The Original Enlightenment

History of dates and proper names, History with capital letters, tends to live on this perception of passing time. It consists largely of the biographies of heroes, great men who conquered territories for their motherland, and shaped the world and their times – a perception best illustrated by Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History; and Carlyle’s numerous crypto-followers.

But this perception of history is guilty of incoherence and self-contradiction. Life is not a downhill road to a perceived end. Life always expands and spreads in all directions, although not necessarily in the way we expect. In fact, in life and in history everything interacts with everything else, morphs, changes, synthesizes, is always on the verge of becoming something different, something new. We cannot understand the past if we select and isolate a portion, take it out of context. So here is a truism: everything was born from something previous.

New beginnings and continuity. That’s the essence of history; which is always subjected to perceptions and verdicts. Most historians are ever ready to judge, to pass verdicts, but are not so keen on evaluations. Perhaps it is not surprising in a discipline that is so old, with methodologies so fixed. Historians thus behave a though they are scroll curators and file keepers, committed to the established mores of blind philology: if it’s old and hard to translate, it is the truth. Once this truth is established, there is reluctance to revisit certain inconvenient periods of time where truth is murky, not easy to decode and discern. 

One of these inconvenient periods is al-Andalus, a long and strange time of Arabic and Islamic culture in European lands, set against a dark medieval stage. It is inconvenient because it refers to a past time in which we were different; but ideology does not permit us to acknowledge that we were different from what we are today. But who were we? And who are we today? 

There are two prerequisites for tackling this subject of al-Andalus. First, we have to move from creationism to evolution in the way we understand passing time. It is futile to maintain in history what has been disregarded in science: the old fashioned tenet about things emerging from nothing, from nowhere, at once. This History, based as it is on romantic ideals that fall from above and create anew by means of invasions and amazing cavalries, is no longer comprehensible. So here is another truism: everything flourishes in a context from which it emanates.

Second, we have to be aware of our current, mediated vision of the world. There is an old pseudoscience called phrenology that imagined the brain as the organ of the mind, divided into neat localised boxes with specific functions that could be inferred by examining and measuring the skull. A phrenology bust described and depicted a grotesque distribution of brain lobes through which you could acquire a magical ability to read the human mind. That disregarded procedure is the basis of our current description of the world: in this assumed phrenology globe there are places out of time, others out of culture, a section out of religion, another vast northern paradise of reason, another repulsive land with an endemic proclivity to violence. A complete phrenologic description of the world of archaic cultures and enduring topics that points out every single tendency of a region and its historical background.

In this phrenologic vision of the world, Al-Andalus appears as an operetta set on an Orientalist stage.  It provides mythological nourishment in essentialist times, serving all needs. After a casual reading of al-Andalus, one may say ‘this is not me’, although belonging to the same land. Another may say ‘this is me’ in spite of belonging to a tradition and culture two or three continents away. Faulty perceptions are fitted for faulty sense of identity.

So nothing is allowed to appear as it once really was, everything has to be fitted to our current concerns. Religions as flags, as vertical motherlands, as teams with a collection of medals and awards gained in the past, are never allowed to be forgotten. Let us suppose I am a Muslim, say an Indonesian Muslim. Do I inherit al-Andalus simply because of the coincidence that I follow the same religion as al-Andalus? Does a man from Panama, for example, inherit the cultural legacy of Byzantium just because he follows the same religion? Let us suppose I am a Christian, say Swedish Christian. Should I bypass the medieval roads and ignore my own western tradition, simply because they were written in Arabic?

Revisiting al-Andalus without ulterior motives, with no stage machinery, means something quite different. It is about admitting the role of connections and movement in History and, thus, discovering a path that led to the first Enlightenment. In the common vision, al-Andalus displays itself as a Punch and Judy Show of History – currently labelled ‘The Clash of Civilizations’. Its initial strangeness, and hence shock, comes from the fact that it is a civilisation located in Europe but developed in Arabic in the Gothic world of ‘with me or against me’ of the Middle Ages. And the Middle Ages are dark because the creationists of the Renaissance needed darkness to highlight their core. If ‘the Middle Ages were less dark and less static’, as the American historian of the Middle Ages, Charles Homer Haskins, once wrote, then ‘the Renaissance (would be) less bright and less sudden’. The Middle Ages are not dark but hardly understood because they are written in Arabic.

But al-Andalus is not merely a past time. It is also a time present, a component, and an essential ingredient of all our histories. And it is an unavoidable seed of Europe: the Europe that we take as matrix of the West, for without al-Andalus and its first renaissance in Arabic, there would be no Europe as we know it. Given the over-arching re-interpretations on the origins of the European Renaissance now in vogue, we should admit that the starting point of that flourishing new age includes a wide-spread stream of previous histories. 

The European Renaissance was not an absolute beginning; it did not emerge out of nothing. Its myth of Greek roots is itself a product of cross-fertilisation of histories.  When the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, the men of learning of Byzantium took refuge in Italy; and took their books, in their own language Greek, with them - and the ‘Greek seed’ of the ‘Renaissance’ was planted. The European Renaissance is in fact a product of wide-spread and different acculturations. Where did they come from? From the East,  such as the trading contacts of Venice with China, and the acculturation of Sicily, where a Norman king, Frederick II (1194-1250), had a realm of Arab lands and decided to translate the Qur'an, commentaries on Aristotle, and other Arab scholarly works into Latin. And, last but not least, the long and dense crossroad of al-Andalus

 The crossroad of al-Andalus, a quite atypical portion of Europe in Arabic, was created like sediment, after prolong and constant gestation. It is the final step after a long series of eastern grafts, just like anywhere else all over the Mediterranean.  To talk about Arabic-Islamic conquest in 711 is to talk about a worthless myth, a bare creationist concoction, devoid of historical proof.  In 711 there was no Arabic culture or ‘Islamic civilisation’ able to spread out from a very limited portion of the Middle East. In later propaganda, Islam expands by force, Christianity by conviction, and Judaism by genetics. Three well-grounded myths that evaporate with a serious, cold look at history:  there were always conversions to the three religions, as well as traffic of populations, and social and religious unrest and troubles all over.

Regarding the insistent myth of an Islamic miraculous and bloody invasion, we ought to note the complete lack of Arab sources - at least, till 858. But several Latin, Syriac and Greek contemporary sources describe numerous causes for the destruction of two central Empires, the Roman and the Persian. We just need a comparative reading of two authors living during the first universal steps of Islam: Saint John of Damascus in the East, around year 750; and Eulogy of Cordoba, in the West, almost one hundred years later. Both of them shed enough light on the gradual spread of Islam to al-Andalus, and highlight a key element in the origins of a wider cultural world: Islam, at least during its first century and a half, was a Hellenic culture. This would change after the foundation of Bagdad, which itself was planned as a Greco-Roman polis, in 762. However, it was the starting point of a new lingua franca: the Arabic language.

This Hellenic origins can be traced not only through the progressive replacement of Byzantine coinage, art and law but also in two significant details that lead to the progressive formation of al-Andalus. One is the name: al-Andalus, a phonetic transformation of Atlantis, located by Plato in the Lost Paradise in the western lands where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean. Between fourth and sixth centuries, several commentaries were produced on Plato’s main writings, generating that Hellenic cultural movement called the Neo-Platonism, where we find the origins of the transformation: Atlantis > Adalandis > Al-Andalus. Something quite similar happened with another Hellenic journey from the Garden of the Hesperides to Separad > Sefarad, the Hebrew equivalent of al-Andalus.

The second Hellenic trace is paradoxically included in the first valuable Arabic source that provides us information about al-Andalus. It is called Akhbar majmua, or Collected Chronicles, dated 858, and is responsible in part for the official version of the origins of al-Andalus, insistently repeated till today. This chronicle narrates the European uprising of the old Syrian Umayyad dynasty and contains the adventure of ten thousand soldiers commanded by a certain general called Balj. They face a defeat in North Africa, followed by a tactical retreat that leads them to al-Andalus where they become the principal party that supported the first emir of Cordoba. It is interesting to note that this is exactly the narrative plot of the Anabasis, written by the Greek professional soldier and writer, Xenophon, who with an army of ten thousand tried to seize the throne of Persia. But Akhbar majmua provides two other Greek literary tropes. One is that first Ummayad Emir was precisely the last of the eastern kings, just like in the plot of the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic Latin poem and the foundation of Rome. The other element is that the alleged conquest of Spain was due to the kidnapping of a maid by Spanish Visigoths, which led to an organized invasion in revenge. Exactly the detonating flame of the Iliad.

Hispania was not the empty or uncultivated land that appears in the Arabic chronicles; written, let us remind ourselves, at least a century and a half after the presumed conquest. Hispania became al-Andalus after an extended struggle of different heretical trends, substantive problems in the transition of the Visigoth kingdom, and a long and continuation process of questioning Imperial Centralism as Rome shifted to Constantinople. The encyclopaedic writings of Isidoro de Sevilla (556-636) provide us with the cultural heights of Hispania that in the next Iberian phase - al-Andalus - were not only known but wisely exploited and turned into an advantage.  Isidoro and Latin-Visigothic legacy of Hispania fertilized the science produced in Arabic in the same lands, which were permanently influenced by the cultural tides originating in the East. Once again: new beginnings and continuity.

This new beginning grew in natural and constant interaction with a similar evolution in the rest of south and east Mediterranean. It was the continuation of the Roman culture and not its decline and fall. Rome and Persia did not disappear but fell into the subsequent and emerging Mediterranean cultural model: Dar al-Islam. The gap between these two different worlds, East and West, Constantinople and Rome, provoked a definitive European disconnection. Hispania, on the verge of becoming al-Andalus, aligned itself with the rest of the Mediterranean south and east. Thus, it cut itself off from the rest of Europe, which aligned in turn with a future configuration: the Carolingian project.

The Carolingian Empire (800–888), which begins with Charlemagne, established France and Germany. It played a leading role in the canonical definition of Europe, and produced a key concept in European history: the idea of restoration. Disregarding the existence of a living Roman Empire in the East, a new emperor sat out to restore the Empire at the beginning of the ninth century. And so it seems that Rome resumes in the West by overlooking the way of being Roman in the rest of the Mediterranean basin.

The point is that Europe loves re-ism: every restoration rejects the past from which it emanates. It was so in the Carolingian restoration, as well as the reconquest to come in the Iberian Peninsula, or even in the Renaissance itself. In the future, every single great project in Europe will have to be anchored in an assumed distant and golden past, bypassing the immediate twists and turns of history, in a myth of eternal return. 

Al-Andalus is not a product of some mythical invasion but Arabization, which enabled it to become a substantial part of what we may call ‘the spirit of the time’. The American scholar of Arab culture, Dimitri Gutas, has shown the connection between the development of Greek lower-case letters and the spread of Hellenic cultural heritage. When Bagdad became established as an economic and cultural fortress, the Greeks in Byzantium developed practical small letter to save time in copying manuscripts they were selling to Bagdadi translators, eager to render them into Arabic. And it is quite interesting that in the commercial interchange between Bagdad and Constantinople, the Bagdadis would always refer to themselves as ‘sons of the igriqis’, the Greeks, while the others were simply ‘sons of Rome’, or rumis. 

The Arabized populations of the Middle East (and not only Muslims) were eagerly translating the cannons of science and philosophy not because they had suddenly discovered a love for letters and learning, but because they needed the knowledge of the elders to understand and shape the world. It is always the practical and pragmatic that moves the engine of civilisation. But Dar al-Islam was not simply a company of carriers, a conveyor belt, translating and preserving the Greek heritage to pass on to its rightful owner, the European Renaissance. No: for more than eight centuries, the Mediterranean knowledge of philosophy to astronomy, from theology to medicine, was developed, shaped and composed in Arabic, not merely translated into it. And this knowledge was delivered all over a world already steeped in Arabic through commercial routes - silk, slaves, gold, paper, spices - with a compulsory stop in al-Andalus. The Dar al-Islam, the territories with a common civilized structure, was never a single state, but a certain and critical commonwealth, a network of cities and routes. We must emphasise: it was never a unique empire, and always urban, maintaining certain Bedouin roots in dress and as implant of collective memory. Belonging to it, to the Dar al-Islam, was just like belonging today to the West, embracing certain ideas as well as tools and instruments of modernity. 

This Dar al-Islam as civilized network had a pluralist system of laws derived from the Roman and Persian laws. In general, this previous dichotomy always persisted: the so-called Sunni Islam comes from Byzantium, while the Shia Islam comes from the Persian and Zoroastrian background, in spite of the fairy tale tradition of familiar disputes.

Al-Andalus was a very active part of this network, without being politically dependent on the East. But there was some dependency on North Africa after the mid-eleventh century, where the Almoravid dynasty of the fanatical Murabits was preeminent. This was not very different from the north-Iberian dependency on the equally fanatic Cluny, a French abbey in charge of re-Christianising Europe. Torn between these two similar and opposite pressures, Al-Andalus developed a culture that would deliver a heritage to all of Europe.

A specific Arabic culture called Andalusian emerged around 850. From then on, a young and formative vision of the world began to spread, one we may recognise as pre-renaissance, provoked, in part, by occasional political uncertainty. In fact, a driving force of al-Andalus was the political turmoil, the stability/instability, in Cordoba, the most modern capital of its time. Then, one morning the system collapsed. It was 1031, the beginning of an age always disregarded or looked down with scorn in the manuals. Again, new beginning and continuity. 

It was a new age based on the core of Andalusian identity: the city-states of Taifas. Cordoba, the ancient capital of sciences, poetry and bureaucracy, did not disappear. On the contrary, it was absorbed into one thousand and one small cordobas whose rivalry and competition contributed to raising the level of whole al-Andalus. It was the beginning of a golden Arab and Hebrew age in the Iberian Peninsula.

The city-states of Taifas, like the Italian city-states that preceded the Renaissance, generated enough political tension to stimulate thought and creativity. Several books appeared that started our thinking on anthropocentrism, the assessment of reality through human perspective, and other typically European themes. For example, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, or The Self-Taught Philosopher as it came to be known in Europe, produced the genre of utopian inquiry and the beau savage. The courtly writings of Ibn al-Khatib, whose poetry decorates the walls of Alhambra in Granada, became a model for the European genre of political education, inspiring Machiavelli’s The Prince and Baldassare Castiglione’s works such as The Book of the Courtier and The Fortunes of the Courtier. Ibn Hazm’s treatise on love and lovers, The Necklace of the Dove, influenced generations after generations. 

Empiricism and experimentation also spread during the Taifas due to the competition between the mini-courts, leading to the golden age of European astronomy and medicine, as well as numerous other disciplines. For instance, the post-taifa period could be considered the road that led to Averroes (ibn Rushd), the European commentator of Aristotle. That philosopher from Cordoba reached such a level of prominence in Europe that his translations were forbidden in thirteenth century Paris, where he was accused of promoting free-thinking. All these writings and works are, and should be considered, as part of the European Renaissance. Indeed, that would be the case if they had been written in languages other than Arabic.

It is now the time to recognize the diversity of European cultural roots. Europe was the final destination of Andalusian cultural thought, devices, artefacts and items.  If Averroes was prohibited in Paris, it was because his writings were avidly read. And if Columbus reached America it was in part because an Andalusian astronomer called Azarquiel (Ibn al-Zarqali) invented mobile instruments and devices that permitted ships to sail across continents. Science often arises from the needs of a society; and Al-Andalus had set a course, a long time ago, for the Renaissance, in that universal game of taking over. 

Geopolitical interests shaped the whole peninsula as northern Christian kingdoms sniffed the wealth of southern Taifa states. To maintain peace, contain the whims of Christian kings and preserve the status quo, the Taifa paid a special tax called parias to northern states - Leon, Castilla and Aragon. The money from al-Andalus financed the building of northern cathedrals, and in their crypts were buried the Christian kings and courtesans dressed-up in the silk produced and bought in al-Andalus. This circulation of money and goods created an atypical mutual prosperity that lasted till the final eclipse of the Arab world and a new beginning: the European renaissance itself, as well as an invented religious rivalry.

The arrival of year 1000 brought a sense of foreboding millenarianism: ‘the end of the world is nigh’. Soon after that, and largely due to previous propaganda, the Christian fundamentalists of Cluny started to enter Spain. At the same time, the Muslim fundamentalists of Almoravids came from Morocco. Torn between these two exclusive identities, al-Andalus began to filter and seep through in three different but important ways. First, there was the expulsion of Arabized Andalusian Jews who fled to France, where they worked as translators. But what did they translate? The Andalusian scientific and philosophical works from the original Arabic into Latin and Hebrew. This is one of the main streams that fertilized Europe, preparing the future Renaissance. Second, the Arab city controlled by Castilians, Toledo, began an extensive programme of translations - the second branch of Latinization of Arab scholarship. But this one would end as a means of converting the whole of Spain to Catholic ideology. Third, al-Andalus spread throughout Spain via converted Jews and Muslims, who enriched the cultural life of a sad and closed Spain. This became a general trend in the centuries to come, a time of frontier and elastic sense of nation.

The tragic, national sport of the Iberian Peninsula began at the same time: deportation. Wave after wave of Andalusians was forced into exile: after the Andalusian Jews, the Muslim Moriscos, then a new wave of Hispanised Jews. It was endemic sport that continued to the twentieth century. In the end, all that was left was a fearful Third Spain: trapped between the Inquisition and Expulsions, it maintained a proud silence on being anything else, anything more. 

But Al-Andalus still made its presence felt. It had surreptitious influences on the Golden Age of Spanish literature, on movements like Erasmism, a form of Christian humanism, and many heterodox cultural and religious trends. If we are able to ‘inhabit our history in Spain’, just as one of our most prominent historians Americo Castro (1885–1972) suggests in The Structure of Spanish History, we would perceive and understand the precious Andalusian remainders left in masterpieces of our literature, such as Don Quixote, that unrivalled protest against oblivion. In the pages of Cervantes’ novel, we find the missing moriscos as well as an enlightened fool who shouts ‘I know who I am’ in a forgetful land. The forgetfulness of having been something more, something else.

Citations

The six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1788-1989 and Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History appeared in 1842 – both are widely available. 

The reinterpretation of Renaissance is best illustrated by Jerry Brotons, The Renaissance Bazaar: from the Silk Road to Michelangelo  (OUP, 2003) and Juan Vernet, What Europe owes to the Islam in Spain (Acantilado, Madrid, 2006). On Akhbar Majmu'a, see David James, A History of Early Al-Andalus: The Akhbar Majmu'a (Routledge, London, 2011).

Other works mentioned include Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1927); Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society (Routledge, London, 1998); and Americo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton University Press, 1954). See also, Emilio Gonzalez-Ferrin,  Al-Andalus: Europe between East and West (Almuzara, Cordoba, 2010, in Spanish and French).