[Reader-list] Kwame Appiah on How Muslims Made Europe

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

Volume 55, Number 17 · November 6, 2008
How Muslims Made Europe
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22029

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 570–1215
by David Levering Lewis
Norton, 473 pp., $29.95


Rveviewer: Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1954 in London) is a Ghanaian
philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include
political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and
African intellectual history.

Appiah was  educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge,
where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. His father was the Ghanaian
politician and barrister Joe Appiah, and his mother was Peggy Cripps,
a children's-book author. His family has a long political tradition:
his maternal grandfather was Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labour Chancellor
of the Exchequer (1947-1950) under Clement Attlee.



The conception of the Mediterranean as the meeting of three continents
goes back to classical Greece. But it took a further intellectual leap
to conceive of their inhabitants as a collectivity. You can have
Europe, Africa, and Asia without thinking of Europeans, Africans, and
Asians as particular kinds of people.



David Levering Lewis's rich and engaging God's Crucible shows that it
took two things to make Europeans think of themselves as a people. One
was the creation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four,
thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish warrior king we know as
Charlemagne. The other was the development, in the Iberian peninsula
on the southwestern borders of his dominion, of the Muslim culture of
Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the process that made the
various tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had
in common and what distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors were
both important. This is, by now, a familiar idea. But God's Crucible
offers a more startling proposal: in making the civilization that
modern Europeans inherit, the cultural legacy of al-Andalus is at
least as important as the legacy of the Catholic Franks. In borrowing
from their great Other, they filled out the European Self.



Charlemagne's rule included at its high point most of France,
Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, the west of Germany, Italy
as far south as Rome, a strip in the north of Spain, and parts of
Hungary and the Balkans. At nearly three and a half million square
miles, it was larger than the continental United States. Charlemagne
imposed Catholic orthodoxy on the pagan Saxons in the east at the
point of a very sharp sword, massacring thousands of those who
resisted, and suppressed heresy within Frankland with equal vigor. He
created monastic centers of learning, drawing scholars from across his
empire and beyond; and after the centuries of ignorance that had
followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in Gaul and Germania, the
works of men like the Northumbrian Alcuin (poet, theologian, and
restorer of the classical curriculum) created a Carolingian
Renaissance.



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These achievements perhaps entitled Charlemagne to his self-conception
as Rome's heir in the West, author of a Renovatio Romani Imperii, an
imperial restoration. When he traveled to Rome in December 800, some
thirty years into his reign, he went to defend the authority of Leo
III as pope; and His Holiness returned the favor by crowning him
Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800 (much to the annoyance of
the Byzantine regent Irene, who called herself Emperor, rather than
Empress, and thought the title was hers).



Charlemagne was a great soldier, a devoted Catholic, an ambitious
administrator, and a patron of learning. He had reason to take pride
in what would prove a brilliant Carolingian legacy; we need think only
of the magnificent carved ivory plaques in the Cloisters of the
Metropolitan Museum or the elegance of manuscripts in Carolingian
minuscule or Alcuin's Latin verse history of York. But the empire he
created was, as Lewis puts it trenchantly, "religiously intolerant,
intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically
primitive," ruled by a "warrior caste and its clerical enforcers."
Despite the new currency, the economy was dominated by barter; there
were few cities of any size; and wealth was measured in land,
peasants, and slaves.



Charlemagne had no national system of taxation. He lived off plunder
and the product of his own estates. What his lords owed him was
military service. They were obliged to show up annually in the late
spring, armed for a military campaign, in case he thought it
necessary. (Very often, he did.) The Franks had once been a relatively
free agrarian people; now they were largely a nation of serfs, working
alongside slaves—many of them Slavs from Bohemia and the southern
shores of the Baltic.



Charlemagne's royal hall, in his new capital at Aachen, was built on a
fifty-acre complex of buildings, secular and religious, and was the
largest stone structure north of the Alps. But it paled in comparison
to the architectural majesty of Byzantium or Rome. The King endowed
libraries with hundreds of manuscripts, impressive by comparison with
anything that had been seen hitherto by the Franks, but pitiful (as
Gibbon observed) beside the thousands of documents in the libraries of
Italy or Spain. He created a new bureaucratic structure, sending royal
officials to each of the 350 counties of his realm to deliver his
commands, hear cases, and, when necessary, to summon his people to
war. But as Lewis says,



much of this royal centralizing had scarcely more than a parchment
reality in a world of near-universal illiteracy, deep suspicion and
resentment on the part of the nobility, and a crippling disparity
between resources and objectives.



The fact is that Charlemagne's empire, impressive as it was, lacked
many of the marks of what we think of as civilization: cities,
commerce, great libraries, a literate elite. This is especially clear
if we compare the world he made with the cultivated society of his new
Muslim neighbors.



Like Charlemagne's empire, al- Andalus was very much the product of a
war machine. Islam burst out of Arabia in the seventh century,
spreading with astonishing rapidity in every direction. After the
Prophet's death in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere thirty years to
defeat the two great empires to their north, Rome's Christian residue
in Byzantium and the Zoroastrian Persian empire that reached through
Central Asia as far as India. The dynasty of the Umayyad clan, which
took control of Islam in 661, pushed on west into North Africa and
east into Central Asia. In early 711, Tariq Ibn-Ziyad, acting for the
sixth Umayyad caliph in Damascus, led a Berber army across the Straits
of Gibraltar into Spain.[1] There he attacked the Visigoths who had
ruled much of the Roman province of Hispania for two centuries. A year
later, a new army of 18,000 men, mostly Yemeni Arabs, joined in the
assault. Within seven years, most of the Iberian peninsula was under
Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly eight hundred years later, was the
whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.



After the early Muslim triumphs, the Christians of northern Iberia
fought back, consolidating the Kingdom of Asturias in the 720s, and
recovering Galicia from Muslim rule by the end of the next decade. In
the mountainous northwest of the peninsula, on the storm-buffeted
southern coast of the Bay of Biscay, the Christian tribes were largely
able to resist Muslim encroachment. Nor was Muslim rule ever secure in
the Basque region on the southern side of the Pyrenees. The Upper,
Middle, and Lower Marches (or borderlands) lay between the core of
al-Andalus, the region around Córdoba, and these Christian kingdoms in
the northwest, on the one hand, and the Franks over the mountains to
the northeast, on the other. As borderlands—whether with the Asturians
or with the Franks—the Marches were always at risk of attack.



The Umayyads did not, however, intend to stop at the Pyrenees. Their
first attempt to take Aquitaine, the southern Frankish duchy, was
frustrated in 721, when Duke Odo charged his heavy horses through a
Muslim army encamped outside his capital at Toulouse. But a little
more than a decade later, 'Abd al-Rahman, the new emir of al-Andalus,
returned to take up the task, with a vast, disciplined, experienced
Moorish army. He sent Odo scuttling off from a defeat near Bordeaux
and marched on northward toward Poitiers, almost halfway from the
Pyrenees to Paris.



Near Poitiers, however, the Muslims met their match. In October 732,
Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather, who had force-marched his
troops from the faraway Danube, joined Duke Odo in decimating the
emir's troops. A Christian scribe in a Latin chronicle written in 754
calls the victors at Poitiers Europenses : it is the first recorded
use of a Latin word for the people of Europe. And it was written in
al-Andalus.



Later Christian historians assigned to the Battle of Poitiers an
epochal significance. Gibbon remarked that if the Moors had covered
again the distance they had traveled from Gibraltar, they could have
reached Poland or the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps, he thought, if 'Abd
al-Rahman had won, "the interpretation of the Koran would now be
taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to
a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of
Mahomet." For him, the fate of Christian Europe hung in the balance.
After a week of battle, he wrote, "the Orientals were oppressed by the
strength and stature of the Germans, who...asserted the civil and
religious freedom of their posterity."[2]



At the time, though, it would have been odd to regard Charles Martel's
victory as guaranteeing religious freedom. The small but influential
Jewish community in Iberia had been tolerated in Spain when their
Visigothic overlords were still Arian heretics ruling Catholic and
Jewish subjects; but Jews began to be persecuted in 589, when the
Visigoths converted to Catholicism. For the Jews, then, the Muslim
Conquest, bringing rulers who practiced toleration toward them as well
as toward Christians and Zoroastrians, was not unwelcome. During the
first period of Muslim domination, Christians, too, discovered that
they would have religious freedom, so long as they (like the Jews) did
not seek to convert Muslims or criticize Islam. The contrast with
Frankish rule could hardly have been more striking. The obsession of
Catholic rulers with religious orthodoxy was one of the things that
made the Dark Ages—as Petrarch was to dub the period from the fifth to
the tenth centuries—so dark.



Nor was it evident at the time that the Battle of Poitiers had put an
end to the dreams of a Muslim conquest in the land of the Franks. For
nearly thirty years the Arabs maintained control of
Septimania—modern-day Languedoc in southern France—ruling from their
capital at Narbonne. In the ensuing decade there were constant sallies
and retreats as a succession of emirs sought to go deeper into
Frankish territory. In all this back-and-forth, it makes little sense
(as Lewis shows) to pick Poitiers as the turning point.



Indeed, the greatest obstacle to Muslim expansion proved to be the
divisions among the Muslims, which led to almost constant conflict in
al-Andalus. Discord in the world of Islam began in the tribal society
that was the religion's first home. The Prophet came from the Meccan
Quraysh tribe, whose members were regarded with special favor by the
faithful. Among the Quraysh, Muhammad's clan was particularly exalted.
The first caliphs were all Qurayshi, but the first dynasty came not
from Muhammad's kinsmen but from the Umayya clan. When the fourth
caliph, Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, was assassinated and
succeeded by an Umayyad caliph, a long rivalry between the clans was
launched.[3] In 750, revolts in the new Muslim empire unraveled the
Umayyad dynasty; and the new caliph of the Abbasid clan set out to
massacre anyone who could resurrect the Umayyad line. Not for nothing
was he called as-Saffah, the Shedder of Blood.



Unfortunately for Abbasid claims to control of the empire, the
bloodletting was not completed. 'Abd al-Rahman, nineteen-year-old
grandson of the Umayyad caliph Hisham I, evaded capture, and managed
to get to Morocco. Across the narrow straits between Morocco and
al-Andalus, 'Abd al-Rahman planned to conquer a Muslim society whose
rulers owed their place to the patronage of his ancestors. In 755 he
landed in Granada with over a thousand Berber cavalry. He was
twenty-five years old. Within a year, he had installed himself in
Córdoba, as emir of al-Andalus. But his hold on power was tenuous. He
lost his foothold north of the Pyrenees in 759 to Pippin the Short,
Charlemagne's father, in part because he was facing a revolt in the
west of his own empire. And he spent most of his time in the saddle,
fighting resistance to his claims as emir.



When 'Abd al-Rahman defeated the Abbasid emir in 763, he commanded
that all prisoners of war be executed, and himself presided as the
emir's hands and feet and then head were cut off. "Labeled and pickled
in brine, the leaders' heads were dispatched to Mecca," Lewis writes.
"When Caliph al-Mansur received the gory details, he is said to have
expostulated, 'God be praised for placing a sea between us!'"



Despite, or perhaps because of, these sanguinary beginnings, the reign
of 'Abd al-Rahman and his descendants in al-Andalus introduced a
period of relative stability. An emir had to be ready at any moment to
defend his territory from without and his authority within. But
alongside the disciplines of war, he could practice the arts of peace.



The original core of the Great Mosque at Córdoba, which stands to this
day, was built for 'Abd al-Rahman in an astonishing burst of
architectural fervor, apparently between 785 and 786. With 152
columns, arranged in eleven aisles, it consisted of two parts: a large
prayer hall, some two thirds of an acre in area, and an adjoining
piazza of the same size, filled with rows of orange trees, which
together made up a square whose sides measured about 240 feet. The
results, added onto over the centuries, still amaze. Lewis writes:



Its builders devised the art and science of transmuting matter into
light and form that medieval Christendom was the poorer for its
general inability to comprehend.... The unprecedented innovation of
the Great Mosque's master builder was to loft the coffered ceiling to
a height of forty feet by means of an upper tier of semicircular
arches that appeared to be clamped to the bottom tier of horseshoe
arches supported by columns.... Structurally ingenious, the visual
effect of the double arches has been from the moment of completion one
of the world's distinctively edifying aesthetic experiences.



If the Great Mosque was the most evident material embodiment of the
civilization of the Arabs in Spain, their intellectual achievements
were even more astonishing. Starting in 'Abd al-Rahman's time, the
Umayyads sought to compete with their Abbasid rivals in Baghdad for
cultural bravura. Over the next few centuries, Córdoba alone acquired
hundreds of mosques, thousands of palaces, scores of libraries. By the
tenth century, those libraries had hundreds of thousands of
manuscripts, dwarfing the largest libraries of Christian Europe. The
university of Córdoba predated Bologna, the first European university,
by more than a century. And al-Andalus was a world of cities, not,
like Europe, a world of country estates and small towns. By the end of
the millennium, Córdoba's population was 90,000, more than three times
the size of any town in the territory once occupied by Charlemagne. In
those cities, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Berbers, Visigoths,
Slavs, and countless others created the kind of cultural goulash—a
spicy mixture of a variety of distinct components—that would generate
a genuine cosmopolitanism.



There were no recognized rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of
Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and
synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Córdoba's
ambassador to Constantinople and Aachen. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of
Córdoba's Jewish community in the middle of the tenth century, was not
only a great medical scholar but was also the chairman of the caliph's
medical council; and when the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII sent
the caliph a copy of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, the caliph sent
for a Greek monk to help translate it into Arabic. The knowledge that
the caliph's doctors acquired made Córdoba one of the great centers of
medical expertise in Europe. By the time of 'Abd al-Rahman's successor
and namesake, 'Abd al-Rahman III, in the tenth century, the emir of
al-Andalus had the confidence to declare himself caliph, successor or
representative of the Prophet and, implicitly, leader of the Muslim
world.



Like Charlemagne's, the emir's position was partly religious; he was
supposed to be (and often was) pious. But piety for the emirs did not
mean—as it did for the Holy Roman Emperor—imposing one's religion on
others. From the earliest times, the emirs of al-Andalus accepted
conversion but did not demand it. There were, naturally, some
pressures to convert: non-Muslim subjects—the so-called dhimmi—were
required to pay special taxes; and non-Muslims could be enslaved
while, at least in theory, Muslims could not. Still, it probably took
about two centuries after 'Abd al-Rahman's death in 788 for Muslims to
become a majority in al-Andalus.[4] In the cities of al-Andalus,
scholars of all three faiths, with access to the learning of the
classical world that the Arabs had inherited and brought to the West,
gathered and transmitted the learning whose recovery in Europe created
the Renaissance.



By 777, 'Abd al-Rahman, now in his mid-forties, and still a vigorous
warrior, had established control over some two thirds of the
peninsula. Not all his co-religionists were pleased. Evidently hoping
to contain him, the emir of Barcelona and the Muslim governors of
Saragossa and Huesca rode the nearly one thousand miles to Saxony to
conspire with Charlemagne. It was at a time when the King had gathered
his nobles and his leading clergy for the Diet of Paderborn to receive
the submission of the Saxon tribes and witness the baptism of many of
their leaders. The coincidence seemed providential. Here were three
Muslim princes offering fealty to the king of the Franks and the
Lombards, who had recently become ruler of the Saxons as well. "To
Charlemagne's vaulting ambitions," Lewis writes, "the symmetry of a
Frankland flanked by two conquered peninsulas proved irresistible—rex
Hispanicum added to the title rex Francorum et Langobardum." In 778,
Charlemagne assembled an army of Franks, Bavarians, Burgundians,
Lombards, Septimanians, and others—perhaps as many as 25,000 men at
arms—to begin his assault on Hispania. For the first time in history,
a Christian army set out to conquer the world of Islam; but it did so
at the invitation of and in alliance with Muslims.



'Abd al-Rahman prepared his own army but he did not have to use it.
Accounts of Charlemagne's great muster gave the governor of Saragossa
second thoughts, and so when the Frankish armies arrived there,
expecting to be welcomed, its gates remained barred. Worse news came
from the far north; the Saxons whose defeat he had celebrated at
Paderborn had risen in revolt. When Charlemagne sought refuge in the
old Basque city of Pamplona, his fellow Catholics spurned him.
Infuriated, he destroyed Pamplona. In the end, a Christian city was
the major victim of his planned assault on the Muslim emirate.



As Charlemagne retreated through the Pyrenees, he was harried by
Basques, who had no love for the Frankish king who had devastated
their city; and in a mountain pass at Roncesvalles the Frankish rear
guard was destroyed. Einhard, Charlemagne's first biographer, lists
among the dead "Roland, Lord of the Breton Marches." This appalling
Christian loss to fellow Christians—Catholic Franks slaughtered by
Catholic Basques—was transmuted three centuries later in the Chanson
de Roland into a fatal conflict between Christianity and Islam.



In the epic, Charlemagne sees the carnage of the flower of Frankish
chivalry, and destroys an army sent from the other end of the Muslim
world. In reality, Charlemagne now turned his wrath on the Saxon
apostates. By the summer of 779, he had amassed a great army aimed at
the final conversion of the Saxons from paganism. At Verden in 782,
according to Einhard, Charlemagne supervised the slaughter of 4,500
Saxon prisoners. The armies of the Saxons were defeated in 785.
Charlemagne threatened those who refused baptism with capital
punishment. As late as 804, Charlemagne uprooted 10,000 recalcitrant
Saxons, settling them in the west of his kingdom.



After four and half decades in power, Charlemagne died in 814. His
rule overlapped the last twenty years of 'Abd al-Rahman's emirate,
encompassed the twelve-year reign of al-Rahman's son, Hisham I, and
also part of the twenty-eight-year reign of the grandson who
consolidated Umayyad rule. The limitations of Charlemagne's
state-building were evident at his death. He had made plans, following
Frankish tradition, to divide the kingdom among his three legitimate
sons, but only Louis the Pious was still alive by the time he died.
Louis's attempts to divide the empire among his own sons led to a
series of civil wars, out of which emerged a partition of
Charlemagne's empire, laid out at the Treaty of Verdun of 843. The
Frankish empire was split into East, Middle, and West Francia. The
eastern kingdom became the (new) Holy Roman Empire, including much of
present-day Germany; the western one is the core of modern France; and
the middle kingdom included Burgundy, Italy, and the Low Countries.
Verdun effectively ended the Frankish empire that had united Western
Europe for the first time since the Romans.



'Abd al-Rahman's heirs as emirs of Córdoba held al-Andalus together
with a little more success. But by the 880s, under his ineffective
great-great-grandson, the emirate was so weakened by rebellion and
demands for regional autonomy that his writ barely ran beyond Córdoba.
It took that emir's son, 'Abd al-Rahman III, to consolidate Umayyad
authority in the peninsula and extend it into North Africa. For nearly
half a century, from 912 to 961, he built Córdoba into a center of
power, creating a palace complex, the Madinat al-Zahra, that awed all
who visited it, from the governors of the towns of the Marches to the
ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire.



After the debacle at Roncesvalles, Charlemagne never returned to
Spain. In 798, the governor of Barcelona sought Frankish help in
achieving independence from 'Abd al-Rahman's grandson, and Charlemagne
authorized a campaign led by his son Louis. Barcelona was reconquered
in 801 after a two-year siege. By 812, after a series of Frankish
campaigns, the emir in Córdoba had accepted that his border was at the
river Ebro, which runs through Saragossa in the northeastern part of
the peninsula.



The Umayyad caliphate collapsed in the eleventh century and Muslim
Spain descended into a chaos of little kingdoms, the Ta'ifa, some
ruled by Arabs, some by Berbers, some by Slavs. In 1085, Alfonso VI,
Christian king of Leon and Castile, captured Toledo; unlike the
Franks, he knew better than to impose Catholicism on the people at the
point of a sword. He called himself "king of the two
religions"—meaning Islam and Christianity—but tolerated Jews as well:
his doctor, Joseph Nasi Ferruziel, was Jewish. The spirit of
cohabitation that the Arabs had created survived their departure. It
took nearly four more centuries to get from the king of the two
religions to the rigorous intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition.



The Berber dynasts—Almoravids and Almohads—who eventually took control
of Córdoba and Seville, re-establishing a single Muslim state in the
southern third of the peninsula from the eleventh to the thirteenth
century, were very different from their Arab predecessors; they were
driven by an intolerant orthodoxy that made it impossible to sustain
the centuries-old intellectual openness that had made Umayyad Spain a
place of scientific and philosophical learning. True, the philosopher
Ibn Rushd—known to the Christian world as Averroës—had the first
Almohad emir as his patron; but three years before his death, he was
exiled to a village near Córdoba in 1195, his philosophical
speculations condemned by the conservative Muslim scholars who now
dominated the society.



As for Maimonides, the greatest of the Jewish scholars of al-Andalus,
his family had to leave Córdoba around 1148, escaping Spain for
Alexandria, by way of Morocco and Palestine. Without Ibn Rushd, whom
Aquinas called simply the Commentator (on Aristotle, it was
understood), as without Maimonides, there is no doubt, as Lewis
insists, that the intellectual history of Europe would have been
radically different. And without the Umayyad centuries, both
Maimonides and Ibn Rushd would have been inconceivable.



The conquest of Spain by an alliance of Catholic princes was now
proceeding apace. They called it a reconquest, because they saw it as
the return to power of Catholicism in the peninsula, long centuries
after the Visigoths had lost control. In the thirteenth century, the
Almohads abandoned Granada to the last Muslim dynasty in Spain. Within
a decade it was a tributary state of Catholic Castile. The end of al-
Andalus came with the submission, in 1492, of the last emir to los
Reyes Católicos, Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of
Castile. By then the crusades had for nearly three centuries been
redefining the contrast between Christians and Muslims, shifting the
focus of the conflict to the east. The toleration that Alfonso VI,
Isabella's ancestor, had shown to the two religions that had shared
Spain with the Catholics for so many centuries was formally ended:
expulsion or conversion was required of all the Muslims and Jews of
Iberia. The pattern that Charlemagne had set in Saxony was carried
forward, once more with a pope's blessing, in Spain.



There were Europeans before there were Frenchmen or Germans or
Italians or Spaniards because there was a world of kingdoms in the
western residue of the Roman Empire bound by Catholicism to Rome. The
histories that made France, Germany, Italy, and Spain—not to mention
Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, or the Netherlands—all pass
through one or both of the empires Charlemagne and 'Abd al-Rahman
made. God's Crucible reveals how much the world we have inherited is
the product of identities created long ages ago in rivers of blood,
proceeding from a slaughter that was as often within Christendom or
Islam as it was at their frontiers.



But there is also a more uplifting message here. Though Christians and
Jews were clearly subordinated to Muslims in al-Andalus, they were
nevertheless able to share in its manifold intellectual and material
treasures. Had the three religions not worked together, borrowing from
the pagan traditions of Greece and Rome, what we call the West would
have been utterly different. In an age where some claim a struggle
between the heirs of Christendom and of the Caliphate is the defining
conflict, it is good to be reminded of this history of fruitful
cohabitation.



Earlier this year, I visited the Center for Contemporary Culture of
Barcelona, housed in an old seminary. In the entrance archway, a group
of people dressed informally in North African clothes, the men in long
djellabas, the women with their heads covered in silk scarves, chatted
cheerfully. Their presence was a reminder that the project of
Charlemagne and los Reyes Católicos—the creation of a totally Catholic
Europe—has failed; a failure that began, of course, from within, in
the Reformation and took hold in the Enlightenment, both of which,
though they have many other ancestors, are heirs to the philosophical
traditions transmitted through al-Andalus. As the Muslim children ran
around their parents on a warm, spring evening, it occurred to me that
in a different history, without the Reconquest, I might still have
seen people much like them in that archway—or, at any rate, one much
like it; and, since I had read God's Crucible, I decided that in that
other history the Christian Catalans who wandered by would also not
have seemed out of place.





Notes

[1]Which is where Gibraltar gets its name: Jabal Tariq in Arabic is
Tariq's Mountain.



[2]Edmund Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (P.F.
Collier & Son, 1899), p. 288.



[3]The division between Sunni and Shia Islam originates here. The Shia
are the followers of Ali, believing that the household of the Prophet
should provide the leaders of Islam.



[4]Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion To Islam In The Medieval Period: An
Essay In Quantitative History (Harvard University Press, 1979), p.
124.