In Our Time - Muslim Spain

Episode Date: November 21, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Muslim Spain. In 711 a small army of North African Berbers invaded Spain and established an Iberian Islamic culture that would last for over 700 years. Despite periods of infighting and persecution, Muslim Spain was a land where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed in relative peace and harmony. Its capital, Cordoba, although not unique amongst Spanish cities, became the centre and focus for generations of revered and respected philosophers, physicians and scholars. By the 10th century Cordoba was one of the largest cities in the world. But what some historians refer to as Cordoba’s Golden Age came to an end in the 11th century, when the society was destabilised by new threats from Africa to the South and Christendom to the North. However, it was not until 1492, when Granada fell to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, that Islamic Spain was well and truly over.In that same year the Jews were expelled from its shores and Christopher Columbus set sail to lead Spanish Christian expansionism into the new world. But how did Muslims, Jews and Christians interact in practice? Was this period of apparent tolerance underpinned by a respect for each other’s sacred texts? What led to the eventual collapse of Cordoba and Islamic Spain? And are we guilty of over-romanticising this so-called golden age of co-existence? With Tim Winter, a convert to Islam and lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University; Martin Palmer, Anglican lay preacher and theologian and author of The Sacred History of Britain, Mehri Niknam, Executive Director of the Maimonides Foundation, a joint Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Foundation in London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 711, a small army of North African Berbers invaded Spain and established an Iberian Islamic culture that would last for over 700 years. Despite periods of infighting and persecution,

Muslim Spain was a land where, Muslims, Jews and Christians, coexisted in relative peace and harmony. Its capital, Cordoba, although not unique among Spanish cities, became the centre and focus for generations of revered and respected philosophers, physicians and scholars. By the 10th century, Cordoba was one of the two or three largest cities in the world and possibly the richest. But what some historians refer to as Cordoba's Golden Age came to an end in the 11th century when the society was destabilized by new threats from Africa to the south and Christendom to the north.

But how did Muslims, Jews and Christians interact in practice? What scholarship flowed from this interaction? Was this period of apparent tolerance underpinned by a respect for each other's sacred texts? And are we guilty of over-romanticising this so-called golden age of coexistence? With me to discuss this is Tim Winter, a convert to Islam and lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. Martin Palmer, an Anglican lay preacher and theologian, and author of the Sacred History of Britain,

and Mary Niknam, the executive director of the Maimonides Foundation in London. Tim Winter, let's start here. Let's establish the historical context. The initial wave of Muslim soldiers invaded Spain is 711, almost 100 years after the foundation of Islam. There's some Berbers from the northwest of Africa. Why'd they come there? How'd they go about it? How fast did they conquer?

Well, the motives are still far from clear. I think probably they were mixed. By this time the Arabs were spread very thinly over this new empire of theirs. They hadn't sent huge armies to conquer North Africa. It was small flying columns of cavalrymen. But the local population, the indigenous population of North Africa, the Berbers sign up to the new religion with considerable enthusiasm and with all the zeal of new converts, they want to carry the torch further.

So in 7-11, Tarek, who's a former slave, crosses the straits. Of course, his name provides the name. of Gibraltar. Gibraltarich, Tarik's mountain. He lands very close to that. And no doubt, part of the motivation amongst his tribesmen was booty. Some were no doubt interested in glory. But others, I think, were possessed by a burning zeal to spread the new monotheistic message of Islam as far as possible. So the motives were mixed, but what is clear is that they very quickly smash the Visigothic German nobility at a battle called Rio Barabate shortly after landing. And within a couple of years, virtually the whole of the peninsula is in their hands.

Why did they so easily knock the Visigoths down? Well, the Visigoths seem to have been both overconfident and pretty unpopular. They did not say it's about 400. Yes, these are the people who'd overthrown the Roman Empire. Sackipo and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, they've been sitting there, often religiously alienated from the population, very unpopular with Jewish sections of the population. They impose a feudal system that makes them unpopular with the peasantry.

In fact, one of the first things that, the Muslims do in Spain is to break up the big Latifundia, the feudal estates, and to allocate the land to the peasantry, the people who are actually working it. I don't think we can understand the permanence of the Muslim conquest, unless we recognize that much of the population actually welcomed the Berbers and the Arabs with open arms. It was a kind of liberation theology, almost. Also, there were tax breaks for the middle classes in the cities. Islamic law imposed lower taxes than Visigothic or Byzantine taxation regimes had done. So generally they were almost sucked in rather than pushing their way into a world that really

didn't want them. You talk about this invasion being led by a slave or a former slave. What was his relationship? What was their relationship with the Centre of Islamic Power in Damascus? Well, communications weren't terribly good. Six months, wasn't it? Six months with a favourable wind. And basically the invasion was unauthorised.

The Berbers, unlike the Arabs, knew that Spain was. the rich and prosperous country, and they were the ones who pushed for the invasion, and it was entirely unauthorised, and when the caliph in Damascus finally got wind of it, he sent a message to recall Tarik and his boss, Musa Bundesir, who by this time are at the gates of the Pyrenees, and they're recalled to Damascus, and they never returned to Spain, but by this time nine-tenths of the peninsula has been overrun, and only a tiny fringe of Christendom remains in the north, so the deed has been done. Just as a little telling, chilling, or perhaps, and who knows, an lightning post script, in your view, had they not been called back, they would have erased through France

and come over and spread all this island, too? Quite possibly. It's certainly the case that they had gone, the Muslims had gone nine-tenths of the distance between Mecca and London, and they'd overrun the more significant centres of resistance. France was ruled by a Germanic dynasty, very similar to the regime that prevailed in Spain. There was no particular reason why the conquest of France wouldn't have been as permanent and as easy as the conquest of Spain had been. But the lines of communication were immensely long. The Pyrenees were a barrier. There was also a sense that there wasn't much there. Northern Europe was a kind of forested, muddy, barbarian place that just wasn't as interesting as Egypt and Syria and Spain. So they stopped.

Martin Palmer, what kind of country did these Berber warriors invade in 711? Well, I think Tim has put his finger on it. It was not a harmonious, united country. by any stretch of the imagination. What you had was the Visigoths, this very high level of control and power, who had only recently, and somewhat begrudgingly, become more Orthodox or Catholic Christians, having been Aryans beforehand.

Arians questioned or indeed did not accept the divinity of Christ in the traditional way that either the Orthodox based at Constantinople or the Catholic as it came to be based at Rome, accepted. So they'd been a little bit out of course, on the wing, you had also still probably quite a strong pagan presence in the countryside, although one of the interesting things about the rate of conversion under the Islamic period, certainly up until the 11th, 12th century, is that whilst the cities converted fairly swiftly, the countryside remained fairly resolutely Christian.

But that Christian population was subject to at least three different regimes of religious belief. You also had the fact that the land was very rich, it was very comfortable, there was wine, women and song, and they got a bit weak, to put it mildly. But I think we mustn't think of it as being Christendom or a Christian country in the conventional way. At that time, really right up until the middle of the Middle Ages, there were various forms of Christianity, varying in orthodoxy.

It's a much more fluid world than we would like to think. Mary Nicknard, the Jewish population in Spain had lived under very severe persecution from the Visigoths, as I understand it, and oppression. and one of the fascinating things about this invasion is that the Berbers couldn't really have done it without the help of the Jews. Not only did the Jews welcome them, but they literally manned the cities

that this very small Berber force had conquered while the Berber force moved on to conquer other cities. So can you just unravel that a bit for us? Yes, absolutely. The life that was led by the Jews under the Visigothic rule was absolutely dreadful. From the really 6th century onwards, for instance, the Church Council of Toledo ruled that children of mixed Jewish Christian marriages should be baptized by force.

Towards the beginning of the 7th century, it was ruled that only Catholics may live in Spain. And shortly before the invasion of Spain, around about 700 and so on, the Jews were forbidden to conduct any merchant activity on pain of actually becoming slaves. they could not conduct commercial transactions. They had to sell all their buildings, possessions, lines, vilniards, and they were not allowed to own slaves. And further that, they were given actually to the hands of Christian masters as slaves themselves. So it was not a surprise that when they heard of this new, let us say, people coming to Spain,

that they welcomed them almost as if they were a messianic harbingers of a new era. You've described that situation very graphically. Can you also now sum up for us what they got out of the Muslim rule when the Muslims established themselves after they'd conquered and decided to stay? What the Jews got out of it was to be able to practice their religion in safety. They were also permitted to be involved in the economy, of the country. And thirdly, they were given the possibility of interacting with their fellow Jews along the Muslim Empire, which was something that they couldn't do before that. So these three

things were very important for the development of the Jewish culture in Spain in the Middle Ages. And that gave it a platform for an enormous blooming, didn't it really? Absolutely. The flowering and the flourishing of the Jewish culture and scholarship in the Middle Ages until then had not been surpassed. Yes. So that committee is wonderful paradox that it comes out of a Muslim occupation. And that's now what we want to talk about.

The so-called, and that's unironic, the golden age of Cordoba, this idea that Muslims, Christians and Jews, scholars, we're not talking about perfect amity, we're not talking about no unrest, we're not talking about no persecution, but we are talking about a considerable period of time when these three monotheisms,

which have been at each other's throat for such a long time, were in one place or two or three places, in Spain at that time, at the very least getting on, but much more than that, because of the interconnections, actually leading to what Mary is called quite rightly a flowering. Now let's see how much truth there is in that. Martin Palmer, okay. The Umayad family may call it by the capital in 756,

and they were to rule for about 300 years, so that was the sort of stability. Did that stability help greatly in what we're going to talk about? Yes, I think it did, and that one of the great problems that the Christian populations experienced throughout the Muslim Empire at that time was the fickleness of rulers. I mean, I think we need to see that whilst Islam as a general philosophy actually has a profound understanding of how to manage a pluralist culture, albeit that Islam has the utterly unchallengeable

top position, and you're not allowed to question or argue against that, it was subject to the fickleness of individual rules. who weren't always as strict Muslims as perhaps history were like them to have been. So I think for many of the Christians, what was important was a period of stability. Tim Winter, we're not only talking about stability, but we're also talking about really great scholarship. Enormous, from his hand in translations, we're talking about developments in medicine, we're talking about developing trigonometry and poetry, philosophy.

This is an area of European culture, which was massive. Let's just take us as a symbol, the mosque. What does that do for us? that huge mosque, one of the biggest buildings of its time. Well, it was a truly gigantic space, gigantic enough for it to function as a university as well as a place of worship. And anybody, with any credibility, could go into the mosque, put his back up against a column and start teaching not just Islamic law,

but also commentaries on Aristotle, if he wanted, or mathematics or astronomy. And very rapidly, Cordoba becomes one of the three or four great intellectual centers of the Islamic world. Partly because they're so self-consciously out on a limb, this is the final frontier for Islam, and they really want to be real Muslims, really civilized metropolitan people. They import a few scholars from the East,

but very rapidly, Kordoba becomes a net exporter of intellectual talent back to the Muslim East. It becomes one of the great centres for the intellectual articulation of Islamic law. It becomes one of the great centres for Islamic mathematics, Somebody called Zaharawi, for instance, writes the first great works on surgery in any language.

These go into Latin quite soon, and they're republished in Latin, also in Hebrew and other languages, and they're taught in British hospitals until the 17th century. They come from Muslim Cordoba. Also, astronomy is hugely important. Tomi's Almagest is in the air. It's in Arabic already. That goes into Latin via somebody called Gerard of Cremona in the 13th century, and that makes a huge difference.

to the development of astronomy and mathematics elsewhere in Europe. So Corrida is hugely important in terms of the internal intellectual dynamics of Islam, but it's also important as a kind of bridge. It does broadcast, often unconsciously, the discoveries and the new synthesis that are being brought about by these pious Muslim scholars, not just around the Muslim world, but far to the north as well. This has been talked about, which will surprise a lot of people. As the golden age of Jewish culture, Tim's hinted out,

or given us some idea of Muslim culture there. What about Jewish culture there? What are we specifically talking about? Well, what Tim says about the Muslim culture can be mirrored very easily in the Jewish culture and scholarship that existed at the time. Simply like this, that whatever the Muslims saw

and experienced as a challenge to their development and understanding of their theology, of philosophy, of all the other disciplines that flourished then. So did the Jews. Therefore, what we find is this, that suddenly there is a movement of, for instance, Talmudic scholars from Baghdad, from Iraq, which had been the seat of Jewish studies ever since fifth century, a common era.

Scholars are moving to Andalusia. and they're setting up academies in Lucena and in Barcelona. So the Talmudic studies begin to develop in Spain, as well as that there is a development of the Hebrew as a language as biblical Hebrew. The grammar is developed there. The grammar is developed. Exactly. In fact, really, the first official Hebrew grammar that we have develops in the Middle Ages in Spain

as the result of the development. of the Arabic grammar. As the result of that, there is commentaries which are written on the Bible, Talmudic studies, and most of all the development of poetry and philosophy, these two which previously, certainly philosophy, had not been part of Jewish law of knowledge. Since first century, common error,

or even slightly before that, the Jews did not experience the Muslim rule, as threatening towards their theology. What they felt much more concerned about were the challenge of reason. And therefore, the books which were written by the Jewish scholars at the time was not so much polemic with Islam.

Rather, they were explaining to, I mean, you get this at the 10th century, Saadia Gaon, who lived in Baghdad, who was the first really Jewish scholar to discuss the challenge of reason. They wanted to explain to their own fellow religions how to cope with this perplexity as to new challenges that the synthesis of faith and reason brings together. Can I just come back to what the Muslims thought of, these religions, these other religions and how they dealt with them,

and where we're talking to where the Muslim theologians are coming in, because they, after all, are ruling. Well, from the point of view of the political establishment, I suppose the attitude tended to be, at least in the first three or four centuries, one of a kind of imperial condescension. God clearly had given the world to the Muslims. This was the final stage. This was the cleansed version, wasn't it?

Their faith was the third, as it were, monotheism. That's right, and earlier religions had really. been trumped by Islam and there were these picturesque little exotic minorities of a few Christians and Jews still running around and one could deal with them in a rather indulgent fashion because clearly they'd had their day in history and now the future was in the hands of Islam so they didn't feel threatened by them at all and they never felt threatened by the Jewish minorities in Spain because there was no external Jewish community or state that could threaten them. Generally the Jews as Meheri as indicated were far more favoured by the Muslim establishment and population than the

Christian minorities, particularly when in the 11th century, a crusading ideology starts to develop in the north. And Christianity regained some of its teeth and starts to look like a force to be reckoned with again. And the situation of Christians in Andalusia starts to deteriorate. But the Jews are never suspected in that way. And of course, when the Christians finally reconquer southern Spain, the great majority of Jews decide to leave with the Muslims and settle further in the east. Was there a discussion between the three faiths? Did they examine each other's, I would say, sacred text? Not really.

Not really. I mean, for instance, the first translation of the Quran into Latin doesn't happen until the 12th, 13th century. And there is very little evidence of any particular. I think Tim's summed it up beautifully. It's this sort of attitude of, well, aren't they colourful but irrelevant? So it was really not an issue for them. In a sense, what was happening in the intellectual world of religion and of faith was a grappling with the legacy of rationalism and the rise of rationalism, the rise of particularly the rediscovery of Aristotelian thought.

Now, I think we have to put that, though, into context that this was not news for the vast majority of Christians in the world. The vast majority of Christians in the world were direct heirs of Greek philosophy. They were also engaged with Chinese and Hindu Buddhist philosophy. Manakee and Zoroastrian and so forth, because the vast majority of Christians at that time of the world were not in Europe. They were from Constantinople eastwards in what's called the Eastern Church and much of the Orthodox Church. So there was a flow of ideas and information coming in from the Eastern Christian world into the Western world. We have Charlemagne, for instance, around about 800 AD, ordering the translation of major Greek texts into Latin

to be placed in every single monastery. And these had to be medicinal texts, texts on health, on healing, on astronomy, and on agriculture. So we have an intellectual milieu going on. We have Bede here in our own country, pioneering modern historography. So it's not as though Christianity was this sort of black backwater where nothing was happening,

but the same challenge was rising. And in Cordoba in particular, but in that interface between Jewish Christian and Muslim, the challenge of the relationship between revelation and discovery, which is essentially the tension between faith and science, if you like, was being hammered out. And of course it comes to its height in Ibn Rush, the great philosopher, and then Thomas Aquinas within Christianity.

So in a sense it could have taken place almost anywhere, but Cordoba provided the perfect environment for that debate, which was really nothing particularly to do with Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. per se, but was to do with the tension between faith and philosophy. Brilliant. But between those two, Jus and Aquinas, there's Avaroes, great Muslim scholar. We're talking about the 12th century. Can you place him in Cordoba and as regards the Muslim scholarship and his regards the spread into other scholarships, particularly the West? Well, Avaroes is one of the great transformational figures of the Middle Ages, particularly,

ironically, for Western Europe. He doesn't really have much of an afterlife in the world. Islamic thought. He's the chief judge of southern Spain. He's a hugely important, to this day, very respected interpreter of Islamic law. But in his spare time, he dabbles, it turns out very profoundly in the Greek legacy. Almost all of it has been translated by this time. And he's decided by this time that the platonic move in Islamic philosophy that had become widespread in Spain, particularly from the 10th century onwards, somebody called Ibn Masarra in southern Spain, is one of the great near-Platonic philosophers of Islam, was actually a wrong turn,

and that his concern was to interpret the revelation of the Quran, and he is a faithful Muslim in his own perhaps slightly eccentric way, that the correct interpretation was not to be on the basis of platonising mystical intuition, but was on the basis of reason. The prophet had said, the noblest thing God has created is the intellect, therefore that's the way to look at scripture. And because he writes a large number of commentaries on the key works of Aristotle,

which are quite soon done into Latin. This provokes a huge intellectual revolution throughout Latin Christendom. Averroism becomes almost a subversive force, and he's one of the reasons and one of the figures most frequently cited by the greatest medieval Christian intellectual, St Thomas Aquinas. But Mois Quinez referred to Aristotle as the master and Averroes as a commentator, yeah. He is one reason why European scholastic philosophy

starts to move in a more, we might say, rationalising direction. and this provides one of the underpinnings for the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and everything since. So we've heard about the Christian, where we've heard about the Muslim. Now, can we, around the figure of Maimonides, what did he bring together that? What can we see from his, he had to leave,

that's a great thing, because we're coming at the end. In his 20s, he had to leave because it was all changing. But he got his grounding there. He got his scholarship there. We can assume that he got what he was as an intellectual there. What was that? Absolutely. He was a younger contemporary. of Avaroes.

Also from Cordova, yes, he left. He had his original studies, both in Islamic and Arabic studies, as well as Jewish studies in Cordova. His family decided to emigrate due to Berber invasion at a time, and they eventually settled in Cairo or Fustadt in Egypt. And that was where he wrote his magnum opus, really,

the guide for the perplex. The importance and the significance of Maimonides in Jewish studies is unique. He not only was a community leader, not only a Renaissance man, because of course he was a physician, he was a grammarian, he was involved as an advisor, he was the physician to the vizier of Saladin, but he wrote two major books, one of which is called Mishnah Torah, where he systematized, being a follower of Aristotle, of course he was very interested, where he systematized basically the Talmudic studies.

And the guide for the perplexed, which is the most perfect example of Aristotelian philosophy, viewed from a Jewish perspective in order to synthesize Judaism and philosophy together. Thank you. Now, we haven't got much time. Can I ask the three of you, do you think that there was something really remarkable about what happened in Cordoba? Or was it a series of accidents that can't be repeated because it was a series of accidents? Or is my reading of it over-inflating it, over-burnishing the goldenness? Can I just have a view? Starting with you, Your Honor. I think we need to put Cordoba and Muslim Spain into much, much wider context.

At that time, in what one might call the old world, the world stretching from Greece through till China, the situation of Cordoba was not that unusual. Baghdad could provide exactly the same experience, so could Cairo, so could Damascus, so could Changang, ang, the capital city of China. All those great cities were melting pots primarily through trade, but of scholars, philosophers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.

What is distinctive in a sense is that Cordoba, as it were, helps Europe, not Western Europe, recover something of its own self-esteem. And it is grappling primarily with this huge issue of the relationship between revelation and discovery, as it were, between faith and reason. And that, I think, is its importance. Mary, would you go along with that? Some of it. I would say that though Cordoba is very important,

very special and very unique, but we do tend to look at it with the slightly rose-tinted glasses. Yes, it was a time of great development between the three faiths, but at the same time there were occasionally difficulties. One shouldn't say that it was all good and wonderful and living together. There were wars going on and there were persecutions of one faith by another at times. So we should take it rationally and look at the same. at it for it's good, but also learn from what went wrong. Can you give us your final view of this day?

Well, for me personally, Muslim Spain represents a very important memory for me as a European Muslim. The far right is gaining ground everywhere in Europe. The new theme in European politics is let's deal with Muslim immigration, asylum seekers, this irreconcilable minority. And we have to recognize that one of the golden ages of European civilization was this Islamic extratum without which nothing really in modern Europe and everything we hold near and dear would be the same. So it's not unique, as Meheri and Martin have said internationally in terms of world history, but in terms of European history, it's an enormously important symbol of what was once possible and if the medievals could just about rub along together,

why can't we? So you find it as it was, as it were, because there was an idea that it was late 19th century Muslim scholars who almost reinvented it. You disagree. with that. Well, there's a certain romanticising as the Arab nationalist movement got underway in the 19th century. Here was Islam being the most civilized, enlightened factor in medieval Europe. Things, of course, were a lot more complicated than that. But certainly by the standards of the time, particularly in the early period, Cordoba was the great lighthouse of civilisation, conviviality and philosophy anywhere in Western Europe. Well, thank you very much. Tim Winter, Martin Palmer and Mehery Nickner. Next week we'll be looking at the imagination. but thanks and thanks very much for listening.

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