Spain: A Unique History (11 page)

In the mixed population of the cities, there was a tendency to segregate neighborhoods, but this was sometimes impractical, so that there were sometimes Christian and Muslim households living side by side. We have little or no information as to how this functioned. The households were not equal, because the Christians paid much heavier taxes, might not enjoy the same standard of living, and were subject to significant discrimination, but at least they were permitted to survive. Muslim minorities — the Mudéjares, as they would be called — incorporated by the advance of the Spanish kingdoms (mainly in the thirteenth century) experienced much the same kinds of conditions, once they were part of the inferior, rather than the superior, caste. Friendly relations between individuals and families certainly took place, particularly in the mixed cities, but those friendly relations on the individual level never blurred the distinct caste lines for Andalusi or Christian society as a whole. For the most part, even in areas where populations were mixed, the castes remained distinct, and there were no systematic efforts to cross caste lines either in society or culture, for, with regard to anything beyond limited gestures, such a practice would have been tabu. Cultural elites, for example, hardly ever studied each other's religion.

Some Spanish historians have wished to see the Muslim Andalusis as to a considerable degree "Hispanized," that is, heavily influenced by the Christian society and culture whose members for approximately two centuries made up the majority of the population of Al-Andalus. There is little evidence of this. Since eventually the bulk of the Muslim population would be composed of Hispanic converts (the "white Moors," whose presence would later astonish European visitors to the peninsula), not the children of Middle Eastern or African immigrants, they undoubtedly maintained certain habits or customs that were not the same as those in Egypt or Iraq. But the entire structure of culture and of society and government became heavily "orientalized," reproducing fundamentally the same structures and mores to be found in the Middle East. Al-Andalus was not a "Western" or "European" variant of Islamic society in anything other than a geographic sense, but it simply became the westernmost projection of Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern society and culture. The great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun recognized that, at least in one sense, the Arabs were the worst overlords — compared with Romans, Greeks, or Persians — for they largely obliterated the languages and cultures of the areas that they conquered, with only a few exceptions, and to that extent did not maintain classic empires.

This was reflected not merely in religion and high culture, but at all levels of life from urban configurations and architecture to cuisine, clothing, and social and marriage arrangements. Noteworthy was the typical Muslim subjection of women, totally different from the situation in Hispano-Christian society, where women could inherit and to some extent maintain property in their own right, and eventually reign individually as monarch of an entire kingdom. In this regard Islamic civilization constituted a marked regression from the Roman civilization that it replaced in the south Mediterranean. Late Roman law permitted daughters to inherit equally with sons and present equal testimony in court, whereas Islamic law provides women with only a half a share in inheritance and assigns their testimony only half the weight of a man's.

Arab and Berber elites zealously maintained their native tribal and clan structures, based on strongly agnatic and endogamous relationships. The political structure of Al-Andalus represented the typical despotism of the Middle East, replete with the equivalent bureaucracy and slave soldiers, without any parallel in the European kingdoms of that era. Arab and other minority non-Hispanic groups always dominated the power structure, even after the breakup of the caliphate in the eleventh century. Descendants of Muslim converts formed no taifa or independent dynasties, all of whom were led by Arabs, Berbers, or Slavic slave soldiers.
⁹
As Anwar Chejne puts it, Al-Andalus "was always an integral part of the literary and cultural mainstream of the East and, as such, was as Islamic as Syria or Egypt."
¹⁰
Historically and culturally, Al-Andalus followed the same chronological trajectory as the Arab civilization of the Middle East, reaching a plateau of acculturation in the ninth and tenth centuries, achieving its maximum cultural sophistication during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, then experiencing major decline, accompanied by conquest from without, in the thirteenth century.

It must be remembered that during the early formative centuries of the Christian kingdoms, from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, the great bulk of the independent Christian population did not normally live in direct contact with Muslims. The "Mozarab" Christians in Al-Andalus were much more affected, however, and by the ninth century were becoming increasingly Arabized or, if one prefers, "orientalized." Those who found this most repugnant seem to have emigrated to the north, if conditions permitted. Later, the Muslim, or Mudejar, minority incorporated into the Spanish kingdoms proved more resistant to Christian and Spanish influence, preserving its caste identity and culture to a greater extent than had the Mozarabs, though most of them eventually Hispanicized linguistically and lost the use of Arabic.

Eventually most of the native Hispanic population remaining in Al-Andalus converted to Islam. When did that take place? The only attempt to estimate this was carried out by the American historian Richard W. Bulliet, applying a technique that he had earlier used for Egypt, Syria, and Persia. Bulliet's rough calculation was that by 800 only about 8 percent of the native population had converted, a figure that increased to only 12.5 percent fifty years later. With the full crystallization of Andalusi society and culture during the ninth century, the rate of conversion began to accelerate. By 900 about 25 percent had converted, and 50 percent by 950. By the end of the tenth century the figure might have stood at 75 percent, by which time the population of Al-Andalus had become overwhelmingly Muslim. Small Christian minorities nonetheless remained until at least the twelfth century, until they were finally eliminated altogether by the Islamist empire of the Moroccan Almohads.
¹¹

In theory all Muslims form part of the
umma
, or general Islamic community. In practice, however, Muslim society has been riven by ethnic tensions, which in Al-Andalus were profound, as much or more than in any other Islamic land. Prior to the eleventh century, and even to some extent afterward, the elite remained Arab and looked down on the Berbers (the other principal group of Muslims of foreign origins) and the native converts, as well as on Christians and Jews. Other sectors of society responded with intense resentment, leading to sporadic revolt and great violence, as political division formed along geographic and ethnic lines. In theory, Islam, like Christianity, rejects racial discrimination, but reality revealed otherwise. The Arabs exhibited a powerful sense of caste and racial superiority, demeaning racially inferior "sons of white women," even though those same white women were the ones most greatly desired for Arab harems. Even the
Muwalladun
(Sp. "muladíes"), the native Spanish converts to Islam, were sometimes derided for their white complexions, compared with the Arab elite. Muslim society featured widespread slavery, which like the slavery of the Ancient World was multiracial, slaves being drawn from every race and ethnic group not Muslim, but black slaves from Africa normally occupied the lowest position. Andalusi society remained highly segmented, not merely among the religions, but in terms of the different categories of Muslims — the Arab elite divided by lineages, tribes, and districts from the Berbers (and their own internal segments) and the convert majority of native Hispani.

At its height, the high culture of the cities of Al-Andalus rivaled that of the great Muslim centers of the Middle East. The scholarly and scientific texts of Greece and Rome had generally been translated into Arabic by the tenth century, but it is a mistake to think that the classic manuscripts (Latin, Greek, Syriac, Persian) were preserved, for "infidel" texts, no matter how high the quality and originality, were generally destroyed after being translated into Arabic. The high culture that soon developed in the Islamic world was a "transfer culture," for the lands originally conquered by the Muslims — Syria, Persia, Egypt, and to some degree the Visigothic kingdom — all had active and vibrant high cultures. The rise of learning in the Islamic world was a matter of taking over these foundations, though, unlike the imperialism of Rome and some later Western imperialisms, Arab imperialism in most areas steadily erased native languages and largely suppressed independent native cultures. In toto, Arab culture borrowed much more from Syria, Byzantium, and Persia than Western culture would later borrow from it, but in its first mature phase fostered a level of learning, which, prior to the thirteenth century, surpassed that of western Europe. By the tenth century Muslim scholars were doing advanced work of their own in mathematics, astronomy, botany, geography, medicine, and other sciences. For several centuries they excelled in historical writing, but there was very limited development in humanist thought.
¹²

Philosophical study was limited to a comparatively brief period, for Islam is a religion of orthopraxy and correct outward conduct, and discourages broader speculation or any extended inquiry into theology or philosophy, holding that there should be no debate or dissension among believers.
¹³
The most famous Muslim philosophers, the Persian Avicenna and the Andalusi Averroes (Ibn Rushd), primarily wrote commentaries on Aristotle and other thinkers, failing to develop complete new systems of their own. Such commentary ultimately had its main impact on Western thought, which, unlike that of the Muslims, learned to study contrasting points of view.
¹⁴
By comparison, Averroes had no significant influence on Islamic thought, which rejected his insights. There was very little in the way of original Islamic philosophy, for that was precluded by the literalism of the Koran and the resultant character of Islamic doctrine.
¹⁵

By the thirteenth century, the Islamic and Western worlds were headed in different directions, as the margin of freedom and tolerance in the former shrank. The new Western universities expanded their activities, while the intellectual culture of the Islamic lands declined. The rigid, intolerant and anti-intellectual tendencies in Islamic religion and culture eventually became totally dominant. By about 1100, learning and science in the West showed the first signs of approximation in range and quality with that of the Islamic world, and by 1300 were pulling ahead.
¹⁶
Subsequent cultural development in Muslim Persia and India was primarily artistic in character. The mark of a tolerant and creative civilization is to be able to deal with contrary ideas, something that the West was slowly beginning to do to a limited degree. Differences were becoming equally or more marked in economic organization and in technology, where by the fourteenth century the West was slowly becoming dominant. In later times, wherever Muslims lived side by side with other religious communities, whether as a majority or a minority, the latter would almost always show greater capacity for development and modernization.

As of the tenth century, the Andalusis excelled in high culture, in most of the practical arts, and in most aspects of esthetics. They had introduced Arabic numerals, certain advanced agricultural techniques, and a series of new fruits, vegetables, and other foods, as well as silk, paper, glass, and new kinds of ceramics. By the eleventh century, on the other hand, Spanish Christians were beginning to excel in military technology and in political development, their structures of law, rights, and civic institutions creating stronger internal solidarity than the ultimately more fragile Muslim despotisms.

The greatest failure of Al-Andalus was political. Generally speaking, there has been little political development in Islamic societies. Since Islam originated in the commercially sophisticated Middle East, commercial and property law in the
sharia
was at first more advanced than that of the West, but criminal law remained harsh and primitive, as it stands even in the twenty-first century. The sharia enshrines traditionalism and the status quo, underwriting a tribal and clan structure of Middle Eastern and Andalusi society, which precluded political evolution. The reinforcement of clan and tribal structures hardened the segmentation of Andalusi society, in which political loyalty was owed primarily to lineages, not to institutions. Classical Islamic thought had little theory of the state or of political development and representation. To a greater degree than most other systems, Islamic states rest on military and police power. The theory of Islamic society posits a kind of utopia but, as is the norm with utopias, in practice tends to foster despotisms.

Those who propose a picture of Andalusi society and institutions as "tolerant" and "convivientes" altogether fail to explain why Andalusi history was wracked by revolts of all kinds — by Berbers, by Muwalladun, sometimes even by the Arab elites. Though the Christian Mozarabs were generally, but not always, passive, the only sector of this highly divided and segmented society that did not rebel were the Jews, the smallest religious minority, totally lacking in military power. The only periods in which there were no internal revolts were the reigns of the most strongly despotic rulers, who governed with an absolutely iron hand and distracted many of their followers by their numerous attacks against the Christian principalities. Throughout the history of Al-Andalus, rebellions of all kinds were repressed vigorously, often with the utmost violence. Cordoban rulers never hesitated to carry out full-scale massacres of their subjects, without the slightest pretext of judicial procedure. This further explains why, once the central caliphal state collapsed early in the eleventh century, most of AI-Andalus found it itself increasingly defenseless, by comparison with the Christian principalities. Under the decentralized, rights-centered, partially representative institutions of the latter, nearly that entire society could be counted on for military service. The Andalusi despotism, by contrast, tried to disarm Andalusi society, which it fundamentally distrusted, relying on its own central Arab-based tribal units, stiffened by the typically Islamic "slave soldiers" and numerous mercenaries.