The Moors?

Medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture Encounters in Confluence and Dialogue Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 brill.nl/me The Moors? Ross Brann Department of Near Eastern Studies, 413 White Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7901, USA e-mail: [email protected] Abstract “The Moors?” interrogates the figure of “the Moor” in some of its medieval and modern textual and cinematic incarnations. This essay discusses the figure’s historical evolution and instability and comments on its particular social agency in medieval Iberia. Keywords Moor, Berber, Almoravid, El Cid, al-Andalus I was called Moorish Moraima, young Mooress of a lovely appearance; A Christian came to my door, cuytada to deceive me. He spoke to me in Arabic, As one who knows it well: “Open your doors to me, Mooress, . . . I am the Moor, Mazote, . . .” Romance de la morilla burlada (trans. Mirrer 26-27) “Falsehood is not in me, beloved, As in my breast there is not one drop Of blood from the blood of Moors Or the dirty Jews.” “Leave the Moors and the Jews,” Said the knight, gently caressing her. And beneath a myrtle tree He led the Alcalde’s daughter . . . And the knight, sweetly smiling, Kisses the fingers of his lady, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/157006709X458864 308 R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 Kisses her lips and her forehead, And finally speaks these words: “I, Señora, your beloved, Am the son of the much-praised, Great learned Rabbi, Israel of Saragossa.” Donna Clara, Heinrich Heine (trans. Bea Rosenberg) More than a century after the fall of Nasrid Granada to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, the seventeenth-century North African scholar Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī compiled The Sweet Fragrance of the Lush Bough of al-Andalus (Nafḥ al-Ṭ īb min ghuṣn al-andalus al-raṭīb), a monumental Arabic social and cultural history of al-Andalus from the eighth through fifteenth centuries. For al-Maqqarī, who never saw al-Andalus except through the lens of the texts available to him, al-Andalus conjured images of agricultural abundance and extraordinary cultural accomplishment on the one hand (al-Maqqarī 1: 129) and recalled the demise of an Islamic polity on the Iberian Peninsula on the other (“May God restore it to Islam” [al-Maqqarī 1: 175-176]). Reading late medieval and early modern North African scholars such as al-Maqqarī draws attention to the Muslims’ persistent, even tenacious, memories of al-Andalus and its legacy. It also underscores the obvious fact that medieval Iberia was characterized by a high degree of religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity long before multiculturalism became a touchstone in our own raging culture wars. When al-Andalus—conven- tionally deemed “Muslim Spain” or “Islamic Spain”—came of age in the ninth and tenth centuries as a center of urban culture, prosperous eco- nomic power and independent polity ruling most of the Iberian Peninsula, the country comprised three ethno-cultural religious communities: Moz- arabic Christians, Jews and Muslims. The Muslims of al-Andalus were themselves an intermarried blend. At one time their religious commu- nity comprised four sub-groups: muwalladūn—converts from native Iberian families and their descendants; Arabs—of Syrian and Yemeni ancestry; ṣaqāliba—Slavs, that is, praetorian guards of European origin brought to Iberia as slaves at a young age, along with their descendants; and “old” and “new” Berbers—those arriving earlier and more recently from North Africa. Relations among and within these communities, whose members spoke Arabic and some Romance, were exceedingly complex, frequently  R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 309 shifting and hardly ever entirely harmonious. Nevertheless, the mix of Arabo-Islamic, Romance-Christian, and Judeo-Hebrew cultural elements contributed to a singularly Iberian pluralism whose patterns of extensive social interaction and cultural interpenetration proved to have lasting power when they were transferred from al-Andalus to Castile and nurtured and maintained in thirteenth-century Toledo. For all the permeability of its political, social, religious, linguistic and cultural borders, it is nevertheless still scarcely possible to speak of medi- eval Iberia without falling directly into a fray over its contested cultural identity, whose dual historicity, medieval and modern, make it especially problematic. To speak of the culture of medieval “Spain” necessarily involves a critical decision with broad historical implications. The student of medieval Iberia must determine whether, and to what extent, to remem- ber or forget the artifacts of cultures conducted in languages belonging to a radically different linguistic family on behalf of other civilizations assert- ing their communities’ own deep association with the Peninsula. That is, should modern-day scholarship suppress or invoke the coexistence and complex interaction of Romance culture with Arabic and Hebrew, and thus of Christians with Muslims and Jews in Iberia during the High Mid- dle Ages (Menocal)? A comparable and related (Western) European case is Italy, for the study of which the memory of Muslim Sicily and its culture from the ninth to the eleventh centuries must be engaged or purged. It is unclear just how pervasive such lapses in cultural memory are. Although readers of English can readily identify the character Othello as the “noble Moor of Venice,” few recall the venture of Islam in Sicily. Yet after Sicily came under the rule of Norman knights between 1061 and 1092, new Christian rulers adopted so many of the habits of their Muslim predecessors that “two who ruled from 1130-1154 and 1215-1250, respec- tively, were known as ‘the two baptized sultans of Sicily’ ” (Watt 76; empha- sis mine). Ironically Emperor Frederick II himself extended considerable patronage to the intellectual and artistic legacy of Mediterranean Islam even as he repressed the Muslims in his kingdom—a practice and policy of appropriation auguring Alfonso X’s like-minded attempt decades later in Toledo to wrest Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture from its bearers. If the contested cultural map of medieval Iberia has frequently been misread or ignored altogether, medieval Iberia has come to occupy a spe- cial place in the modern and postmodern literary imagination. Its multi- cultural situation has drawn the attention of various writers inclined to find medieval Iberia appealing for reasons of their own time, place and 310 R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 cultural condition. Zofloya or, The Moor (1806) by Charlotte Dacre; Manu- scrit trouvé à Saragosse (c. 1815; trans. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa 1996) by Jan Potocki; Heinrich Heine’s verse play Almansor (1820); Wash- ington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832); Leo Africanus (1988) by Amin Maalouf; José Saramago’s História do cerco de Lisboa (1989; trans. The His- tory of the Siege of Lisbon 1996); The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes (1991) by Stephen Marlowe; Tariq Ali’s Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992); Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995); The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1998) by Robert Zimler; and Borges’ famous short story “La busca de Averroes” (1949; trans. “Averroes’ Search” 1962) are only a few of the more inspired European-language works set in or drawing upon images, figures and themes from medieval Iberia. In particular these works represent evocatively a highly cultured Iberian people identified as Moors, without clarification of who precisely the Moors are. Andalusi Arabic sources—as opposed to later Mudejar and morisco sources in Aljamiado—neither refer to individuals as Moors nor recognize any such group, community or culture. Yet Moor and Moorish are also employed regularly in academic circles and in popular culture without much question or reflection (Fletcher; Brett; García Gómez). The aforementioned scholars suggest that our own cultural artifacts employ the term Moor fluidly, alternately referring to race—and specifically to African origin, to Berber as opposed to “Arab” identity—or to a North African or Iberian Muslim religious and cultural identity differentiated from Christian- Spanish. We are thus compelled to consider the socio-historical provenance and significance of the term Moor inherited from early modern Spain. Was Moor a less ambiguous and more determined term in medieval Iberia itself? What sorts of transactions turned the Moor into a protean figure in Iberian cultural history? Moor (<maurus/moro) certainly repre- sents a problematic expression in its changing historical contexts, but not because of the way it was sometimes used to refer to Muslims without regard for their ethnic origins, as in the Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1207). Eth- nic divisions and tensions within the Andalusi umma (or ‘community of Muslims’) certainly played a critical role in each of the political crises of the eighth through twelfth centuries. Nevertheless, religion was ultimately a more important ideal and emblem of identity and place in the social order of the multi-ethnic Arabo-Islamic society in al-Andalus, just as in the Mus- lim East. Accordingly, any term casting the community of Muslims as a unity cannot be dismissed as completely inaccurate.  R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 311 Unlike relatively stable terms of Roman provenance inherited by Chris- tians such as Arab, Ishmaelite and Saracen, Moor is problematic because of its shifting significance (Barbour 258). Isidore of Seville, who died well before Islam came to Iberia, follows Roman usage in referring to northwest Africa as Mauritania (derived from <maurus/moro) because, he says, of its inhabitants’ blackness (Barbour 255). Similarly, Isidore’s younger contem- porary, the Visigothic chronicler John of Biclaro, refers to the inhabitants of pre-Islamic North Africa as Moors (Wolf 64). The so-called Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, written by a Christian living in al-Andalus and the earli- est account of the events of 711, speaks of the invading force of Muslims without racial animus as “Arabs and Moors” (Wolf 131). This text suggests that early in the history of al-Andalus, Moor signified ‘Berber.’ African origin is clearly marked in this usage, but apparently as a geographic and ethnic rather than racial signifier. Later documents authored in the Christian kingdoms attest to the com- plete transformation of Moor from a term signifying ‘Berber’ into a general term referring primarily to Muslims living in recently conquered Christian lands and secondarily to those residing in what was still left of al-Andalus. For example, the Chronicle of Nájera (from twelfth-century León) refers to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, the Umayyad amīr of mid-eighth-century al-Andalus, as “King of the Mauri,” and to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, the tenth-century Umayyad caliph, as “the (consummate) Maurus” (Barbour 258). An ele- giac passage from the thirteenth-century Alfonsine Primera crónica general (Chapter 559) recounts the events of 711 for what is construed as the (temporary) downfall of “Spain” in that year. The text testifies that the semantic transformation of Moor was not nearly as benign as some readers have assumed: The Moors of the host wore silks and colourful cloths which they had taken as booty, their horses’ reigns were like fire, their faces were black as pitch, the handsomest among them was black as a cooking-pot, and their eyes blazed like fire; their horses swift as leopards, their horsemen more cruel and hurtful than the wolf that comes at night to the flock of sheep. The vile African people who were not wont to boast of their strength nor their goodness, and who achieved everything by stealth and deceit, and who were . . . at that moment raised on high. (Smith 19; emphasis mine) Here, Alfonsine historiography, whose audience knew firsthand of the racial diversity of their Muslim neighbors in Toledo, shares a vocabulary developed across the Pyrenees. 312 R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 The thirteenth-century Poema de Fernán González, composed by a monk in the vicinity of Burgos (Smith 54), endows the semantic and figural arc of Moor with a peculiar but related significance (Akbari). Treating the exploits of the notorious—according to Christians—al-Manṣūr (or Alman- zor) of late-tenth-century al-Andalus, the poem recounts how the goodly count instructs his retinue in the Moors’ perfidious and idolatrous prac- tices and beliefs. The Moors, according to the count: do not take God as a guide, but the stars; they have made of them [the stars] a new Creator . . . There are others among them who know many charms, and can create very evil simulations with their spells; the devil teaches them how to stir up the clouds and the winds. They associate the devil with their spells, and join up with them to form covens; they reveal all the errors of people now dead, and the treacherous dark ones [carbonientos: ‘coal-faced’] who hold council together. (Smith 57-59; emphasis mine) The count’s prayers for the intervention of the Apostle and patron saint of Spain, Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor Slayer), redeem the Castil- ians from al-Manṣūr’s nefarious grip (Smith 55, 59). Various thirteenth- century chronicles credit St. James with killing some 70, 000 Moors (Van Liere 529), and in this text, the racial dehumanization and religious demonization of Moors very nearly converge. From the Poema de Fernán González and the Primera crónica we learn that Moor and Christian form a clearly established cultural opposition in thirteenth-century Castile.1 The extreme enmity inscribed herein was probably driven in part by the Andalusi-Mudejar rebellion of 1264-1265 and by the Marinid invasion of 1272-1375 (Harvey 51-54, 153-160). Yet this dichotomy is also already evident in the medieval Spanish expression “ni moro ni cristiano” (‘no one’) and apparent in the perfectly wrought symmetry of line 731 in the first Cantar of the Poema de mio Cid: “The Moors called on Muḥammad and the Christians on St James” (Hamilton and Perry 60-61). Moor in these and other texts of similar provenance underscored for Christian readers not only the Muslims’ religious and cul- tural otherness but also and more particularly their “foreign,” racialized African origins: their misplaced and thus temporary presence as outsiders supposedly without roots in Castile. Having come from another, darker place, the Moors surely belonged somewhere else. 1 This opposition survives in the form of the name of the Cuban dish moros y cristianos: that is ‘[white]rice and [black] beans.’  R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 313 Visual images produced during this period reinforce the texts’ racial opposition of Moor to “Spanish” Christian. For example a detail from frescoes in the palace of Berenger de Aguilar, Barcelona, portrays a white knight stabbing and throwing a blackamoor from the battlements during the Aragonese capture of Majorca in 1229 (Brett 67). It was not much of a conceptual leap for Christians of Castile and León (and Aragón, Catalo- nia, Navarre and Galicia) to believe that “Spain” could not find itself as a nation until such racial and religious others vanished or were forced to disappear incrementally. Eventually, the Moors would disappear in the late fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries (Harvey 1-3). Because of its potent connotations, Moor arguably served as the princi- pal linguistic vehicle for suppressing the indigenous nature of the Andalusi Muslim cultural heritage in Iberia and rendering Andalusi Muslims as oth- ers in a projected Christian Iberia. It enabled Christians in thirteenth- century Castile to dismiss as “foreign” the substantially mixed Andalusi Muslim population to their south, as well as Castile’s own Mudejars, and to disregard the extent of social and cultural ties among all Andalusis, including Muslims from Africa. Christian longing for a world of religious, cultural, ethnic and political unity—rather than diversity—effectively interfered with and rewrote the cultural history of the Peninsula in accor- dance with the polity that they not only imagined for themselves but then constructed for their new religious and linguistic community. To complicate matters further, our own socio-historical condition inter- feres in subtle and not so subtle ways with understanding the varied his- torical inflections of the seemingly innocuous appellation Moor. Two well-known films produced a generation apart will serve to illustrate this problem and give a sense of its implications for achieving a nuanced pre- sentation of the intersection of cultures and communities in medieval Iberia. In the first instance, there is the “historical” epic El Cid, a 1961 production that represented an unusual collaboration. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the eminent dean of Spanish philology and historiography, and inci- dentally Américo Castro’s mentor, served as principle historical advisor for the cinematic re-telling of Poema de mio Cid. Menéndez Pidal’s association with the film thus conferred historical “authenticity” on the project, cor- responding to the crucial role he played earlier in re-establishing the Cid as a Spanish national hero (Fletcher 5; Linehan 437-450). It is worth keeping these observations in mind as the narrator intones: 314 R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 This is Spain, one thousand and eighty years after the coming of Christ. It is a war-torn unhappy land, half-Christian, half-Moor. This is the time and the story of Rodrigo Díaz of Vivar known to history and to legend as El Cid, “the lord.” He was a simple man who became Spain’s greatest hero. He rose above religious hatred and called upon all Spaniards whether Christian or Moor to face a common enemy who threatened to destroy their land of Spain. This enemy was gathering his savage forces across the Med- iterranean Sea on the north shores of Africa. He was the African emir Ben Yusef. (transcription and emphasis mine) The dazzling quiet of the Iberian sunset in this opening scene fades away or, more precisely, is shattered by the menacing image of black-caped horseman riding to the ominous rumble of beating drums. Then, the emir Ben Yusef clad entirely in black (played by the inimitable British character actor Herbert Lom of Pink Panther lore) addresses a captive band of color- fully dressed Iberian Muslims—Andalusis for sure. His frenzied discourse and sinister demeanor are not solely the product of the filmmakers’ imagi- nation and a document of Cold War culture but are representative of the conventional view Arab historiographers and Western historians have taken toward the Almoravid—and Almohad—Berbers as “barbaric nomads” (O’Callaghan 208). Ben Yusef ’s words in the film also anticipate by forty years some of the popular images of Middle Eastern figures that flash recur- rently across our own computer, television, video and film screens today. The Prophet has commanded us to rule the world! Where in all your land of Spain is the glory of Allah? When men speak of you they speak of poets, music makers, doctors and scientists. Where are your warriors? You dare call yourselves sons of the Prophet? You have become women! Burn your books! Make warriors of your poets! Let your doctors invent new poisons for our arrows. Let your scientists invent new war machines. And then, kill! Burn! Infidels befall your clutches; encourage them to kill each other, and then, when they are weak and torn I will sweep up from Africa and the empire of Allah, the true God, will spread, first across Spain, then across Europe, and then the whole world! (transcription mine) The scene then fades into the picture of a ravaged Christian village, where an immense wooden cross has been defiled by the invaders’ arrows and buried amidst the rubble. The cross is rescued and borne by fair-haired Charlton Heston as Rodrigo Díaz of Vivar. The Moor in the film’s text (the emir of Saragossa, probably modeled after Avengalvón, the Cid’s Moorish vassal in the Poema) turns out to be an idealized noble “Spanish” Muslim who ostensibly stands in contrast to the bellicose African emir and his “savage forces.” While the film’s emir of  R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 315 Valencia is a duplicitous, foppish hedonist and an extreme caricature of this commonly accepted representation of the Moor, the emir of Saragossa is highly cultured and by appearance and manner devoted to the courtly good life above other endeavors. Moreover, while he initially complies with Ben Yusef ’s rapacious instructions, after waging war against the Christians he ultimately joins forces with the Cid, committing himself and his legion to struggle for the peace of “Spain” and all its inhabitants. In so doing, the Moor comes to embody the filmmakers’ ideals of Christian (i.e. anti- Communist) valor, nobility and civility in opposition to the diabolical African Muslim. Nevertheless, the Moor also remains bound to the Afri- cans by his faith and viscerally by his swarthy appearance that more closely corresponds to Ben Yusef ’s complexion than the Cid’s flaxen coloration. The religious kinship and racial association among the Muslims of Iberia and North Africa were in fact always manifest in bilateral travel and migration within the socio-economic and cultural unity of the Maghreb (the Muslim West). That intimate connection was formalized politically when the Almoravid Berbers under Yūsuf b. Tāshufīn (represented here as Ben Yusef ) incorporated al-Andalus into their North African kingdom in 1090. In this case, the film’s sensitivity to a nuance of Islamic history is inadvertent and ironic: the affinity of Muslims across the Mediterranean straits serves to undermine the film’s high-minded narrative appeal to a “Spain shared by Christian and Moor.” If he is to have a place in Spain, the Moor must behave as an ersatz Christian. More consequentially, he must abandon any false hopes he may still entertain that the Moors can restore Islamic sovereignty to the Iberian lands they have lost. The Moor in the film is rendered powerless and a political puppet of his Christian lord. He must submit to Christian rule, much as his textual counterparts in the epic and frontier ballads of what is called “Reconquest Castile” (Mirrer 50) and Rodrigo’s own idealized Moorish vassal in the Poema (Burshatin 121). The second film example is a more conventional Hollywood historical drama of recent vintage, the 1991 production Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. On the face of it, this would seem a most unlikely point of refer- ence for a discussion of literary history and the multicultural situation in medieval Iberia, except that Robin of Locksley’s sidekick ‘Azim, portrayed by Morgan Freeman, is repeatedly identified as a Moor. This is not the place to address in detail the historicity and uniformly positive representa- tion of that loyal, noble Moor. Suffice it to say that he is portrayed as a devout, intelligent and highly educated man equipped with the latest tech- nology and medical acumen—all in opposition to Robin and even more so 316 R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 to the barbaric garrison of Turkish brutes portrayed at the outset of the film in the Jerusalem dungeon. The film identifies the Turks’ practice of Islam with their barbaric behavior: the call to prayer is heard just as a par- ticularly sadistic Turk admonishes his pathetic Christian victim to “have the courage of Allah.” So while the Turks are identified unmistakably as Muslims, they are differentiated sharply from the Moor as though the film- makers were heirs to early modern English tradition (Matar). What is interesting about the representation of ‘Azim is its double emphasis on Moor as signifying ‘African’ and ‘Muslim.’ Any specifically North African origins, let alone Iberian connections ‘Azim might have, do not come into play at all and are exchanged for a thoroughly African iden- tity. It is the Moor’s racial otherness above all, and secondarily his different religion, which determine his identity for the contemporary audience. Although the characterization of the Muslim is emphatically faultless, an achievement in and of itself in a contemporary American production, ‘Azim’s identity and honor condemn him to live out his life as an exile in racial, religious and cultural isolation. He enjoys neither polity nor com- munity of the sorts that sustain Robin in “this cursed country” with “no sun” (transcriptions mine). Another emblem of our own peculiar variety of Kulturkampf, akin to the interest in and appropriation of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, is the re-publication of Stanley Lane-Poole’s nineteenth-century classic The Story of the Moors in Spain. Reissued by Black Classic Press, with Eduard Char- lemont’s imposing “The Moorish Chief ” as its cover illustration, the book seems to invert the value structure of El Cid. The image of “The Moorish Chief ” projects power and dignity. It signals, as the new introduction to Lane-Poole’s work avers, that “Civilization was restored to Europe when another group of Africans, the Moors, brought this dark age to an end, mean- while re-civilizing the Christian barbarians of Europe” (Lane-Poole, “Intro- duction” [n.p.]; emphasis mine). Similarly, the essays of the Fall 1991 issue of the Journal of African Civilization, re-printed as Golden Age of the Moor (Van Sertima), are devoted to subjects such as “Race and Origins of the Moors,” “Moorish Contributions to European Civilization” and “The Science of the Moors.” One of its papers declares: “these same African (Moorish) conquerors civilized backward Spain and Portugal . . . Art, learning, refine- ment and elegance marked the reign of these African conquerors” (Scobie 340; emphasis mine). By the same token, David Lean and Robert Bolt’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) portrays emir Faisal mounting the historic Arab revolt against the Turks with Machiavellian intelligence and purpose. Yet  R. Brann / Medieval Encounters 15 (2009) 307-318 317 Faisal laments wistfully that he “long(s) for the vanished gardens of Cór- doba,” as though the “lost garden” of al-Andalus were his own home (tran- scription mine). In our own time, then, Moor is still so unstable a term that it can accommodate efforts to reclaim the figure of Othello as an African or re-invent him as an Arab or a Turk (Kaul; Ghazoul). References Akbari, Suzanne. “Imagining Islam: The Role of Images in Medieval Depictions of Mus- lims.” Scripta Mediterranea 19-20 (1998-1999): 9-27. 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