The essays in this volume form part of the international research project âIslamic Legacy: Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean (1350â1750)â funded by COST European Cooperation in Science and Technology. Their aim is to investigate the enduring legacy of the medieval and early modern Islamic presence in certain European countries that has persisted beyond 1750 and continues to manifest itself in life today. They demonstrate the importance of a legacy that is crucial to European identity by exploring contemporary cultural, political, historical and religious references to medieval or early modern Islamic interaction and influence manifest in a number of European nations.
The idea that Islamic civilization and its legacy is part of European identity challenges the popular perception of a centuries-old clash between Christians and Muslims on European soil. Christian Europeâs first encounter with Islam arose through invasion and religious conquest, when Muslim armies arrived on the shores of the Hispanic peninsula in the year 711. The anonymous Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 described that conquest as a cataclysm, a disaster akin to the fall of Troy, visited upon the Visigothic Christians of Iberia as divine punishment for their corruption. Early Christian notions of Muslims as inherently warlike followers of an aberrant form of Christianity contrasted with the ethos of their new Muslims rulers, who tolerated Christianity as a religion of the Book. Antipathy sprang from the quills of early medieval historians â the eighth-century Syrian priest John of Damascus refuted Islam,1 and the Venerable Bede, who believed that Muslims allegedly were descended from Ishmael, the son of Abrahamâs concubine Hagar, while Christians came from his lawful son Isaac. Bede referred to the prophecy relating to Ishmael in the book of Genesis XVI: 12, which condemned his descendants the Saracens to wander in the wilderness.2 The point of Bedeâs story of origins is that it rendered all Muslims illegitimate, while only Christians belonged to the legitimate blood line. This antagonistic attitude was pursued by later Arab and Christian writers who set the moral tone for centuries to come.
The common history and belief in one God shared by the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam were engulfed by largescale European political and religious conflicts that reinforced the idea of a clash not only of religions but also of cultures. The crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the fall of the last Muslim emirate in Europe in 1492, the sixteenth-century Ottoman threat to Europe followed by Christian European colonialism from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, all fostered a narrative that pitted Islam against the West and fuelled the Islamophobia and anti-westernism so prevalent in contemporary politics and media.
When Spain came under Muslim rule in the eighth century, its Christian communities perceived Islam not only as a religious threat, but also a political and cultural one, despite the fact that Islam was generally more tolerant to its Jewish and Catholic subjects than Roman Imperial Christianity had been. Three centuries later, the Crusades intensified the antagonism between the two faiths, hardening both the Christian view that Islam was the religion of the sword, and the equivalent Muslim perspective on Christianity as the militant herald of western imperialism. Both sides saw the other in similar terms, as barbaric, violent conquerors and zealots. The fall in 1492 of the southern Spanish city and province of Granada, final bastion of Islam in Europe, to the Catholic Monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon was a watershed in European history. It marked the end of seven centuries of Muslim rule in Spain and led directly to the conquest of the New World by Columbus and the rise of Spanish colonialism.
Further east, the Muslim armies of the Ottomans conquered much of central and eastern Europe from the mid fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, including Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and parts of Hungary, Albania and Poland, all largely Christian. But as Ottoman power waned in the nineteenth century, the European colonialism of which imperial Spain had been the precursor began to expand. The Muslims, who had been conquerors and independent rulers since the eighth century, now found themselves dominated or ruled in turn by Christian Europeans. The French colonized north, west and equatorial Africa, Lebanon and Syria, the British took over Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, the Arabian Gulf, and the Indian subcontinent, as well as what is now Peninsular Malaysia, while the Dutch occupied Indonesia. The challenge to Muslim power and identity posed by European hegemony in the nineteenth century led to much soul-searching, and a deep longing among many Muslims for the perceived lost paradise of medieval Islamic Spain. The repression of the Muslim world through colonialism has been seen to have its roots in the fall of Islamic Granada in 1492, an idea that fuelled political rhetoric after 9/11, when the US Bush administration spoke of the âwar on terrorâ as a crusade, countered by Bin Ladenâs declaration that a global jihad against the west sought to reclaim territories that were lost in the medieval struggle for al-Andalus, from which the name of the region of Andalusia derives.
The notion of a war between Islam and the West was fostered by Samuel Huntingtonâs influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, published in 1996, which argued that cultural and religious rivalries were the greatest threat to world peace, citing Muslim and Chinese challenges as a threat to the dominance of Europe. Since then, religious terrorism, Islamophobia and immigration have become crucial political and social issues, which have strengthened negative stereotypes. In the present phase of the long history of relations between Muslims and Europe outlined above, the media and many politicians still tend to describe Islam and Christianity, Europe and the Muslim world, in terms of opposition and conflict. Amid these political, religious and economic concerns, the great diversity of the Islamic world and the numerous fertile cross-cultural exchanges between Islam and Christian Europe past and present have been largely forgotten by those outside academic circles.
Europe owes a very great deal to Islamic culture and has been irrevocably shaped by it. One of the most ardent advocates of the inestimable and enduring importance of medieval Hispano-Arab and Sicilian culture in the intellectual, cultural and economic evolution of Europe was the independent American scholar S.H Scott, who published his three volume History of the Moorish Empire in Europe in 1904. This lone scholar, working in isolation in the early twentieth century, created an erudite and extensive testament to the enduring glories of Muslim Spain and Sicily. His viewpoint of informed enlightenment turns much received wisdom on its head to formulate the most fulsome possible advocation for the lasting influence of Muslim civilization in Europe, highlighting the rarely acknowledged debt owed to that great empire by modern Europeans. From early Islamic times, with the help of Jewish and Christian subjects, Muslims had collected the great books of science, medicine, and philosophy and translated them into Arabic from Greek, Latin, Persian, Coptic, Syriac and Sanskrit. These translations inspired educated Muslim thinkers and scientists to make their own contributions to philosophy, medicine, chemistry, astronomy, algebra, optics, art and architecture. We might think of the tenth-century Cordoban physician Abulcasis, known as the father of modern surgery, who invented the forceps and encouraged the knowledge of anatomy in surgical procedures, or the Andalusian polymath Averroes (d. 1198) who pioneered the study of optics and pathology. Later, in the translation schools of thirteenth-century Toledo, Arabic texts were translated into Latin, and disseminated throughout northern Europe, where this lost heritage was regained. Muslim advances in philosophy, mathematics, medicine and science were taught at Paris university in the Middle Ages, including Averroesâ controversial commentaries on Aristotle, which were banned by the Church. Many great medieval Christian philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard and Roger Bacon recognized their debt to Muslim learning, and Christopher Columbus used Arabic maps perfected by Muslim astronomers from Toledo. Without Jewish or Muslim expertise, Spain would not have become the greatest colonial power in sixteenth-century Europe, and western science would be incomprehensible without Islamic scholarship. This important history of cross-cultural influence has been erased, deliberately or not, by historical, political and economic conflicts. For Muslims and Europeans alike, the abiding memory tends to be of battles lost and won, not of cultural interchange and fertilization.
Yet the Islamic legacy in Europe is still very much alive in the present, as revealed by this volume of seven new essays, which help to provide a fuller understanding of past relations between Christianity and Islam in the contemporary European context, using a variety of approaches across a range of academic disciplines, and across a variety of nations. These essays explore a variety of themes that uncover the origins of contemporary references to Islam in European countries around the Mediterranean, as well as the form those references take and the reactions they arouse, in order to assess their cultural implications and significance. What is striking about this collection is its demonstration of contemporary Islamic cultural references in a variety of European countries that include not only Spain, but also Turkey, Slovakia, Poland and Albania.
The seven essays are divided into two sections, one which focuses on Islamic heritage and its role in cultural politics, and another which considers that heritage in relation to architecture. In the first part, Karol Kujawa presents the causes of the Ottoman revival in post-Kemalist Turkey and explores the tensions arising from the implementation of this historical policy. He shows how important historical figures such as Mehmed the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent are used to revive Ottoman traditions in present-day Turkey and explores how they play a key role in a political discourse that legitimizes the power of the AKP. Gabriel Pirický also considers the continuing impact of the Ottoman legacy on identity, culture and politics, this time in twenty-first century Slovakia. His essay focuses on contemporary political references to the Ottoman period, on architecture, folk culture and language, as well as discussing how the Ottoman era has shaped contemporary views of Islam in Slovakia. In the third essay on Islamic heritage and cultural politics, Carlos Yebra investigates the popular Spanish TV series El PrÃncipe (2014â16), set in the Muslim working-class district of that name in modern-day Ceuta. He examines how the presence of Islamophobic and Orientalist elements in the production influence the fictional recreation of so-called âjihadist radicalisationâ in the series, showing that while Islamophobic and chauvinist elements exist in the plot, El PrÃncipe remains a thought-provoking interpretation of the pressing contemporary issue of jihadist terrorism.
Part 2 centres on Islamic heritage and architecture and is headed by Nuno Granchoâs wide-ranging study of how hybridity in contemporary Islamic architecture and urbanism goes hand in hand with the emergence and diffusion of Islam, the submission to Islam by people from different cultural backgrounds, and the mobility of Muslims. The essay also reflects on a definition of hybridity and draws parallels between architecture, urbanism and literary studies. Two essays focus on the architecture of the mosque. The first, by Agata S. Nalborczyk, looks in detail at the cemeteries and mosques of Polish-Lithuanian Muslim Tatars as examples of the Islamic legacy in the largely Christian territories of Poland in the twenty-first century. She shows how these elements of the landscape reveal traces of the co-existence of Muslims and Christians in these areas. In the second essay on mosque structure, Edmond Manahasa analyses the recent restoration of Ottoman period mosques in Albania, comparing those restorations with the originals to assess the nature and quality of the alterations made. He uses archival research, photographic documentation and site observation to investigate how the Turkish government implemented this restoration work, following an agreement with the Albanian government. Lastly, Elena Paulino Montero examines the way that different interpretative paradigms relating to the ambiguous role of al-Andalus in modern Spain were crafted by historians and Arabists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the lens of the iconic palace of the Alhambra in Granada she reveals how contradictory perceptions of aesthetic and historical identity emerged, as theoretical and practical approaches diverged.
This collection of essays is timely in its ambitions and in the issues it addresses, at a time when contemporary Europe, Islam and the West often appear to be at political, religious and cultural loggerheads. Immigration and terrorism are two of the biggest issues that will confront twenty-first century society both in Europe and worldwide, and the way in which the history and legacy of Islam in Europe and beyond is perceived will have a major impact on how those issues are resolved. In that context, perhaps the biggest question this volume of essays responds to is how we might consider Europe and Islam in terms other than a clash between civilizations, religions and cultures. In their apprehension of a wide range of cross-cultural influences and cross-fertilization in the arenas of politics, history, popular culture, art and architecture, these essays draw attention to the vital presence of Islamic cultural heritage in the everyday life of diverse Mediterranean countries. Its presence betokens both change and continuity, embraces positive and negative views of the Islamic past, and elicits thoughtful reflections upon the significance of Muslim heritage in contemporary European life. That heritage is the latest manifestation of the non-violent interchanges between Europeans and Muslims that began in the seventh century and evolved via political diplomacy and alliances, trade, and cultural and scientific influence and interaction. The scholars who have contributed to this volume have unearthed a rich, complex history of varied relations between Muslims and Europeans which are both highly specific yet of universal importance. They show that alongside past conflicts, clashes and conquests, the close connection between Europeans and Muslims that began so long ago may still bear fruit, and pave the way for future dialogue and reconciliation, as Europe explores its true cultural and religious identity and reconnects with its Muslim legacy.
Bibliography
Bede. 1995. Commentarius in Genesim [Clavis Patrum Latinorum 1344] Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 118A. Turnhout. Brepols.
Graham-Dixon, Andrew, 2010. The Art of Spain, DVD (BBC Worldwide Limited).
Huntington, Samuel P., 1996, 2002. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London. The Free Press.
John of Damascus, 1958. Saint John of Damascus: Writings. Translated by Frederic H. Chase Jr. New York: Fathers of the Church Series. Vol. 37.
Scott, Samuel Parsons. 1904. History of the Moorish Empire in Europe. 3 vols. Philadelphia. J.B. Lippincott Company.
See the text on the heresy of the Ishmaelites in On Heresies, (John of Damascus, 1958, 153).
âSignificat semen eius habitaturum in eremo, id est Saracenos uagos, incertisque cedibus. Qui uniuersas gentes quibus desertum ex latere iungitur incursant, et expugnantur ab omnibus. Sed haec antiquitus. Nunc autem in tantum manos eius contra omnes, et manus sunt omnium contra eium, ut Africam totam in longitudine sua ditione premant, sed et Asiae maximam partem, et Europae nonnullam omnibus exosi et contrarii teneantâ, (Bede, 1995, 201).