The historical uses of relativism

Since Andrew noted a revision of the name for the “Cordoba House,” I thought I would discuss something which has alway bothered me: the perceptions of Muslim Spain by both the opponents and proponents of the project. The opponents argue that Muslim Spain, itself a category encompassing seven hundred years and a variety of polities, was characterized by the domination of Muslims over Christians and Jews. The proponents of the project suggest that Cordoba as the capital of Al-Andalus was a brilliant example of the efflorescence that can occur in a climate of cultural pluralism. Both are strictly true. The problem occurs when we interpret the past through our own particular normative lens.

The reality is that compared to any present nation, excepting cases such as Saudi Arabia or North Korea, Muslim dominated Spain was a profoundly illiberal place, with dhimmis often relegated to a role analogous to that of blacks before the Civil Rights era. And yet on the balance around the year 1000 Al-Andalus was more religiously diverse and tolerant than any polity west of the Indus, in the world of Islam or Christendom. Though Muslims accepted the right of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians to practice their faith so long as these groups accepted Islamic domination, as an operational fact by the year 1000 these communities were already in the midst of a precipitous slide toward marginality or extinction. The last flickers of North African Christianity in the Maghreb were going dark, and the power and influence of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian religious eminences at the heart of the Muslim world was no more as their communities no longer had the demographic parity to make them noteworthy.

Muslim ruled Spain had a more robust Latin Christian culture than North Africa, which was always linguistically divided, with the Berber tribes only lightly touched by Romanitas. Additionally, the Muslim elite in Spain was divided between Arab and Berber, as well as Arab factions whose roots go back to divisions in the Levant and Arabia proper. Geographically Spain was also very far from the core of the Muslim world, an exotic land literally on the edge of the world. So as a structural matter the relationship of non-Muslim and Muslim was more balanced than it was in most of the Islamic world, producing a de facto culture of relative toleration and pluralism in the year 1000 in Al-Andalus which was more akin to the period of the Umayyad Caliphate in the year 700. The last of the Church Fathers, John of Damascus, was an official for the Caliphs of Damascus. There was no way that Muslims in this period could monopolize even the highest positions in the bureaucracy because of their numerical inferiority and the continuing cultural power of the Greeks. The Umayyads were not fundamentally more tolerant than the later Abbasid Caliphs, who relied more exclusively on a Muslim bureaucracy (though often these were recently converted families, such as the Barmakids). They were simply in a position which their actions bespoke toleration because that was the price which pragmatism demanded.

What I’m pointing to here is the to distinction between an attribute and a situation. We know as an empirical fact that the partisans of the Abrahamic faiths are not very tolerant of dissent from their religious monopolies when they are in a position of power. But, in a position where the faith can not impose its will on a society toleration is a characteristic. So the first Christian monarchs in pagan European lands were often rather tolerant of the religious feelings of the majority, but beyond a particular point the Christian powers that be imposed their faith on the non-Christian majority (generally the key was the extension of Christianity beyond the royal family to members of the nobility who could serve as ideological allies; if this did not occur the populace could remain firmly pagan as they were in the case of the Wends). The distinction between the attribute of tolerance, and a situation which fosters tolerance, can be muddled. In the case where a particular religion is supremely dominant the idea of tolerance may simply seem ludicrous and peculiar on the face of it, a temptation toward heresy and error. But in a situation where a plurality of religious opinion is a structural fact of the universe tolerance may seem a necessary attribute of a civilized person; from what I have read the last Mughal Emperor was a genuinely latitudinarian individual in matters of religion, but I do not believe it is a coincidence that he was a product of the Indian cultural milieu.

Bringing the issue back to the present, moderns tend to co-opt pre-moderns for their own ideological ends, when the pre-moderns had no such ideology, or when ideology did not even exist. Muslim Spain was not an idyll of toleration which could serve as a model for any modern nation. Rather, in its day and age it was a region where different cultural strands, Romance, Arab and Berber, Muslim, Christian and Jew, persisted uneasily. In the years between 1000 and 1250 the Muslim tide retreated before the Reconquista states in the north of Spain, and Islamic powers in the Maghreb were invited in to staunch the expansion. They failed, and the last 250 years of “Muslim Spain” consisted of the tenuous existence of the Emirate of Granada as a vassal of Christian powers. What would have happened if the North African powers had rolled back the Christian advance?  Over time the decline in Christian numbers would reduce the community to marginality or extinction, and there would certainly be eventual extinction of Romance dialects outside of mountainous areas, and probable absorption of Al-Andalus culturally into the Mahgreb.

So far in this post I’ve been implicitly focusing on the uses and abuses of this period of history by partisans of  multiculturalist Left-liberalism. What about conservatives who see in the attempt by Muslims to idealize Cordoba a dominionist agenda? My personal experience with Muslims is that many do have some nostalgia for Al-Andalus. Not as an example of the multicultural tolerance which it may represent, but rather the high water mark of Arab Muslim civilization, both geopolitically and culturally. But that need not be the only interpretation, and I can grant that more sophisticated Western Muslims may co-opt the past in a manner which makes their own existence within a liberal order possible. I have noted for example Western Muslims citing approvingly the existence of their co-religionists historically as a minority in non-Muslim lands, or even the subordination or alliance of Muslim polities with non-Muslim ones. My impression from the Muslim commentary in the past is that these were seen as deviations, embarrassments, or pragmatic compromises. But many Western Muslims do not see them in that way at all, but rather as more genuine expressions of what it means to be Muslim.

As an atheist with little sympathy for Islamic civilization I do find this new sentiment peculiar, but the key to understanding it is human cognition: the explicit models and rationales which people give for their beliefs may not truly inform you of the deep logical structures which are the causal roots of why they believe what they believe. There are many Christians today who claim that their religion entails that they be anti-racist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pacifist, pro-capitalist, racialist, etc. Which one of these is the “real Christianity”? As an unbeliever I do not believe that it is of any use to distill Christianity down to an idealized reality. Rather I accept that the religion is defined by the parameter space which religious believers occupy. Christian libertarians and Christian socialists who argue that their political beliefs derive from their religion are both equally sincere, and, equally misguided in grounding their politics in a false axiom (that God exists, and Christianity is Truth).

Western Muslims who claim the “real Islam” is totally compatible with democratic liberalism may be part of the same general phenomenon. Though the reality is that Muslims today are by and large an illiberal lot, these individuals may believe that they have access to the True Islam. As a factual matter what I believe has happened is that some Muslims have become liberals, and their liberalism entails a certain set of constraints on their religious beliefs, which they rationalize by asserting that these are more in keeping with their religious tradition than the illiberal aspects which they must discard. Granted, Muslims in America are more socially conservative than the average, about as conservative as evangelical Protestant Christians. And there is always the problem that they identify with an illiberal Islamic international. But probably the best bet for America is to aid & abet the belief by Western Muslims that their interpretation of their religion is the religion, and limit the immigration of Muslims from foreign lands so that the new cultural norm takes hold among the Muslims we already have.

Note: I’m not going to publish historically ignorant comments (or I’ll delete them). Stupidity is blasphemous to me, and we live an iniquitous age! In other words, don’t lecture me on details you don’t grasp.