A Spanish flag at half-mast in front of Cibeles Palace in Madrid. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty
A lot of Greeks here have asked me “Why Spain?” When the 2004 attacks on the Madrid commuter trains which killed 192 people were carried out, Spain still had troops in Iraq, which then new Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero shamefully withdrew as soon as he could after defeating José María Alfredo Aznar López, who got Spain into Iraq in the first place. Involvement in Iraq had been unpopular with the Spanish electorate from the beginning, and pressure had already been mounting on Aznar to withdraw troops after seven Spanish intelligent agents were killed by Iraqi insurgents in November of 2003, but the Madrid bombings were planned by Al Qaeda to occur just three days before Spanish elections. I was not an Aznar man by any stretch of the imagination, but for Spaniards to cave in to Al Qaeda terror like that and elect a Prime Minister whose first act, essentially, was to withdraw the country’s troops from Iraq, was a show of collective cowardice from a people whose ballsiness I’ve always admired that seriously dismayed me. But since Spain is no longer a nation with troops in Muslim lands, what’s the problem.
So here in the Guardian is the answer to “Why Spain?”:
Although most are thought to have been radicalised by the war in Syria, some jihadis find Spain a peculiarly atavistic target because of the country’s 700-year period of Moorish occupation. Islamic State was quick to look to the past and claim credit for the Barcelona attack, trumpeting: “Terror is filling the crusaders’ hearts in the Land of Andalusia.” [my emphasis]
See the New York Times’ video: “The Islamic State’s Claim to Spain”
OK…I’ve bitten off more than I can chew I think, so let me resort to bullet points. Some Al-Andalus and Crusades fun bubbles I’d like to pop:
* The happy Muslim Iberia of convivencia — co-existence — only lasted for at most two centuries, as long as the Umayyad Caliphate with its capital at Córdoba lasted. That caliphate was replaced by new and much more religiously orthodox and intolerant Berber kingdoms from North Africa under which Spain devolved into small Muslim emirates — the taifa — in which conditions for Spanish non-Muslims came to resemble those of dhimmi elsewhere in the Muslim world. (See also rayah: “…both in contemporaneous and in modern usage, it refers to non-Muslim subjects in particular, also called zimmi.” The “dh” sound of Arabic is usually replaced by a “z” sound in Irano-Turkic usage, as in Ramadhan and Ramazan.)
The taifa of the Iberian peninsula in 1031. (By 1248, when Seville fell to Christian siege, the only other major city left in Muslim hands was Granada.
* Check out this book about the Crusades: God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark.
It’s a cruddy, badly written and amateurish book (but, you know…”Out of the mouths of babes…” Psalms 8:2 and Matthew 21:16; you can’t expect an academically serious historian to write something like this, as he’d lose all funding and probably his job), but it asks a serious question: why have we in the modern West come to consider the Crusades the beginning of aggressive Western imperialism, a kind of proto-colonialism, and not, as Stark asks, a perfectly predictable response to the aggression of Islam/Arabs? I mean, sorry, it’s a question I’ve always been afraid to articulate: but who conquered two thirds of the Roman Christian world and the whole of the Sassanian world in less than a century to being with?
Next:
* That the Crusades have remained a traumatic memory seared in the collective consciousness of Arabs everywhere, that Syrian mothers still scare their children into obedience by telling them that Richard the Lionheart is coming to kidnap them, is an urban myth. Arabs didn’t remember the Crusades any more than we (Greeks) collectively remembered the Fourth Crusade that dealt the fatal blow to the Eastern Roman Empire (the Ottomans really just mopped up what was left). Arabs only “remembered” the “trauma” of the Crusades when the West and the above mentioned guilty Western intelligentsia “reminded” them
* On to another inconvenient truth that follows on the above: the Byzantines recovered fairly quickly from the loss of the Levant and Egypt to the Arabs in the 7th century, and in fact, may have emerged stronger as a more compact, ethnically and linguistically Greek polity. Then, under the early Comnenoi in the 12th century (Alexios, Ioannes and Manuel), they showed their resilience again as they reconsolidated their rule over the Balkans and, taking advantage of the crumbling of the Seljuks caused by the appearance of new Turks in Asia Minor, reconquered a large part of western Anatolia, despite facing renewed aggression from the Italian/Sicilian Normans to the West and from these newer Turkic states on the East; with the First Crusade’s help, they even recaptured Antioch and the surrounding region for a brief period. The Fourth Crusade’s conquest and sack of Constantinople in 1204, though, was an event it was impossible to recover from. Several Greek successor states that emerged then reunited into an empire under the leadership of the Palaeologoi out of Nicaea and retook Constantinople in 1261, but from then on this remnant Roman Empire was, despite a new cultural and artistic flourishing, a political and military sitting duck. Add to these facts that Levantine Christians and Armenians who ended up in the reconquered Crusader states — at the time of the Crusades the regions we’re talking about were, by some estimates, still almost 50% Christian — were subjected to violent reprisals by their newly returned Muslim overlords that diminished their numbers through flight and conversion and we come to the inevitable conclusion: in the long run, the greatest victims of the Crusades were eastern Christians.
* For Jews, whose horrific experiences with the Christian West just went from bad to worse over two millenia, culminating in the Holocaust, and for whom it seems to have been particularly tempting to see the historical lands of Islam as the “Goldene Medina” where Jews lived in peace and acceptance, it wouldn’t hurt to keep in mind that the biggest pogrom in mediaeval Europe in terms of numbers slain occurred in 1066 in Muslim Granada. This was when a Jew-cum-uppity-nigger, Joseph ha-Nagid, became too powerful as the vizier at the emir’s court in Granada — that city whose languid beauty and graciousness is the Fetish-in-the-Crown of pro-Moorish apologists. He was crucified and, by some estimates (many consider them discredited, but you have to ask why), 4,000 Jews were killed. I don’t know if crucifixion was supposed to have some kind of retaliatory significance given he was Jewish. But, according to Bernard Lewis, the Berber Muslim mob that carried out this pogrom were egged on by a poem of a certain Muslim, Abu Ishaq:
Bernard Lewis writes:
“Particularly instructive in this respect is an ancient anti-Semitic poem of Abu Ishaq, written in Granada in 1066. This poem, which is said to be instrumental in provoking the anti-Jewish outbreak of that year, contains these specific lines:
- Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them, the breach of faith would be to let them carry on.
- They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violators?
- How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent?
- Now we are humble, beside them, as if we were wrong and they were right!
- [my emphases]”
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“My emphases” are obviously meant to highlight the zero-sum game that is monotheism and particularly Islam: “obscure/prominent” and “wrong/right”. No sense that there’s room for both or many as in polytheism or Hinduism (let’s not get into whether Hinduism is really polytheism right now). Just “right” and “wrong”. If you’re wrong you’ll be tolerated as long as you don’t get too big for your britches. And: “why am I obscure when they’re prominent?” sounds like the battle cry of curdled ressentiment we’ve heard from Sayyid Qutb to Mohammed Atta and his buddies and back to Abu Ishaq if not to the very beginnings and to Ishmael himself, the rejected illegitimate son of Abraham and of the slave Hagar.
Lewis adds though: “Diatribes such as Abu Ishaq’s and massacres such as that in Granada in 1066 are of rare occurrence in Islamic history.”
Well, ok then…
Some questions:
* Why does the Western liberal never tire of reminding us how bloody the massacre that accompanied the First Crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem was, but if you dare compare that to one of the first acts of the first community of Muslims — the decapitation of an entire tribe of Jewish men and boys and the distribution of the women and younger children among them as slaves (sound familiar?) — or the orgy of bloodletting and destruction the Ghaznavids unleashed on India, or the comparable massacre and enslavement by the Ottomans of whatever remained of the population of Constantinople on May 29th, 30th and 31th, 1453 (when a city that has resisted falls you get three days to pillage, massacre and enslave and then you have to stop: let’s not get greedy), then you’re an Islamophobe like the creepy Sam Harris or the silly Bill Maher or even the flip-flopping Maajid Nawaz (I never trust a convert) who’s “cherry-picking” events and quotes in order to make his hateful, Islamophobe argument?
Detail from miniature painting The Prophet, Ali, and the Companions at the Massacre of the Prisoners of the Jewish Tribe of Beni Qurayzah, illustration of a 19th-century text by Muhammad Rafi Bazil. Manuscript now in the British Library.
(At least, as far a I know, no Western descendant of the Crusaders celebrates either the fall of Jerusalem or the 1204 Sack of Constantinople with this kind of clownishness:
“…the fifth annual Conquest Cup, an archery competition that celebrates the anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.” [my link] the Times writes, oblivious to the fact that this celebration commemorates an event which to some might mean a history of death and enslavement. And they just cheerily put it in the sports section, when it’s as easy to find this offensive as it is to find a Confederate soldier or Robert E. Lee monument offensive. But imagine the Times just putting Southern Civil War battle reenacters in the sports section as a wacky, cool, exotic event; there’d be a screeching riot of anger they’d have to deal with that they would never forget. Let’s re-enact some slave auctioning too then. I mean, whatever, Turks can have their fun. I’m not going to turn into one of the jerks who kvetches until the Helmsley building takes down its Cross lighting display during Christmas. But then drop the religion-of-peace argument.)
* I am so sick of the clichéd accusation of “cherry-picking” so beloved by the insufferable Mehdi Hassan (see below) and his like, but let’s take the term as textually literal and see. If I took a basket and starting looking through Muslim scripture and history for legitimized violence and intolerance, I think I’d end up with a pretty hefty basket-load of cherries; c’est-à-dire, if something is “cherry-picked” it doesn’t mean that the cherries are actually light on the tree and we’ve picked the very few that there are this year, for whatever reason, or that they don’t taste like what we think they taste like. And let’s rethink the word “tolerant.” “To tolerate” is a word that in contexts other than Western liberals’ defense of Islam is offensive; it means, I’ll be merciful and compassionate, if you accept your second-class status. Needless to say — it pisses me off to have to add this caveat — the Old Testament is just as loaded, if not more, with cherries ripe for the picking, as is the New Testament aside from the Gospels and Acts; pain-in-the-ass Paul’s re-Judaizing of the Gospels’ message with his moralism and legalism and chauvinistic zeal, is nasty and, worse, boring (like I said, always watch out for the convert), and the psychotic vengeance-poem of Revelations (Apocalypse in Greek) sends chills up my spine — and not chills of repentance, just disgust — whenever I’m exposed to it.
* Spanish Catholicism has been (Yes – “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…”) for great periods of our common history, terrifying, especially for the Jews and Muslims the Arabs left behind in Spain and for the subjected-to-genocide inhabitants of the New World. I admit to having played around with Santiago imagery in the past, but the connotations became too hard to stomach (see this interesting article: “The Transference of ‘Reconquista’ Iconography to the New World: From Santiago Matamoros to Santiago Mataindios“). The Spanish Catholicism of the Reconquista and the Counter-Reformation is easily the most abominable form Christianity has ever taken — along with the Puritans, of course, and Luther and his Taliban, of course, and American Evangelists, of course, etc. etc. — but, still, you have to ask: the legitimacy of force and conquest in the spreading of the faith; massacre or forced conversion as legitimate proselytizing methods, enslavement of the defeated enemy — where did Spanish Catholicism get those ideas from? They’re not in the Gospels. And forced conversion is not present in Judaism either, which — remember — is not interested in converting you. Maybe — just maybe — after 800 years you start to resemble your enemy. Even the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre — blood purity — that you have no Muslim or Jewish ancestors, probably unfeasible to impossible in Iberia — seems to mirror the chauvinism of early peninsular Arabs, and the apart-ness status they lived under in early Islam. Any ideas?
Santiago Matamoros
* And the insufferable Mehdi Hassan below. I loved him as host of Al Jazeera’s The Café. Then he appointed himself the ummah’s defender against the likes of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens and became as annoying as hell. He seems to think that speaking a mile a minute in an Oxbridge accent with just enough working-class twang to suggest a Bradford boy done good will win him arguments…snide, cliché-ridden, “super-cherry-picking,” an accusation he likes to throw at others. Exhausting, but you have to admire his energy I guess. I don’t know if you’re the best “ambassador” of Islam, though, when you yourself have started to develop strange physical ticks in an attempt to monitor your own rage.
Comments, questions, answers, corrections, tirades, please send to:
Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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Turks beating up young conscripts on the Bosporus Bridge, defending their democratic right to elect a dictator who has abolished Turkish democracy for the most part and soon will have the power to go after whatever’s left…Turkish “unity” in action.
Other money quotes:
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 