Christopher Lowney - A Vanished World: Medieval Spains Golden Age of Enlightenment

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, as we know, come from different religious traditions, but have many ties to each other. In fact, all the believers of these three religions refer back to Abraham... for whom they have a profound respect, although in different ways... If there is not an amiable peace among these religions, how can harmony in society be found?

From believers, from the representatives of religion, from persons who have spent so many years of their life in meditation on the sacred books, the world is waiting for a world of peace.

Pope John Paul II, April 30, 1991, to a conference of Christians, Muslims, and Jews

Contents

Preface

On a sunny March morning in 2004, as Spanish commuters converged on a Madrid pulsing with the gathering energy common to rush hour in every large city of the world, ten bombs shredded four commuter trains. Nearly two hundred persons died within seconds, and Spain earned the dubious distinction of hosting the worst terrorist attack ever inflicted on mainland Europe.

But who had attacked? Government authorities immediately fingered ETA, acronym for a notorious separatist group boasting a decades-long rsum of terror in the cause of prying their Basque homeland from the grip of Spains federal government.

Then the plot thickened. Authorities backpedaled as ETAs political wing disavowed Basque involvement in the tragedy and Islamist terrorists proudly claimed responsibility. The world shuddered to wonder whether the masterminds of the September 11 attacks on New Yorks twin towers had inaugurated a transatlantic phase of their gruesome campaign.

Spain had never suffered a worse terrorist incident, but she had suffered far bloodier days. For more than seven centuries, ending in 1492, Spain had been divided into a Muslim-ruled south and a Christian-ruled north. After one of the deadly clashes that punctuated crusading attempts to reclaim all Spain for Christendom, a jubilant monarch exulted, armed [Muslim] men or more fell in the battle... [But] unless it be a miracle, hardly 25 or 30 Christians of our whole army fell. O what happiness!

The Muslim extremists who claimed responsibility for Madrids train bombings may well have been recalling that bloody medieval day. They justified their attack as echoed Spains medieval past in other ways. By blaming Basque separatists for bloody havoc wrought by Muslim terrorists, government authorities had unwittingly reversed a monumental, nine-hundred-year-old propaganda injustice. The Song of Roland, by many estimates the medieval eras greatest epic poem, climaxes with a Muslim sneak attack on a Christian army. Though such an ambush did actually occur, Basque bandits perpetrated the heinous assault, not the Muslims so roundly vilified in the Song of Roland. Roland s twelfth-century anti-Muslim recriminations lingered; repeated again and again as decades piled up into centuries, they acquired the timeless certainty of the epic itself. Thus, medieval Muslims wrongly blamed for Basque transgressions gave way to twenty-first-century Basques wrongly blamed for Muslim violence. Both episodes, medieval and current, were freighted with the same heavy undertones of Muslim-Christian enmity.

I visited many of the places commemorated in the Roland saga in late September 2001. With the New York twin towers attacks still an open wound on the human psyche, I rattled around tourist sites scared empty of tourists. Spains churches, monuments, language, and literature are richly redolent of a unique, multifaith heritage. Muslims, Christians, and Jews had worked, worshipped, and interacted in Spain on a scale unparalleled and even unimaginable elsewhere in the medieval West. As I pondered the wound inflicted on my own native city of New York, I wondered what these medieval Christians, Muslims, and Jews might teach us in a twenty-first century still plagued by enmity among adherents of the worlds three great monotheistic religions.

Discerning medieval Spains lessons is no straightforward task. Madrids police investigators had it easier in March 2004. After dispassionately sifting shards of train wreckage and forensic evidence, they pieced together an objective narrative of that fateful day when so many innocent lives had been callously swept away on a late winter morning in central Madrid. Picking through the artifacts of humankinds shared medieval story is less easy to do. Medieval Spains poets, historians, and chroniclers were anything but dispassionate. They peered at events through the prism of their own sacred books and beliefs. They manipulated religious rhetoric to pursue political agendas and vilified as enemies those who professed a different faith. They bore long-nursed grievances of their countrymen or coreligionists. They chose starting points of their liking when tracing the convoluted drama of their past, leading to narrative journeys that ineluctably corroborated their sympathies.

Were too often guilty of the same. As our Muslim, Christian, and Jewish neighbors argue the righteousness of their respective causes, we readily pounce on their oversimplifications, prejudices, and self-interest; were less quick to subject our own hearts and minds to the same exacting scrutiny. We believe we already know how the Muslim, Christian, or Jew ought to feel; we have little need, therefore, to listen to his or her story. We focus on the dogmatic differences that divide us, seldom considering that we are united in common worship of the same God of Abraham.

Roland the medieval epic hero rallied comrades for battle by boiling down Muslim-Christian confrontation to conveniently simple terms: and the Christians are right. Such simplicity certainly appealed to Rolands warrior colleagues, and Madrids terrorists of 2004 undoubtedly reassured themselves in some similar fashion.

Medieval Spains enterprising, devout, imaginative, ambitious, and adventurous men and women forged a civilization that in many ways far outshone those elsewhere in Europe. They almost built the peaceful, common society that we must learn to build. But by clinging unblinkingly to the perceived black-and-white certainties of their respective causes, they all but destroyed the very wonder they created.

We risk the same, the stakes now higher. Technology has shrunk our world. Our globe has become, in some respects, no different from those tiny medieval Spanish villages where Muslims, Christians, and Jews rubbed shoulders on a daily basis. Technology delivers us each day the ideas, beliefs, and culture of those a half-world away, and technology renders us capable of instantaneously inflicting damage on those whose ideas offend, on a scale that would have been inconceivable to these medieval Spaniards.

All the more urgent, then, that we learn to heed wisdom sacred to Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike. Jesus told listeners that the greatest commandment was to love God above all things and Love your neighbor human being, it shall be as if he has killed all humankind.