perhaps it is now time to hold our noses and develop a new, liberal account of the Arab-Islamic conquest of Iberia in which our chief attendance is to those peoples and cultures who did not survive that period.

A bit of a ramble today, but these things are complicated enough to induce headaches…

Is it mean to say...?

Is it mean to say that popular Islamic history isn’t such a good idea? I ask this as I’ve been reading Shahnaz Husain’s The Muslim Conquest of Spain and the Legacy of Al-Andalus (London: Taha, 2004) and it made me wonder why such work is necessary when there are so many good works on al-Andalus available which are written by “real” historians and “real” scholars. I can understand the motives of a write like Husain, whose work is driven by a desire to extend the range of historical work available in Islamic bookshops (12) and to provide positive historical works for Muslim children in Britain (as she says, 13, ‘Let us take charge of our legacy’). Yet however admirable such aims seem in practice, they are rather more fraught with dangers than Husain appears to appreciate.

First, one look at Husain’s bibliography inspires dread. It contains fourteen works, three of which are travel books and does not list any of the key modern works of Andalusi scholarship (by Burns, Jayyusi, Menocal, Castro, Sanchez-Albornoz, Kennedy, Glick etc etc). As a consequence, Husain is happy to trot out all sorts of things as indisputably factual – such as the Julian, Roderic, Musa and Tariq tale – when such narratives are troubled and critically examined in modern scholarship (which is a nice way of saying that most historians consider such narratives to be fictions nowadays).

Second, it worries me when Husain says: ‘it is vital to look back at our history to forge a common identity and to take back the legacy that is rightfully ours; to infuse our children with pride and a love of Islam’. I have no issue with the idea of using history as a political or a religious resource, but two aspects of Husain’s assertion merit probing. First, her idea that we look back to history to forge a ‘common identity’ strikes me as plain silly in the Andalusi context because it presupposes the existence of a common Andalusi identity and culture, which there emphatically was no such thing. The value of the Andalusi example comes in its complexity and not its simplicity. There were liberal Islamic cultures and moments in al-Andalus and there were puritanical Islamic cultures and times, but there was no ‘common heritage’; for if you had asked, let us say, an Almohad puritan what he thought of the philosophy of Ibn Rushd he would have thrown his hands up in the air and exclaimed ‘haram!’ (forbidden!). Similarly, if you had asked an Umayyad liberal at the court what she thought of later strictures on poetry by women or literature about sex, she would surely have suggested that this represented a diminution of Islamic culture.

My suspicion in all this, I’m afraid to say, is that when Husain talks of reclaiming a ‘common heritage’, what she means is a monocultural, uncomplicated, pretty puritanical, and not very Andalusi, Islamic heritage. This is emphasised by the language she uses when she refers to “the legacy that is rightfully ours”. Now the problem with the kind of legacy she is talking about here is that you cannot reclaim it whole in the manner in which family jewels can be claimed in a will, for the kind of cultural and historical legacy discussed by Husain is something which is negotiated and shared. The umma can indeed inherit their share of the Andalusi legacy, but the suggestion that it is “ours, all ours” somewhat works against the Andalusi notion of a set of cultures which were shared amongst Muslims, Jews and Christians. It also denies difference within historical Islam, asserting the primacy of Islamic identity over all other ties, when one of the most significant aspects of Andalusi history is the manner in which tribal, cultural and ethnic identities often trumped religious ones. This is a pretty uncomfortable reality for writers like Husain to acknowledge, for a recognition of such complexity also entails an admission that allegiance to Islam is not necessarily the primary site of identity for all Muslims (speak to a Sa’udi tribal leader, a Francophile in Algiers, or a gay man in Beirut about this today…).

Third, and very pragmatically, it is not as though very good, accessible works of Andalusi scholarship do not exist. Take Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World for instance, and the significant advantage of a book like Menocal’s is that it is nuanced in a way that Husain’s cannot be, because Menocal is aware of the body of scholarship in the field and not afraid to temper grand claims if the evidence is not there to support them. I do feel mean now that I’ve written this hatchet-job, but al-Andalus is important and writing the history of al-Andalus is too important to be left to works like this…