Category Archives: Europe

Once upon a time in the mid-eighth century, an intrepid young man named Abd al-Rahman abandoned his home in Damascus, the Near Eastern heartland of Islam, and set out across the North African desert in search of a place of refuge. Damascus had become a slaughterhouse for his family, the ruling Umayyads, who had first led the Muslims out of the desert of Arabia into the high cultures of the Fertile Crescent. With the exception of Abd al-Rahman, the Umayyads were eradicated by the rival Abbasids, who seized control of the great empire called the “House of Islam.” … The prince’s mother was a Berber tribeswoman from the environs of today’s Morocco, which Arabs had reached some years before. From this place, which the Muslims called the Maghrib, the “Far West,” the descendants of the Prophet and his first followers had brought women such as Abd al-Rahman’s mother back east as brides or concubines for the highest-ranking families, to expand and enrich the bloodlines….

Beginning in 711, the Muslims–here the Berbers under the leadership of the Syrian Arabs–had pushed across the small sliver of sea that separates Africa from Europe, the Strait of Gibraltar, to the place the Romans had called Hispania or Iberia….

Abd al-Rahman followed their trail and crossed the narrow strait at the western edge of the world. In Iberia, a place they were calling al-Andalus in Arabic, the language of the new Muslim colonizers, he found a thriving and expansive Islamic settlement. Its center was on the banks of a river that wound down to the Atlantic coast, the Big Wadi (today, in lightly touched up Arabic, the Guadalquivir, or Wadi al-Kabir). The new capital was an old city that the former rulers, the Visigoths, had called Khordoba, after the Roman Corduba, who had ruled the city before the Germanic conquest. It was now pronounced Qurtuba, in the new Arabic accents heard nearly everywhere. The governor of that amorphous and fairly detached frontier “province” was understandably taken aback by the unexpected apparition of this assumed-dead Umayyad prince. Out in these hinterlands, after all, so far from the center of the empire, the shift from Umayyad to Abbasid sovereignty had, until that moment, made little difference in local politics….

The vexed emir of al-Andalus saw at least some of the handwriting on the wall and offered the young man permanent refuge in the capital city as well as his daughter’s hand in marriage. But the grandson of the caliph, the successor to the Prophet and the supreme temporal and spiritual leader of the Islamic world, could not be so easily bought off. Abd al-Rahman assembled forces loyal to him, Syrians and Berbers combined, and one day in May 756, a battle just outside the city walls of Cordoba decisively changed the face of European history and culture. Abd al-Rahman easily defeated his would-be father-in-law and became the new governor of this westernmost province of the Islamic world….

But this young man was, for nearly everyone in these outer provinces, the legitimate caliph, and he was not about to spend the rest of his life in embittered exile…. Although it would be two more centuries before one of his descendants actually openly declared that Cordoba was the seat of the caliphate, al-Andalus was transformed and now anything but a mere provincial seat….

This book tells the story of how this remarkable turn of events, which actually had its origins in the heart of the seventh century in what we call the Near East, powerfully affected the course of European history and civilization. Many aspects of the story are largely unknown, and the extent of their continuing effects on the world around us is scarcely understood, for numerous and complex reasons. The conventional histories of the Arabic-speaking peoples follow the fork in the road taken by the Abbasids. At precisely the point at which the Umayyad prince sets up his all-but-declared caliphate in Europe, the story we are likely to be told continues with the achievements of the Abbasids, who did indeed make Baghdad the capital of an empire of material and cultural wealth and achievement….

The very heart of culture as a series of contraries lay in al-Andalus …. It was there that the profoundly Arabized Jews rediscovered and reinvented Hebrew; there that Christians embraced nearly every aspect of Arabic style–from the intellectual style of philosophy to the architectural styles of mosques–not only while living in Islamic dominions but especially after wresting political control from them; there that men of unshakable faith, like Abelard and Maimonides [Musa ibn Maymun] and Averroes [Ibn Rushd], saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines.

SOURCE: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Back Bay Books, 2002), by María Rosa Menocal, pp. 5-11

Frederick II was one of the most energetic medieval monarchs, and he remains one of the best remembered. His ambitions operated powerfully in the intellectual and cultural spheres as well as in the political, where he spent a lifetime carving out and defending his combined German, Norman, and Sicilian claims, most often against the papacy….

The man who had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor …, in 1220, spoke and read Arabic, and he was so familiar with both the philosophical and the religious traditions of the Muslims that he had astonished and perplexed witnesses of his 1229 entry into Jerusalem. In that year the excommunicated Frederick, who was militantly at odds with the pope, had entered the Holy City. Sovereignty over Jerusalem had been contested, violently, ever since Christians arrived with the First Crusade, more than a century before, and Frederick was there to establish his own complex claims and to be crowned king, which he managed to do, even while excommunicated, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He seemed to the local Muslims a rather different species of Christian from the Franks who preceded him, and dozens of anecdotes were later recounted about this leader of a Crusader army whose first deed in the city was to restore the public call to prayer that had been suppressed by previous Christian sovereigns: “When the time came for the midday prayer and the muezzin’s cry rang out, all his [Frederick’s] pages and valets rose, as well as his tutor, a Sicilian with whom he was reading Aristotle’s Logic in all its chapters, and they offered the canonic prayer, for they were all Muslims…. It was clear from what he said that he was a materialist and that his Christianity was simply a game to him.”

SOURCE: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Back Bay Books, 2002), by María Rosa Menocal, who dedicates her book “for un hombre sincero de donde crece la palma, my father, the intrepid Enrique Menocal, who has lived in lifelong exile from his own land of the palm trees”

Dean Jorge Bocobo’s Philippine Commentary has an interesting take on a national hero.

JOSE RIZAL is a strange kind of national hero. He … was basically a highly educated Spaniard of the late 19th Century. He was born and raised in the Philippines to a prominent indio family who were nevertheless tenants of a land-owning religious order near Calamba, an old Spanish colonial town on the southern shores of Laguna de Bai, south east of Manila. He was educated by Jesuit priests of the Ateneo de Manila (a Catholic school and university still considered among the creme de la creme of Philippine education; and by Dominicans of the famous Royal Pontifical University of Santo Tomas–established a decade before Harvard University, though slightly less, err, endowed)….

Jose Rizal was freed by his mastery of the Spanish language, and several other modern languages, from the purposive obscurantism of the colonial friars and their dogmatic theocracy. He escaped the intentional benighting of the Philippines and her people by absorbing the best of Western culture and civilization to finally see Spain and the Philippines in the total context of the past and present, and also, of future possibilities. That is what made Rizal dangerous, and sealed his fate at the Spanish Taliban’s hands–he had become a Prometheus for a people that had long suspected the existence of fire, from ancestral memories and sentiments inherent to the human genome.

Almost all of Rizal is in Spanish, though he also competently wrote in French, German, English, Italian, though his output in these languages was minimal compared to his obras Español. But even in translation, Rizaliana surpasses every other Filipino who calls himself a writer. BAR NONE! … And Rizal wrote all the time, about everything. Like an obsessive blogger in the Nineteenth Century with the only blogspot in the archipelago–the only one who could read, write and publish with panache and nobility and courage and surpassing mastery of the tools available to him.

Rizal’s two most famous novels are Noli Me Tangere (Latin for ‘touch me not’) and El Filibusterismo (Spanish for ‘subversion’, but a word of many etymological twists and turns; scroll down at the link). The links at the titles are to a website containing the 1987 English translation printed in the Philippines of a 1983 work in German by an Austrian wartime exile about Ferdinand Blumentritt, another Austrian who was “Jose Rizal’s closest friend and companion.”

Ein Handkuß zu El Filibustero Wretchard at Belmont Club.