The Almoravids were the polar opposites of the taifa rulers in Spain, whose love of wine and astrology was abhorrent to these illiterate but energetic new fundamentalists. Yet the Berbers’ military skills were only too evident. As fellow Muslims they would be more than willing to fight alongside their Spanish co-religionists against the Christians, but as hardliners, they would make an uncomfortable fit in Al-Andalus. The taifa rulers sweated over the decision, but in the end the most powerful of them, the poet–king Al-Mu’tamid of Seville, made the decision. ‘I would rather die a camel-herder in Africa,’ he said, ‘than a swine-herd in Castile.’
His words were prophetic, as he would later die in exile near Marrakech. But for now he needed the Almoravids to fight the Christians, and so the invitation was sent.
The Almoravids duly arrived and did everything that was expected – and predicted – of them. In a series of campaigns they helped push back the Christians and halted their advance. They failed to retake Toledo, and El Cid’s Valencia held out against them, only falling, in 1102, shortly after the great warrior’s death. But within less than twenty years, Al-Andalus was under their control: brought in as friends to help against a common enemy, they were quickly seduced by the charms of Spain and decided to stay.
What followed for ordinary people in Al-Andalus, however, were very difficult years. Their terrain may have been united under one leadership again, but the Almoravids were anything but benevolent rulers. Despite preaching religious purity, they saw Spain as little more than a land for raiding, and plundered and pillaged their way across the southern Peninsula into the early decades of the twelfth century. In addition, they brought with them far less tolerant attitudes to non-Muslims, and for the first time Christian and Jewish communities living under Moorish rule were subject to systematic persecution.1
It didn’t take long, however, for these ascetic Berber warriors to become fond of the more sophisticated life they encountered north of the Strait, and within a generation or so they had effectively gone ‘soft’. So soft, indeed, that by the 1140s the indigenous Moorish populations – who had never taken to them – began to rebel and overthrow them.
But if the Almoravids had one redeeming quality, it was that they had managed to bring unity to Al-Andalus. Once their power was broken, a key pattern of Spanish history played out again, and once more the Moorish lands shattered into separate parts, in what has been called the ‘second taifa’ period.
And as before, the Christians took advantage of the situation. Alfonso VII of Castile, grandson of the Alfonso VI who had taken Toledo in 1085, even struck as far south as Cordoba, briefly taking the former caliphal capital in 1146.
In an extraordinary example of history repeating itself, however, Muslim Spain was once again saved by the arrival of a second group of Berber fundamentalists from Morocco.
Since the early twelfth century, the Almoravids had been challenged in their own heartlands by a group that emerged from the Atlas mountains. With a new message of purity, these people were equally vigorous and warlike, but had a more solid religious grounding and possibly a better understanding of Islamic teaching than their rivals. Their founder, a man called Ibn Tumart, claimed to have travelled east to the Muslim heartlands and to have studied under the great Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), a leading expert on Islamic law who had reconciled Sufi mysticism with mainstream religious doctrine. These new Moroccans have been described as ‘unitarians’ who stressed the singularity of God and His attributes, hence their name, al-Muwahhidun, which was Latinised into ‘Almohads’.
To Western ears the name is confusingly similar to ‘Almoravids’, and both groups emerged from a similar part of Morocco within less than one hundred years of each other, and went on to rule Moorish Spain. But an easy way to distinguish them is this: the Almoravids veiled their men; the Almohads veiled their women.
As part of their efforts to overthrow the now decadent Almoravids, the Almohads sailed over to Spain to occupy their Peninsular lands, arriving just as the Christians were making inroads into Moorish territory once more. The Almohads retook Cordoba for Islam in 1148. Within a few short years the new taifa kingdoms were defeated and Al-Andalus reunited (although Valencia remained independent until 1172 under the ‘Wolf King’ Ibn Mardanish).
The Almohads brought new unity to Moorish Spain, this time in a far more settled form than under the Almoravids. They were more accepted by the locals, and for a brief time Al-Andalus prospered. Cordoba, which had never fully recovered after the Fitna civil wars of the early eleventh century, now enjoyed something of a renaissance, with new building projects designed to restore some of its previous glory. This was the period of Averroes, the great Spanish thinker, who as a religious judge and personal physician to the Almohad rulers, enjoyed certain protection for the development of his ‘philosophical’ ideas. Yet the religious intolerance towards minorities as practised by the Almoravids continued, with Jewish communities in particular suffering at their hands, especially Jews who had previously been forced to convert to Islam. One Almohad ruler stated that he would happily massacre all of them were it not for the fear that some might have genuinely become Muslims in their hearts.
Militarily, the Almohads gave Al-Andalus greater protection against the Christians, launching summer campaigns against them on a common, if irregular, basis. Their greatest triumph came at the Battle of Alarcos in 1195. At a site not far from Ciudad Real, on the southern fringes of Spain’s central Tableland, the Almohads routed the Castilian forces, pushing them back to Toledo and recapturing several towns along the way.
It was a huge victory, celebrated throughout Al-Andalus. But it was short-lived. The defeated Castilians rallied themselves and managed to forge an alliance with other Christian kingdoms – Aragon, Navarre and Galicia – to stage a comeback. The result was a second battle, in 1212, not far from Alarcos, near the gorge of Despeñaperros at a place known as las Navas de Tolosa. It proved to be the single most important battle in the history of the ‘Reconquest’, resulting in a collapse of the Almohads and the near capture of their caliph on the battlefield. Protective chains used by his personal bodyguard were captured by Navarrese forces during the fight, and to this day can be seen decorating the walls of the monastery at Roncesvalles: they still form the design, in a circled eight-star cross, of the Navarrese flag and form part of the contemporary Spanish coat of arms.
The Almohads were unable to recover after defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa, and over the following three decades Christian kingdoms captured Moorish territory at a faster rate than ever before. Cordoba fell – definitively this time – in 1236, Valencia in 1238 and Seville, the Almohad capital, in 1248. The capture of Cordoba meant that the bells of Santiago, seized by the Moorish dictator Al-Mansur in 997, could finally be regained, and were ceremoniously reinstalled at Compostela shortly afterwards.
Christian Spain was victorious and Moorish Spain was finished . . . except for one small rump kingdom in Granada. Curiously, this would hold out for another two hundred and fifty years, helped by old Spanish standards: difficult mountainous terrain, and infighting among its opponents.
1 Previous incidents of persecution had occurred, for example the massacre of Jews at Granada in 1066, in which poet and vizier Joseph ben Naghrela was killed, but these had fallen short of becoming official policy; with the arrival of the Almoravids, that changed.
A DESERT ISLAND STORY
At the eastern end of the Sierra Nevada, not far from Granada, there is a small town tucked away in the dusty hillsides, almost forgotten amid the dry, desert-like landscape. Tourists who stray here will find an imposing cathedral, half-empty streets and a vast number of caves in the surrounding area, homes to the large Gypsy community who settled centuries ago in this part of Andalusia. Guadix has a special and rather quiet charm, but its most important gift to humanity – a metaphor that one of its greatest sons developed almost a thousand years ago – is hardly mentioned today, despite forming such an integral part of our culture that it is u
sed constantly in literature, in jokes, and even in Hollywood films.
The name of a small street and a hotel are the only reminders now that Guadix was the birthplace of Ibn Tufayl (or ‘Abentofail’ as the locals prefer). If he is referred to at all, it is simply as a writer of the twelfth century whose greatest achievement was to have been the mentor of the philosopher Ibn Rushd, or Averroes. Nonetheless, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl was and is a great figure in the history of ideas. Poet, physician, mystic, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher, he was, like so many others of his time, a polymath, and wrote what is arguably the first European novel.
Hayy bin Yaqzan can be translated as ‘Alive son of Awake’, and is his only prose work that has survived to the present day. Based on an earlier tale by the Persian philosopher Ibn Sina, it is the first desert island story, and has been the inspiration for many other better-known versions, from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to the Tom Hanks film Cast Away.
Hayy bin Yaqzan tells the story of a baby – Hayy – the son of a princess, whose birth must be concealed. He is abandoned on an equatorial island, where a doe suckles and looks after him. The baby becomes a child, then a youth, and finally a man. He is possessed of great intelligence, and spends his days studying the world around him. Like a good scientist, he observes natural phenomena, develops theories to explain them, and then returns to his observations to see if his ideas stand up. In this way he discovers such things as the circulation of the blood, the effect and use of fire, and the movement of the heavens. Each phase of his learning lasts seven years and his knowledge grows until he becomes aware of the soul and the Creator. Finally, in a vivid and transcendental moment, he passes from an intellectual understanding of such things to an intuitive and direct experience of Reality.
Shortly afterwards, a second person arrives on the island by boat. His name is Asal, a devout man seeking a place of quiet contemplation. When they meet, Hayy and Asal realise they share the same ideas – one through direct experience, the other through reasoning – and decide to travel together to Asal’s home town in order to communicate what they know. Once they reach the city, however, they discover that few people there can or want to understand their message, and in the end the two men return to the island.
After A Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Tufayl’s story of Hayy is said to be the most translated work of Arabic literature in the world. A Hebrew version already existed in the fourteenth century with a commentary by the Jewish philosopher Moses ben Joshua of Narbonne. This was later translated into Latin in Florence in the fifteenth century. In England there were various translations from 1671 onwards, both into Latin and English. One of these, carried out by Simon Ockley, was published in 1708. Only a decade later, Defoe brought out Robinson Crusoe, widely regarded as the first modern novel in English.
At the time it was believed that Defoe had been inspired by the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who had survived four years alone on a remote island off the coast of Chile, and it is likely that Selkirk’s experiences did influence the writing of Crusoe. Yet there are many echoes of Hayy bin Yaqzan in Defoe’s story, partly in the appearance of a second character on the island (Man Friday), but particularly in the third volume, in which Crusoe tells of his vision of the ‘angelic world’ – an unmistakable parallel with Hayy’s experiences.
With the publication of Crusoe, the powerful metaphor of a person living on a desert island, alone and forced to survive and reflect, fully entered Western culture. As a reflection of human life itself, it is so common today that we have largely forgotten where it came from or who introduced it. But the influence of Ibn Tufayl, a Spaniard from Guadix, continues nonetheless, and will doubtless carry on inspiring as it has done for the last nine centuries.
STRAIGHT THINKING
A Spaniard – a Cordoban – is widely credited with being the father of Western rational thought.
‘Rationalism was born in Spain in the mind of an Arabian philosopher as a conscious reaction against the Arabian divines,’ wrote the French historian Etienne Gilson in 1938.
This view was echoed more recently in the 1990s by the Spanish Arabist Joan Vernet, who described the man in question as ‘possibly the Spaniard who has exercised the greatest influence on human thought throughout history’.
Yet mention his name to Spanish people today and you will generally receive a quizzical look. As an Arabic-speaking Muslim of the twelfth century, he is rejected as belonging to the ‘anti-Spain’ which the warrior Santiago busies himself slaughtering.
Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd was an astronomer, physician, courtier, lawyer, poet and philosopher. Latin-speaking contemporaries referred to him as Averroes.
Averroes was a hugely influential figure in late twelfth-century Cordoba. He was friend and personal physician to the Almohad caliphs, and rose to high rank by becoming chief qadi – the leading authority in religious law, a position held by previous members of his family. As a young man he met Ibn Tufayl, author of Hayy bin Yaqzan, and was introduced at court. After a philosophical discussion, the caliph complained about the obscurity of Aristotle’s writings. Averroes was subsequently given the task of explaining them.
The result was his writing of three Commentaries on Aristotle’s work, which became the basis of his fame and philosophical importance for centuries to come. An obsession of the times was the apparent contradiction between two different ways of understanding the world and the universe; either through the revealed word of the prophets, or, following Aristotle’s methods, via the intellect.
The intuitive was at loggerheads with the rational, the holistic with the sequential – ‘faith’ with ‘reason’.
Averroes was living in a superstitious age in which, for example, a leading rebel of the time could escape capture by ‘transforming himself into a cat’ (leading to the slaughter of many strays), or the destruction of a statue of the Madonna at Medina Azahara could lead to howling winds which caused much structural damage throughout Cordoba. ‘Reason’ was a novel idea, and seen as highly dangerous by religious authorities who recognised the threat it posed. What if ordinary people applied ‘rational thought’ to the religious teachings which formed the basis of society?1
Averroes’s achievement lay not only in his explanation of Aristotle’s often dense and unclear texts, however, but in his reconciliation of these two modes of thought. In a world created by God, Averroes argued, there could be no contradiction between what our own observation told us and what He Himself had revealed in holy scripture. Analysing the universe could only ever confirm religious truths.
It was by squaring this circle that Averroes earned his high place in the history of philosophy. What’s extraordinary is that within a very few years of his death in 1198 his teachings were translated into Latin at Toledo.2 These texts had an enormous influence on medieval Christian thinkers, not least St Thomas Aquinas, who had been grappling with the same question. Aquinas went on to quote Averroes over five hundred times in his own writings on the subject. Dante honoured ‘The Commentator’ – as Averroes became known in Europe – by placing him in Limbo among other virtuous non-Christians such as Homer, Ovid and Saladin.
But Averroes’s work wasn’t limited to analysis of Aristotle. He also developed ideas about the ‘universal mind’, a vision of God as a ‘universal intelligence’, an ‘ocean of spirits shared by each man’, not dissimilar to Jung’s concept of the ‘collective unconscious’.
In addition, he found inspiration in the work of the Baghdadi group the Ikhwan al-Safa – the Brethren of Sincerity, who, among other things, evolved highly influential musical theories. Most historians of music insist that the note names do, re, mi come from Italy, but an alternative suggestion points out their marked similarity with the Arabic letters dad, ra, mim, fa, sad.
Averroes had his critics, however. Ibn Saba’in of Ceuta, a contemporary, was scathing about the Cordoban: ‘If he had heard the Philosopher (Aristotle) saying that whoever is standing is at the same tim
e sitting, he would have professed and believed this.’
And Averroes was accused of being too close to the Jewish community, at a time when they were being systematically persecuted by the Almohad authorities. From his high position, he fell from grace in 1195 and was exiled. He died in Marrakech in 1198, but his body was transferred back to his native Cordoba, where he was later buried.
His influence, however, lived on. Averroes’s writings were standard texts at European universities well into the eighteenth century, and Columbus himself mentioned him as one of his inspirations for his world-changing journey across the Atlantic . . .
But more on that later.
1 Averroes’s reply was to insist that philosophy was a reserve of the social and intellectual elite, and not for the masses.
2 Some of them by Michael Scot, who spent time in Toledo before moving to Italy and the court of Frederick II.
CROSSOVER
Ibn Tufayl and Averroes are key elements in the Spanish crucible of the Middle Ages, producing new gold. But the alchemy of the time isn’t limited to Al-Andalus: Christian Spain has an equally important role to play, nurturing the refined precious metal and, crucially, helping to pass it on to its Western European neighbours. Although divided politically and religiously, the Peninsula as a whole transmits the fruits of its more advanced civilisation, and in so doing lays the groundwork for the Renaissance, Europe’s most celebrated re-engagement with its Classical heritage. And the most significant channel through which this lost learning reached the rest of the Continent was the School of Translators in Christian Toledo.
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