Since finishing my book I’ve been thinking about how to pursue my goal of doing public writing as well as academic writing and research. Following the attack in Barcelona last week I finally stopped overthinking it and actually wrote something and submitted it to a few op-ed sections. I didn’t move fast enough and the news cycle had moved on by the time I got it in and they got back to me, so for now I’ll post it here; I fear the issues will continue to be relevant, so I’ll give it a go the next time around…
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The vehicular attack on pedestrians along Barcelona’s Las Ramblas promenade this past week brought up all of the usual, expected, old discussions about terrorism, life and death, and the role that Islam can play in European societies. The oldest of all of those discussions does not go back to the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 but rather to the year 711, when a Syrian military governor landed at Gibraltar, the rocky outcrop that still bears his name, and set up outposts in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula in the name of the Umayyad caliph at whose pleasure he served. Every time that Spain suffers an attack attributed to terrorists acting in the name of Islam, the discussion inevitably turns to the flourishing Islamic society that grew up in the wake of that commander’s arrival and the improbable series of global events that, by the end of the 8th century, made much of the lands that we now call Spain and Portugal into al- Andalus, a Muslim-governed polity that was the vibrant home to cultural flourishing, cutting edge science and medicine, and rock-star poets writing in three languages. Even when Spain is not involved, the splendor of Islamic al-Andalus often merits a mention to signal nostalgia for a different world — from one perspective or another.
One of the most striking invocations of al-Andalus this time around came in an interview this weekend on National Public Radio in which Spanish terrorism expert Juan Zarate contextualized the threat of Islamic terror in Spain by explaining that “the reality is Spain sits right at the heart and crosshairs of jihadi lore. Remember that Moorish Islamic rule controlled parts of southern Spain, known as al-Andalus in the lore.” In two sentences, Zarate ceded the historic Umayyad polity of al-Andalus to the ideology of terror. The majority of the Iberian Peninsula was known as al-Andalus in far more than modern, aspirational “lore,” but at the same time, the lore is powerful.
Instead of treating al-Andalus as a jihadist’s fantasy, we would do better to explore the medieval origins of medieval-inspired lore and the reach that it has in the modern day. One of the best examples of Andalusi history becoming lore comes from the battle in the year 778 at Roncesvalles, the Pyrenees mountain pass sometimes better known by its French name, Roncevaux. A rift between the Andalusi emir of Cordoba and some of his generals, who resented his centralization of power, ultimately led those officers to reach out to Charlemagne for assistance in regaining their former positions. The emir and Muslim troops loyal to him skirmished with Charlemagne and the Muslim generals he was assisting. One of those battles was for control of Barcelona. The Battle of Roncesvalles came at the end of the campaign. It took place as Charlemagne’s forces retreated from the city of Zaragoza; they were routed at the mountain pass by Basque forces defending territory they sought as their own.
Yet by the time the medieval troubadours, the singers of songs whose vision becomes our memory, told the story of Roncesvalles, Charlemagne’s forces were made holy warriors vanquished not by Basques but by zealous Muslim enemies. This story becomes the legend of French and Italian literary classics, the Song of Roland and Orlando Furioso. History tells us that this was a battle in which Muslim forces were fighting for a Muslim prince against Muslim
forces fighting alongside the Holy Roman Emperor that were ultimately routed not by their Muslim-led enemies but territorial Basques. Lore tells us that it was a failed attempt at holy war in which Muslims vanquished Christians for their infidel beliefs. It was called al-Andalus in both history and in lore; the mythological, lyrical version allows people to tell their own story with the greater gravitas of an appropriated history. It’s not just terrorists who do that; it’s been happening since the beginning. Everyone tells stories about that grow out of the place known in history and in lore as al-Andalus.
One of the best-known scholars of Islamic Spain once wrote that al-Andalus was a first-rate place, evoking F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate mind: one that is capable of holding two contradictory opinions at once. How we tell the story of that first-rate place is, in its own way, just as resolutely and sensibly self-contradictory: Lore matters because it has a past and a future of its own. And as a result, it’s never just lore.