The look of the other [Ressource électronique] : cross-cultural perceptions in in medieval Iberia / Mustapha Kamal

Doctor in Philosophy : Comparative Literature : University of California, Berkeley : 2000

Bibliogr. p. 188-194

Less than a century after the emergence of Islam in Arabia, the Muslims conquered Iberia and reached the south of France. The sudden appearance of the new conquerors north of the Straits of Gibraltar caused a huge anxiety among the Christians of Western Europe. Once the military threat stopped, Christians sought to understand the political and religious background of their enemy. In this struggle, their first reference was the Bible. Scholars interpreted several ambiguous passages of the Jewish Bible (for example The Book of Daniel) in order to find solace in the prophecies they contained. But as the struggle was protracted, other forms of cultural opposition developed. Thus, in France there appeared a literary genre called chansons de geste, imbued with a crusading spirit. In these texts, Muslims are called Sarrasins; and the only good Sarrasins are Muslim princesses or queens who convert to Christianity after the defeat of their correligionists. In Iberia, the situation was different: after a long period of submission, the northern provinces began to get their independence from Muslim rule, inaugurating the so-called Reconquest. Following the expansions of Christian dominions southward, there circulated poems and epics, in which heroes such as the Cid and others, were extolled. In these texts, the Muslims (or Moors) are portrayed more fairly. In the Cantar de Mio Cid, for example, we learn that there are good and bad Moors. As for the Muslims, they did not pay much attention to their Christian foes at first. Theirs was a more pragmatic approach. The texts produced by the first literati of al- Andalus stressed political allegiance. Thus, when the Christians in al-Andalus were weak, a loyal Christian was better than a rebellious Muslim. But when Christian kingdoms began to represent a real threat, especially towards the last decade of the tenth century, the tone began more militant. In this dissertation, I examine both the Muslim and the Christian sides, and I focus on the periods when both felt strong enough to portray the enemy without fear. My approach has been to show that both sides were far from being monolithic. In the first chapter, I examine the conquest of Iberia by the Muslims and the myths that they created to legitimize their rule over the land. The second chapter deals with the way in which the first Muslim literati viewed the other, i.e., Christians. The third chapter shows a more militant face of Islam in the Peninsula. Because Muslims felt seriously threatened, they addressed their Christian foes in a more polemical tone. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The fourth chapter addresses the issue of the so-called Reconquest, and examines the way in which Spanish, and other Western scholars, try to legitimize an agenda which did not exist in the Middle Ages. The fifth chapter analyzes the ways in which two epic texts depict Muslims. The first one is the Spanish Cantar de Mio Cid, and the second is the French La Prise d'Orange. In this chapter, I show how the former epic is more realistic than the latter chanson de geste. In the last chapter, I examine an eminently Spanish genre, the Romancero fronterizo. In this chapter, I show the genre evolved: from being eminently anti-Muslim to being more sympathetic to the plague of the Moriscos, the Christian descendants of the defeated Muslims.