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…