In his first book, Contradictory Muslims in the Literature of Medieval Iberian Christians, Marcelo E. Fuentes sets out square the circle of Muslim representation in the poetry and prose fiction and “non-fiction” of the kingdoms of Christian Iberia from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. He seeks to understand “the alternation between hostile and empathetic view of Muslims in texts written by Iberian Christians” (4). Notwithstanding the fact that Christians and Muslims were engaged in a whole range of relationships from bellicose to beneficent across the Middle Ages, he puzzles at the generosity or ambivalence with which the latter are often portrayed, given that “Christian authors could have well ignored all that complexity and depicted Muslims in a more simplistic way by using only negative stereotypes, which would have been just as convenient to demonstrate their religious and political superiority” (7). To this end, over the course of seven chapters, he explores a range of sources that reflect the ambivalent presentation of Muslims in Peninsular literature and the context in which they were created. He is not so interested in the lived reality of Hispano-Lusitanian inter-communal relations, but rather how Muslims were objectified in literature, and particularly why they were sometimes not only regarded neutrally, but held up as examples of moral and personal (although not religious) propriety.
The first chapter, “Introduction: Friendly Chivalrous Enemies--Contradiction, Stereotypes, and Colonialism in the Representations of Muslims by Medieval Christians,” serves as an introduction to the study. Fuentes surveys the various theoretical approaches historians have taken to disentangling the paradoxes of plurality in medieval Spain, noting the interdependence of “ideology, textual representation, and social reality” (9) in generating representations of Muslims. [1] Less so for Jews, who in contrast to Muslims rarely if ever appear as sympathetic or complex characters in contemporary literature, perhaps because, unlike Muslims, they did not constitute a community that ruled over much of the contemporary world and whose political and cultural power had to be rationalized in the face of what were believed to be their religious failings. Moreover, he notes, Iberian Christian attitudes (unlike those of their northern European co-religionists) were conditioned both by familiarity and by the pragmatic need to incorporate Muslims into their kingdoms as free subjects. So great was the imprint made by the complex experience of reckoning with Islam and Muslims on Iberian consciousness that it became the template for Peninsular Christians to make sense of the diverse world they began to colonize at the close of the Middle Ages.
Chapter Two, “Indispensable Enemies, Subjects, and Friends: The Political Instrumentalization of Muslims in the Cantar de mio Cid,” delves into the most storied and misrepresented figures of the era of the so-called Reconquista. Focusing on the early thirteenth-century epic poem, rather than its Latin precursor, the Historia Roderici, or its various later, increasingly-fictionalized iterations, Fuentes shows how the poem reflects nuanced Christian Iberian sensibilities to Islam and the Muslim presence in the Peninsula at a time of political fragmentation and competition among an array of Christian and Muslim powers, none of whom had the capacity to dominate the entire territory. Driven by what this reviewer has characterized as conveniencia (“The Principle of Convenience”), Christian rulers and elites adopted ambivalent attitudes towards Muslim rulers who they courted as allies. [2] At times the military, colonial enterprise was rationalized by the providential righteousness of the Christian faith, but at bottom what drove the Cid’s approach to Muslims and those of his contemporaries was the will to power and the pursuit of wealth.
Next, “The Learned Conquerors and Their Muslims: Intercultural Conflict and Collaboration in the Cantigas de Santa Maria and the Llibre dels fets,” moves to the thirteenth-century world of Alfonso X “the Learned” of Castile-León and Jaume “the Conqueror” of the Crown of Aragon, each of whom governed over or conquered kingdoms with significant communities of free Muslim subjects. Alfonso is known for the robust political and cultural program he sponsored, which included translations of Arabic literary and scientific works, an illuminated cycle of Marian hymns (the Cantigas), and monumental legal code (Las siete partidas). Jaume, who conquered extensive Muslim-ruled territories, is best known for his autobiography, El llibre dels fets, and for his own legal compendia, the Fueros de Aragón and the Furs de València. Both rulers presented Muslims as legitimate subordinates within their kingdoms and as rational, good-faith actors, while also at times emphasizing the illegitimacy of their faith or presenting them as enemies of Christianity. In Alfonso’s Cantigas, Muslim actors--and the work distinguishes clearly between foreign North Africans and localmudéjares--are frequently implicated either as villains or witnesses in Marian miracles, which reinforce Christian superiority and Alfonso’s authority and at times lead to their conversion. Jaume’s Llibre, which recounts inter alia his conquests of Muslim Mallorca and Valencia, treads an even more conciliatory line. While the conquests are presented as Christian works, Muslims appear variably as enemies and allies, but at bottom as rational and reasonable (if morally inferior) actors, who are all but never caricatured as wantonly destructive, monstrous or diabolical--characterizations that were put to the test in the context of the mudéjar rebellions of the 1260s and 1270s.
“From Great Muslim Heroes to Good Christian Subjects: Converting the Legend of the Seven Infantes of Lara” takes a tale of a bloody inter-Christian tale of betrayal and revenge set in the 900s and traces its evolution from its first surviving appearance in the thirteenth-century Castilian Estoria de España through its adaption a century later in two Portuguese works, the Livro de linhagens and the Crónica geral de 1344. Fuentes shows how, whereas the earlier Castilian telling presented Muslim characters in an ambivalent and nuanced light, the later Portuguese tellings deprived them of their depth and converted them into caricatures of an illegitimate faith. Despite the triumphalist and anti-Islamic tone that runs through the Estoria, in the tale of the Infantes it presents a Muslim ruler, the hajib and dictator, Muhammad ibn Abi Amr al-Mansur (“Almanzor” to the Christians he terrorized) as a force of moderation and mediation, and a virtuous Muslim knight, Mudarra, as the conduit for a Christian father’s righteous revenge on his sons’ killers. In the fourteenth century, however, Mudarra could only be presented as virtuous if the tale had him convert to Christianity and abjure his loyalties to his homeland and former faith.
In, “Across the Mediterranean and Beyond: Fighting Islam by Embracing Muslims in Tirant lo Blanch,” the study moves over to Valencia of the late fifteenth century, and the chivalric romance that responded to Christian anxieties at the ominous rise of the Ottomans. Here, the hero--a Valencian knight who aspires to marry his way to the imperial title--is presented as uncompromisingly committed to the violent defeat of Islam, yet prepared to show clemency to his subjugated enemies--much as the Catholic Kings must have appeared to their subjects. The tone of the text swings between virulent anti-Muslim polemic and a cautious respect borne of familiarity, an ambivalence that likely results from the dual authorship of the work. A Cresques map come to life, the poem--operatic in tenor and ribald in tone--is a work of exuberant fantasy, with cases of adultery, conversion, mistaken identity, and betrayal, involving Ottomans, Africans and Christians of various provenance and constitution. Here, as in the earlier version of the Lara and Cid stories, it is the solidarity of vocation and class that engendered solidarities and sympathies (fleeting as these might be) across the confessional divide. The “good Saracens” show their virtue by converting, whereas even the unregenerate are capable of manifesting a certain integrity and noblesse.
The final chapter “An Empire of Faith and Its Infidels: Portuguese Colonialism and Muslims, According to Os Lusíadas and Its Sources,” focuses on a sixteenth-century epic that aimed to justify and elegize Portugal’s colonial expansion into North Africa and the newly accessed oceanic world. The author, Luís Vaz de Camões, had travelled around Africa and the Indian Ocean, and was well-aware of a wider world beyond the Peninsula--one inhabited not only by Muslims, but by pagans and Hindus. Nevertheless, he reinforces the Christian-Muslim dichotomy in the service of legitimizing Portuguese imperial power. He anachronistically presents the history of his country as shaped by the determination to battle the mouros in particular and infidels in general, whether in the Peninsula or beyond, a cause vouchsafed by the Papacy itself. Again, despite the anti-Islamic invective that runs through it, the poem rehabilitates the figures of those Muslim rulers who allied with and supported the Portuguese, whether or not they converted. For in the end, this is a tale not of conquest, but of commerce: Vasco de Gama, the navigator, plays the role of the messiah, and once again, convenience triumphs over conviction.
In the book’s conclusion, “Christian Supremacy and Contradictory Non-Christians Beyond Muslims and Iberia,” Fuentes emphasizes on the one hand that the ambiguities and ambivalences that characterized Iberian Christian attitudes towards Muslims and the dynamics of interaction and exchange that drove them were not unique to the Peninsula; and on the other, how these attitudes and postures came to be transferred to the colonial enterprises that got underway at the very moment the history of political Islam was coming to an end in Iberia. “Matamoros” would become “Mataindios,” in what some contemporaries characterized as a continuation of the same process. Fuentes sees the presumption of Christian righteousness and Providence that characterized Spanish and Portuguese thinking reflected broadly in the attitudes of European powers in general as they justified the marginalization of the peoples they colonized in the Modern Age, and anti-Muslim attitudes that developed in the Middle Ages are reflected in persistent currents of Islamophobia today.
Altogether, this is a well-written, original, and thought-provoking work of scholarship that draws on a broad range of literary sources across some four centuries and several linguistic traditions. Fuentes engages with a range of modern historiographical perspectives and interpretive methodologies. Thus, Contradictory Muslims will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval Spain and the Mediterranean and of early modern colonialism not to mention a range of other fields. This reviewer is very sympathetic to Fuentes’ determination to make sense out of the apparent contradictions built into Christian attitudes towards Muslims in this period, and is gratified that his own models (e.g.: “Dynamics of Scale,” described here on page 6, but not by name) have proven helpful in this regard. Quibbles are few, and lacunae inevitable. For example, in relation to the third chapter, one might contrast the idealized treatment of Muslims in Las siete partidas, with Jaume I’s more ideologically neutral and pragmatic Fueros de Aragón. A discussion of Alfonso’s sponsorship of translations of works in Arabic and the influence of Almohad political philosophy on the Castilian would-be emperor would have been welcome, or of Jaume’s incorporation of elite converts, notably Abu Zayd, the former ruler of Valencia, and the son of the vanquished ruler of Mallorca, both of whom were incorporated into the Christian aristocracy. Fuentes draws on diverse methodologies, including cultural studies and post-modernism, from Bhabha to Said, but does not engage with sociological approaches that might have helped clarify some of the contradictions he investigates. Intersectionality is crucial to this, as are the affinities that produced “cross-cutting circles”--identities that bridged confessional divisions. All of that said, no work of scholarship can be exhaustive, and Fuentes impressively marshals evidence to support his arguments. One also sympathizes with his closing reflections, and his hope that such analyses will help “to deconstruct and expose the destructive prejudices and hypocrisy of our [Western democracies’] past [and] can help us reveal, understand, and overcome the ones in our present” (202), but one wonders how unique those prejudices and hypocrisies are. Muslims’, Christians’, and Jews’ perceptions of both each other and their own co-religionists throughout the pre-modern Mediterranean world and up to today have been no less contradictory or paradoxical than those of Christians towards Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, and little less destructive or bigoted.In sum, Contradictory Muslims presents an excellent set of case studies of the complex dynamics of the construction and articulation of communal identity as it was fashioned in the literature of Christian Iberia.
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Notes:
1. Fuentes cites, for example, María Rosa Menocal, “Visions of Al-Andalus,” in Maria Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, eds., The Literature of Al-Andalus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1-24; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence. Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Robert I. Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, ca. 1050-1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
2. See Brian A. Catlos, “Contexto social y ‘conveniencia’ en la Corona de Aragón. Propuesta para un modelo de interacción entre grupos etno-religiosos minoritarios y mayoritarios,” Revista d’história medieval, 12 (2002): 220-35.