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…