Response to Nuria de Castilla
By Alexander Pena | Published on September 19, 2019
Professor de Castilla, thank you so much for this wonderful presentation, this is such exciting work! One of the aspects of your current project on the history of the Qur’an which is so compelling and timely is that you are tracing the Qur’an’s fate – as sacred text and scripture, as well as a physical object — within various vastly different, but contemporaneous and intimately interconnected, worlds. One of these worlds comprised the Iberian Muslim communities which were under violent attack in the 15th and 16th centuries and who sought to preserve their heritage and communal practices through Qur’anic manuscripts themselves; another is the elite world of the imperial Christian court in Spain as well as the wider world of Christian European bibliophiles, book collectors, orientalists, clergy, and nobility who all had some stake or interest in the collection of Qur’anic manuscripts as physical objects, for a variety of reasons. The Qur’anic manuscripts and the other Islamic religious texts you’ve discussed emerge as the lifeline for communities trying to preserve a heritage which was under attack, but they also emerge as cultural artefacts which were sought after for both destruction and preservation by the western Christians they came across.
The codicological work which you’ve been carrying out raises so many questions about the social and cultural life of the manuscript. Your work on what you’ve termed Morisco Qur’ans, for example, illuminates so much about the history of Qur’anic manuscripts which were native to the Iberian peninsula itself. However, these Qur’ans faced a tumultuous history as a result of the violent expulsions and bans on Islamic learning and culture which Muslims faced in Spain throughout the late 15th and early 17th centuries. As these particular manuscripts demonstrate, Moriscos — that is, Muslims who were forced to convert to Christianity in Spain, many of whom continued to practice their religion in secret — turned to various ways to express their faith and maintain their beliefs and practices. As you’ve demonstrated in your previous research, for example, they might turn to writing the Qur’an in aljamiado, an Islamicized romance dialect, or they might create abridged copies of the Qur’an — sometimes written in several languages. The conditions which resulted in the widespread confiscation and, often, destruction of the Qur’an and other Arabic texts which we see in the 16th Century thus, in part, led to the production of these unique Morisco Qur’ans during the Inquisition and other periods of heightened hostility towards the Muslim communities of early modern Spain. This hostility towards the Qur’anic manuscript as object, however, stands in striking contrast to the event which you’ve discussed today: that of Emperor Charles V’s conquest of Tunis in 1535, in which manuscripts of the Qur’an were not sought for destruction, but rather were sought after as spoils of war, and which subsequently found their way across Europe, including Spanish libraries, and which are the subject of your talk today.
This brings me to a central theme which emerges in your work: the ambivalence between what we might term, even if just for heuristic purposes, Islamophobia and Islamophilia, two traditions with long and very intersected histories. The variable fates of the Qur’anic manuscript in Western, or Christian, Europe — an object of derision to be destroyed, or an object to be admired for its aesthetic beauty or studied for its intellectual and theological content — reflect the often radically ambivalent attitudes exhibited towards Islam itself in the early modern world, and, indeed, the Medieval and Modern worlds which came before and after. You posited a striking and particularly evocative contrast today: on the one hand, the image of Emperor Charles V’s designation of the Alhambra in Granada — the most iconic example of Islamic architecture on the peninsula — for the site of his palace in the 16th century; on the other hand, the brutal tribunals and Inquisitionary activities which were taking place at the same time. For many, such a contrast will certainly bring to mind Edward Said’s Orientalism, which discussed exactly this sort of colonial appropriation which entailed a mix of both admiration and derision.
Your expertise straddles both the Medieval and Early Modern worlds, so your work also makes the point that Christian interest in the Qur’an and elements of Islamic art such as its architecture actually extends far back past the reign of Charles V. I’m interested in similar phenomena in the High Middle Ages; Alfonso X, the famed thirteenth century King of León-Castile, is a great example of someone who appreciated (and sought to learn more about) Islamic culture and heritage, both for its scientific and philosophical knowledge as well as for its aesthetics, for example in music, poetry, art, and architecture, but his reign also saw the continued deterioration of Muslim (and, for that matter, Jewish) life under Christian rule. This sort of ambivalence is seen in a wide variety of Medieval European cultural artefacts; for example, the chivalric depictions of Saladin in French literature, or the trope of the wise Moorish sage in Iberian and even Arthurian literature, all coexisted with the violence of Crusades in the Near East and in Spain and with the forced expulsions of Muslims from reconquered territories, as well as with the monstrous depictions of Muslims endemic to other literary sagas such as the Chanson de Roland. Many literary texts contain these ambivalent depictions within the same corpus — take, for example, Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of 420 devotional songs which might depict bloodthirsty and violent Muslim invaders in one song and benevolent Muslims who have transcended that perceived barbarity in the very next (and it bears mentioning again that the same is true of Jewish subjects treated in the Cantigas). One might even (cautiously, but I think nonetheless importantly) draw parallels to ambivalent minority cultural relations today, for example, the extreme popularity of music by black musicians such as Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston or Prince in a country where Black people continue to face systemic racism, discrimination, negative stereotypical portrayals, and derision against movements such as Black Lives Matter (#BlackLivesMatter).
I would also like to discuss, a bit more comparatively, the history of the Qur’an in Medieval Latin Christendom versus the early modern period. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we see ecclesiastics, for example, develop a very deep intellectual commitment to the study of the Qur’an, and people like Peter the Venerable, who was the abbot of Cluny in the twelfth century, and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the archbishop of Toledo in the thirteenth century, actually commissioned the Qur’an to be translated from Arabic into Latin, along with many other Islamic religious texts which were then disseminated among clerics to aid in their study — and polemical rebuttal of — Islam. Many clerics even learned Arabic itself in order specifically to read the Qur’an in its original language, for example, Ramon Llull and Riccoldo da Monte Croce and other mendicant friars. So we see large ecclesiastical interest in attaining knowledge from the Qur’an; I would love to hear your thoughts about whether you consider this picture to change in the sixteenth century, and whether we see different types of people interested in these manuscripts than we might have seen in the Middle Ages, and indeed whether or not we see these sorts of intellectual or polemical interests change according to geography and nationality.
