The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal
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the story of the making of Europe and ratifies the legitimacy of that heritage as an integral part of the West. The second image, in turn, codifies Christianity, the triumphant religion of the West, as its dominant and shaping cultural force, an essential, rather than incidental, component of our cultural ancestry. Both the non-Roman substratum and the Christian superstratum are (not by accident, one might guess) elements peculiarly and characteristically European, essential ingredients in what sets the West apart from everywhere else.
While most individual medievalists have more complex and variegated views of the period on which they work than any of these simple paradigms, the paradigms are nonetheless there, and they are formative factors. To spell them out is to delimit and understand the parameters of the medieval cultural factors that are normally considered and that are normally accepted as reasonable. Thus if one’s study is grounded in the pre-Latin substratum—its mythology, folklore, or literature—or if it relies on a close reading of the Latin sermons, the Church fathers, or the Latin “foundation,” then it falls within those acceptable and canonized limits. It does not challenge the boundaries of the image of the medieval period but instead adds to the evidence for the validity of that image. Even more important, perhaps, a study that falls within the limits of those possible narratives of European history needs neither justification (as to why one would bring such texts or presumed sociocultural conditions to bear on the study) nor external, nontextual proof that the writer in question was specifically aware of the texts or other material adduced. Such studies need no apologies.
Within such contexts our paradigmatic views of the medieval period have not readily expanded to include the possibility of greater cultural polymorphism. Indeed, given the historical circumstances and cultural ambience of the formative period of our discipline, such a move would have been surprising and uncharacteristic. Nineteenth and early twentieth century medievalists could, without having radically to alter their view of themselves and their world, proceed to redefine the extent to which the medieval world was not as backward as it might previously have seemed to be. But a reappraisal of the role played by an essentially alien, Semitic world in the creation of the basic features of that same period would have involved dangerous and ultimately untenable modifications of the paradigms governing their view of themselves. While cultural ideology may often remain unarticulated—its very unconsciousness being one of its essential traits—it is no less powerful for being unspoken, and it would be naive to argue that the cultural unconscious does not play a formative role in any variety of cultural studies. An individual, even a scholar, can scarcely operate outside its bounds.11
The relative paucity of material wealth, the perceived cultural inferiority, and the demonstrable powerlessness of the Arab world in the period in which modern medieval scholarship was carefully delimiting its parameters could hardly have suggested or encouraged a dramatically different view of relations between East and West. Contemporary views generated by the relative positions of the two cultures—with one eclipsing and dominating, literally shaping, the other—could not have escaped being factors in the elaboration of an image of the Arab world, even in an earlier period, that could have been, at most, marginal in the formation of our own culture and civilization. It is fruitless and somewhat misguided to be sanctimonious about such matters, to judge or condemn others by moral and ethical standards that did not exist in their own universes. But it is equally misguided to ignore the fact that such ideologies have existed or to suppose that intellectual enterprises have remained unaffected by their tenets.
Within this context, then, how surprising can it be that in the relatively short history of our discipline, not only has there been no addition to the medieval paradigm of an important Semitic or Arabic role, but also that whatever intimations of such a role had survived from earlier periods or have been introduced more recently have largely been discarded or put aside.12 The untenability of such a notion lies not so much in the difficulty of revising our view of an earlier period of history. In and of itself, that is relatively easy to do, and historical revisionism is one of the most popular of academic pastimes. The key to the unimaginability of this particular bit of revisionism is that it would have challenged and ultimately belied the regnant worldview, requiring the reversal of an ideologically conditioned sense of the communal Western self. It requires the ability not only to imagine but to accept as plausible and admissible an image of our own civilization, at one of its formative moments, as critically indebted to and dependent on a culture that was for some time generally regarded as inferior and, by some lights, as the quintessence of the foreign and the Other.
And yet, in the past one hundred and fifty years or so there have been numerous suggestions within the scholarly community that one of the critical components in the making of the Middle Ages was Arabic and/or Semitic. The critical literature exploring and detailing such views is in fact copious. But although a certain group of historians, and the odd literary historian, has stated or reiterated the view, or some aspect of it, that one or more basic features of our medieval world was directly or indirectly dependent on the medieval Arabic European world, such perspectives have never become part of the mainstream within the community of scholars who regularly deal with medieval European studies, particularly literary studies.13 The Arabic component of our paradigmatic view of the Middle Ages has always remained incidental; it has never been systemic. It may perhaps account for a given, usually isolated, feature, but such a feature is literally a world apart from the cultural sets that are perceived to be integral to the general system of medieval European culture.14
The two closest approximations to a revision of such views, and what can only be described as their failure, are themselves indicative of the unflagging vitality of the paradigm. On the one hand, there has been a Europeanization, an adaptation and absorption into this paradigm, of the body of information that reveals that Arabic “translations,” particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, contributed decisively to the intellectual revival of Europe at that time.15 The impulse and need to absorb this discovery that otherwise threatened the coherence of Western ideology as imposed on the Middle Ages, was dictated in great measure by the eminence of the European historian who first called the phenomenon to the attention of a wide audience of fellow Europeanists. The mode of its absorption into the existing matrices was suggested by the title of Charles Homer Haskins’s own work, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. The association between this renaissance and the later and atavistically European renaissance was inescapable. In fact, the thrust of Haskins’s argument could reasonably be construed as being that the dating of the European Renaissance was off by several centuries, that the European discovery or rediscovery of our ancestral and hereditary culture really began in the twelfth century, and that a general secular cultural revival of considerable proportions followed on its heels. But Haskins was aware of the fact that such translations were almost universally an essential feature of Arabic intellectual life in Europe at the time (both in Sicily and Spain); that many of the most influential “translations” were not at all translations from the Greek as such, but rather translations of Arabic philosophical commentaries on Aristotle, who for some centuries had been one of the philosophical luminaries in the Arabic tradition; and that the propagation and reception of such texts was at least in some measure explicable only in terms of a deeper penetration and knowledge of Arabic intellectual life in Europe, and of its far greater prestige, than had previously been adduced.16
Another failure in introducing a paradigmatically meaningful Semitic component to the European view of its own medieval period is considerably more complex and perhaps more accurately described as a success, although one of very mixed blessings and benefits. The only image of the Middle Ages that regularly admits a shaping and globally influential role for Arabs and Jews is that cultivated and perpetuated by many Hispanists and Spaniards, both medievalists and more general historians and philosophers. This exception, as far as it goes, is undoubtedly due to the fact that the seven-century-long Arab “occupation” of large parts of the Iberian peninsula is a historical fact less easily dismissed and ignored by Spaniards than by other Europeans.17 But, curiously enough, with a handful of very important exceptions, the nature of the molding influence and its effects on subsequent events and tendencies in Spanish culture and history as they are perceived by many generations of Spaniards and Hispanists is a derailing one. It was, in simplified form, a de-Europeanizing one at best and in most other cases a largely or overwhelmingly negative one.18 The most popular