The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal

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      9. The debunking of the myth of the darkness of the Middle Ages is certainly best exemplified by Haskins 1927, but Pernoud 1977 indicates that many of those views have never been completely eradicated, and why in her view they ought to be. Among general literary historians there is surprisingly often a notion of the primitivism of the medievals relative to the modern period, and prominent critics (see Bloom 1973) can still regard everything before the Renaissance as antediluvian. Even among medievalists, similar views are not unknown. Zumthor (1975), to take one example, is able to characterize the period and its men as incapable of autobiographical writing. A recent nonacademic perspective on the surge of interest in medieval studies and what this implies for our general perceptions of the period is Murphy 1984. See also Jauss 1979 and Calin 1983.

      10. For a succinct history and extensive bibliography of the development of these views as reflected in scholarship dealing with troubadour lyrics, see Boase 1976.

      11. Prévost (1972:18), inspired by Althusser, notes that people “use” ideology, but “sont également produits et mis en mouvement par l’idéologie, par ce qui fonctionne comme un véritable inconscient culturel” (emphasis mine). Evidence of the institutionalization of these general views surrounds us. General anthologies of European medieval literature do not, as a matter of course, include examples of literature written in Arabic or Hebrew, nor do they even, in many cases, acknowledge or discuss its existence as part of the general historical background. Courses on medieval literature, with few exceptions, perform the same excision. Even the very definition of what is “Spanish” literature that is implicit in the structure of courses and histories and anthologies of the literature systematically excludes what was written in Arabic and Hebrew at the same time as what was written in the Romance vernaculars. The definition of a Hispanist has rarely included knowledge of Islamic Spain from any but a rudimentary fronterizo point of view. In the often daunting inventory of languages deemed necessary tools for a medievalist, Arabic rarely figures. The respective bodies of literature are shelved in different sections of our libraries, are studied by different scholars, and are taught in different departments, even though in some cases they may come from the same place and time. A familiarity with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch is considered necessary for the truly competent French or Spanish medievalist, but even rudimentary information on the translations of Arabic and Hebrew works commissioned by Frederick II or of the Arabic poetry dedicated to his grandfather Roger is rare even in an Italian medievalist. Augustine and Aquinas are de rigueur; Averroes and Maimonides are obscure figures at best. To argue that there are and have been exceptions to such rules would hardly contradict the validity of this rudimentary outline of the general system. It is more telling that we are easily able to name the exceptions, whereas an enumeration of the instances of conformity to such norms would be a daunting task.

      12. Curiously, much of the resistance to such a change in our appreciation of the Arabic role in medieval Europe comes from the area of Arabic studies as well, as indicated above in note 5. The only comprehensive and critical study of the historiography of Arabic Europe, Monroe 1970, confirms what even casual observation might well reveal: The conceptual schism between East and West (Arabic and Romance) has in turn resulted in the creation of fundamentally separate fields of inquiry, the setting up of a field that falls between two stools. (No adequate equivalent of Monroe 1970 exists for Siculo-Arabic studies, but see Bausani [1957] 1977, Gabrieli 1957, and Ahmad 1975.) The study of Arabic culture as it existed in Europe is a poor and regularly neglected relation. While often there is a certain amount of lip service paid to the heights of the cultural glory of Córdoba, little recognition of the centrality of al-Andalus in the overall contours of Arabic history can be measured through institutional yardsticks. In fact, it is noteworthy that traditionally the scholars who have studied Arabic culture in Spain have been Spaniards, and those who have been students of Siculo-Arabic matters, Italian. Further confirmation of how far from the Orientalist mainstream this area of study and its scholars are may also be found where one might least expect it. Curiously enough, it is virtually completely ignored in Said’s Orientalism. It is telling that in that wide-ranging and usually unsparingly critical review of the discourse of Orientalism, there is a virtually complete omission of both the phenomenon and the subsequent study of the history and culture of the Arabs in medieval Europe. One cannot but be struck by, and perhaps relieved at, this ignoring of the discourse of Orientalism when it has addressed the question of the Arab on European soil—let alone the further question of why scholarship in those instances has assumed that, despite seven hundred years there, the Arab never became a European and even that the territory he occupied was thus not part of Europe for that period of time! There is clearly some irony in this, in that Said would have found even more convincing grist for his polemical mill in the annals of Spanish Arabism than he found in the writings of Arabists who worked in more traditional areas of Islamic studies, areas that do not address, for example, the question of how the Arabs actually de-Europeanized a group of otherwise legitimate Europeans under their control. There is further irony in the extent to which this reveals that even Said, critic par excellence of the Orientalist discourse, is not altogether immune to what is certainly a part of that discourse—its segregation of Arabic or Arabized Europe. Part of the myth that he is attempting to demolish is ratified in his choice of texts and scholars, and his choice reflects the view that the real Europe is a Europe almost completely unaffected by hundreds of years of Arab domination, that the only real Orientalism, or Arabism, is that practiced solely by those who have always been the colonizers of the Arabs, not those who were transformed by Arabic colonization and who have had to come to grips with that fact in themselves. But even without going this far, without dissecting Orientalism from the same vantage point from which it dissects that field, one can certainly note that this most widely read and influential discussion of the marginalizing approach to the study of the Arabs outside of Europe itself very much reflects the segregation of the study of European Arab culture and history and just how marginal the scholarship on the Arabs in medieval Europe really is.

      13. Even traditional Orientalists of the sort severely criticized in Said 1978 have noted the Orientalism of scholarship on the medieval period. See note 4 of the preface, above. In Watt 1972, one finds a statement that might have been made by Said himself: “In this post-Freudian world men realize that the darkness ascribed to one’s enemies is a projection of the darkness in oneself that is not fully admitted. In this way the distorted vision of Islam is to be regarded as a projection of the shadow-side of European man” (83). Daniel 1960 is the most extensive exploration of the misconceptions of Europeans concerning Islam, and it is remarkable that many of his observations about the ignorance and prejudice that are part of this view are relevant not only for the medieval period. See also Southern 1962. A recent study of the crusades concludes with the succinct observation that “modern Western European Christians seem in general to be as ignorant of the fundamentals of Islam as their twelfth-century predecessors” (Finucane 1983:211). To fully realize how acceptable, even expected, much racial prejudice was until very recently, one need only read any of the social histories of the twentieth century or biographies of some of the individuals whose lives and views have spanned the period of vastly altered attitudes. It is enlightening, for example, to read of the matter-of-factness as well as the depth of anti-Indian and anti-Arab feelings among the British upper classes in Manchester’s biography of Churchill. Or, on this side of the Atlantic, the overt racism and anti-Semitism that is considered unspeakable today but that until recently was not only not shocking but was expected of the educated classes are both described in some detail in Lash’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

      14. Hitchcock 1977 is a good indication of the studies dedicated to the kharjas alone, and a considerable number of those studies have discussed direct or ancillary questions of possible Arabic borrowings. Even more telling, perhaps, would be a glance at Cantarino 1965, which includes a full bibliography of studies on Dante and on the possible influence of Arabic texts on the Commedia. One is struck both by the quantity of such studies (there are eighty-one entries in his bibliography) and by the fact that so very few of them are by mainstream Italianists. Cantarino himself notes that “Asín Palacio’s theory, although rejected almost unanimously and without any qualifications by Dante critics, did not fail to leave a deep influence on subsequent research СКАЧАТЬ