Read Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain Online

Authors: Matthew Carr

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Spain & Portugal, #Religion, #Christianity, #General, #Christian Church, #Social Science, #Emigration & Immigration, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #Islamic Studies

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Some Muslim religious scholars questioned whether Muslims should even remain in the lands of Christians, known as the
dar al-harb
, the “zone of hostility,” and called upon them to return to the
dar al-Islam
, or “zone of Islam.” “There can be no excuse in the eyes of God for a Muslim to stay in any infidel country, save when passing through it, while the way lies clear in Muslim lands,” wrote the thirteenth-century Spanish Muslim scholar Ibn Jubayr. In a fatwa (religious injunction) issued in the late fifteenth century, the mufti of Oran, al-Wansharishi, ordered his co-religionists to leave Spain and declared unequivocally that “living among unbelievers was not permissible, even for a single day, because of the dirt and filth involved.”
4
Many Spanish Muslims may not have been aware of this specific fatwa, but they would nevertheless have been familiar with the religious injunction to live in Muslim lands. Why did they not leave? Many were too poor to uproot themselves and undertake such a journey, while others were forbidden to leave by their Christian rulers. Some Muslims may have rationalized their continued presence in the
dar al-harb
through the belief that Christian rule would not be permanent. But many, perhaps the majority, probably made the same compromises between their religious obligations and their immediate circumstances that Muslims living in contemporary Europe are often obliged to make in a very different context. Not all Spanish Muslims were equally devout, but even the most ardent believers had other obligations. If they were Muslims, they were also subjects of Christian rulers, vassals of Christian lords, members of their communities, neighbors, and family members, whose horizons were often limited to the immediate world in which they lived. Even today, the Spanish often show an attachment to their own particular regions that surprises visitors from countries with more transient populations. These local attachments were even more clearly defined in the medieval world—for both Muslims and Christians.
Even in the midst of a Christian society that generally regarded them with hostility and grudging tolerance, it was still possible for Muslims to inhabit microcosms of the wider Islamic world as long as they were allowed to practice their faith. In the great cities of Seville, Córdoba, Zaragoza, and Toledo, they lived in their own neighborhoods, with their characteristic culs-de-sac and inward-facing streets built round an interior courtyard, their mosques and bathhouses, and the cemeteries where their ancestors were buried. In Christian baronies and dukedoms of Aragon and Valencia, they tilled and cultivated the same lands and served the same lords as their parents and grandparents.
Nor was Christian rule universally oppressive. In the fifteenth century, the taxes levied on Muslims in Granada were actually higher than those exacted on Muslims in Christian kingdoms, which was one reason why Boabdil and his family were so unpopular with their own subjects. In some parts of Spain, Christian laws could be more lenient than the sharia code for particular offenses, so that Muslims sometimes tried to have their cases transferred to Christian courts in order to obtain lighter punishments. Though Muslims generally formed a marginalized group on the fringes of Christian society, they were not entirely segregated. Muslim craftsmen and builders worked on Christian churches. Farmers and peasants brought their produce to Christian markets. In the Aragonese city of Teruel in the fourteenth century, Muslims, Christians, and Jews were so closely integrated that the local historian and archivist Antonio Floriano has commented on the “cordial, almost fraternal” relations among members of all three faiths in this period.
5
However nostalgic some Muslims may have felt toward the lost world of al-Andalus, serious resistance to Christian rule had all but ceased following the Mudejar rebellions of the late thirteenth century. Even during the Granada war, when Christians from all over Europe enlisted in Ferdinand and Isabella’s armies, there was no comparable rush of Muslim volunteers to fight for the last independent Iberian Muslim kingdom, either from inside or outside Spain. Pan-Muslim solidarity was not entirely absent, and some Valencian Muslims did raise money to help the Nasrids, but for the most part, Spain’s Muslim communities were too fragmented to challenge their conquerors and survived by remaining as unobtrusive as possible in a country that remained their homeland, regardless of its rulers.
 
Toleration always implies a degree of aversion to what is being tolerated, and fifteenth-century Spain was no exception. Spanish Muslims were distinguishable from Christians not only in their forms of worship, but in the rules and taboos that their religious and cultural traditions imposed upon them. Unlike Christians, they were forbidden to drink alcohol, though many did, so much so that Muslim drunkenness was regarded as a serious social problem in parts of Christian Spain. They were forbidden to eat pork and other specified animals, which Christians could eat. They slaughtered their meat in accordance with Islamic custom. They cooked with olive oil rather than the lard that Christians used, and their houses gave off a different smell. Where Christians ate at tables, Muslims generally ate their food on the ground. They spoke Arabic—or
algarabía
(gibberish), as Christians called it, a language that few Christians spoke or understood. They gave their children Muslim names, which Christians often had difficulty pronouncing.
In terms of skin color and physiognomy, there was no obvious difference between Christians and Muslims. There were many black Africans in fifteenth-century Spain, some of whom were slaves or former slaves of Muslims and Christians, but the frequent Christian references to “white Moors” and “tawny Moors” suggest that skin color was not a key factor in determining the differences between them. The most obvious visual difference between Muslims and Christians was their clothing, but even here the separation was not hard and fast. In preconquest Granada, men were more likely to wear traditional Moorish clothing, such as flowing robes, turbans, and hooded cloaks, but Christian fashions were also popular among the Muslim upper classes. In 1529, the German illustrator Christoph Weiditz published a
Trachtenbuch
or “costume book” of Spain, which included one striking portrait of Moorish musicians and a dancer performing a
zambra
, all of whom are wearing Christian doublets and hose. In 1482, Ferdinand was sufficiently concerned at the absence of clearly visible distinctions between the two populations in Valencia that he ordered Muslims to wear only blue clothing. Yet four years later he complained that Muslims were still dressing “like Christians, and many of them in silk doublets and fine clothing.”
Muslim women were more recognizably Moorish than men in their appearance, and their clothing was a source of constant fascination and wonder to the European travelers who visited Spain during the sixteenth century, including Weiditz and the Flemish illustrator Georg Hoefnagel. Weiditz’s engravings show barefoot Moorish women wearing loose pleated trousers and long tunics, together with the white
almalafa
, or veil, that could cover their heads and faces in public. Spanish Christians were often struck by the contrast between the more humble attire of Muslim men and the jewelry and the brightly colored clothing of their women, which contrasted with the more sombre appearance expected of Christian women. Many Moorish women were fond of personal adornment, like the Algerian beauty Zoraida described by the Christian narrator of the “Captive’s Tale” in
Don Quixote
:
I will only say that more pearls hung from her lovely neck, her ears, and her hair than she had hairs on her head. On her ankles, which, in the Moorish fashion, were bare, she had two
carcajes
—that is the Moorish word for rings and bracelets for the feet—of purest gold, set with so many diamonds that she told me afterwards, her father valued them at ten thousand dollars; and those she wore on her wrists were worth as much.
6
 
If this exotic attire enhanced the sexual allure of Moorish women to Christian men, the imagined wealth of these accoutrements also aroused Christian greed in peacetime and especially in war, when their clothes and jewelry were often taken as war booty. At the same time, Spanish churchmen disapproved of such frivolity in women and were appalled by the fact that many Moorish women also adorned their bodies, whether it was their plaited hairstyles or the intricate henna tattoos with which they stained their legs, hands, and feet. Such customs reflected an attitude to the body that was very different from the ascetic ideal of
contemptus mundi
, or “contempt for the world,” that was valorized by the Church, and it sometimes generated a tormented mixture of attraction and revulsion that was not that different from Spanish attitudes to the “naked” Indians of the New World.
One cultural practice regarded with particular horror by the Church was the Muslim fondness for public bathing. In the Middle Ages, the Muslim hammam or public bathhouse had become a feature of many Spanish towns, and Christian rulers had allowed Jews and Christians to visit bathhouses on different days. From the fifteenth century onward, public bathing was suppressed throughout Spain and Europe. This transformation was partly due to the belief that bathing opened the pores of the skin and weakened the body’s defenses against plague, but it also reflected a widespread association between bathhouses and prostitution and immorality.
7
In fifteenth-century Spain, bathhouses were often regarded as meeting places for illicit sexual relationships, even though separate days were assigned for each sex.
Some Christians saw the Muslim fondness for bathing as an expression of Moorish sensuality and licentiousness—a perception that undoubtedly explains the seventeenth-century ecclesiastical historian Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza’s indignant denunciation of Granadan Muslims who bathed “even in December.” Bathing was also regarded as an effeminate—and possibly homosexual—activity by some Christians, such as the fifteenth-century chronicler Fernando de Pulgar, who attributed the Muslim defeat at Alhama during the War of Granada to their bathhouses, which had caused “a certain softness in their bodies.”
8
Christian aversion to public bathing was also based on its perceived association with Islamic religious ritual. Some Spanish Muslims not only washed their hands before prayer, but performed the full body ablution known as the
guadoc
, which involved the cleansing of what the Church discreetly called the “shameful parts.”
For much of the fifteenth century, these marks of cultural and religious difference were not a priority for Spain’s rulers. Such differences might be disliked or disapproved of, but the ecclesiastical and secular authorities were generally prepared to tolerate them—on condition that Muslim customs did not permeate Christian society unduly. Despite sporadic bouts of repression, there was no systematic attempt to impose Christian norms on the Muslim population. Though some Muslims were obliged to convert during the 1391–1412 upheavals, they never did so in sufficient numbers to warrant the status of an existential threat and a potential scource of corruption
inside
Christian society. Spanish Muslims might constitute weak and largely defenseless minorities within Spain itself, but unlike the Jews, they were connected by culture and religion to Muslim states with real political and military power, which could in theory be used against Christians. In addition, the Muslims of Aragon and Valencia had powerful protectors among the local nobility who were more concerned with profiting from them than they were in converting them to Christianity.
For the most part, therefore, Spain’s rulers were more concerned with maintaining the distance between Muslims and Christians through segregation rather than persecution during the fifteenth century. The 1412 segregationist Catalina laws were aimed at Muslims as well as Jews, as was Isabella’s 1480 edict ordering both minorities to live in segregated areas in order to prevent the “great damage and unpleasantness” caused by the “continued conversation and common life of Jews and Moors with Christians” in Castile. But even as Ferdinand and Isabella made war on Granada, the Muslim population in the rest of Spain was protected by medieval Mudejar agreements signed with their Christian predecessors. How valid were these arrangements in a united Christian Spain that was no longer prepared to allow its Jewish population to exist?
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the intentions of Spain’s rulers toward their Muslim subjects were not entirely clear and often appeared contradictory. In 1597, Ferdinand and Isabella obliged Portugal to expel the Muslims together with the Jews, during the prenuptial negotiations with the Portuguese king for their daughter’s hand. But these Muslims had then been allowed to travel through Castile and even settle there. In eradicating the Muslim population of Portugal, the Catholic Monarchs increased the number of infidels in their own realms. Was this apparent paradox due to a cynical attempt to gain short-term economic advantage, in the knowledge that these Muslims would soon face the same choice extended to the Jews? Or did it indicate a long-term commitment to religious tolerance? It was not until the end of the century that the answers to these questions became clearer in Christian Spain’s most recent Muslim acquisition.
4
 
Broken Promises: Granada 1492–1500
 
On the surface, the Catholic Monarchs appeared to be fully committed to a permanent Muslim presence in the newly created kingdom of Granada. This commitment was enshrined in the remarkably magnanimous surrender agreements signed by Boabdil in November 1491. Not only were the Muslim population guaranteed their lands, property, and income in perpetuity, but they were allowed to emigrate to North Africa and return to live in Spain afterward if they changed their minds. The agreements also specified that the “judges, mayors and governors” appointed to rule Granada should be “persons who will honor the Moors and treat them kindly.” On the question of religion, the Catholic Monarchs were equally conciliatory, declaring:
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