Both words have a meaning of attacking people of other religions. One big difference is that this sort of Jihad is going on right now, whereas this sort of Crusade last occurred hundreds of years ago.
There ought to be a statute of limitations.
Tamerlane, thanks for the clarification. It’s not a nitpick at all, in fact. In Ornament of the World, Menocal neatly sidesteps the factors which led to the downfall of the Umayyads of Damascus in 750 and especially the who-and-why behind Ali’s assassination in 661 – which, it seems, had some bearing on the legitimacy of Umayyad rule. Clearly there had to be a backstory which, until now, I did not know.
Also, thanks for the reference. When I was doing research on medieval Spain eight or nine years ago, English-language scholarship on the Christian kingdoms was good but still meager, and almost non-existent on al-Andalus but for David Wasserstein’s work. I look forward to reading Safron’s book.
Lastly, I do agree with you and MEBuckner, that democracies do a good job overall in promoting and protecting the free practice of a wide variety of religions. However, in the highly secularized world of Western democracies, one can co-exist quite peaceably with other religions without ever really understanding them. (Note that a prevalent theme in this thread is the ignorance of many Americans where Islam is concerned.) In the USA, the practice of religion is very much a private issue, and by and large religious practice is not politicized. This makes peaceful co-existence easier, but it does not actively encourage understanding the “other”. I think peaceful co-existence is harder to achieve in multi-religious states where religions have a strong, directly political expression, where one cannot help being exposed to the “other”, where peaceful relations must be based on the kind of respect and tolerance which comes from mutual understanding. In the distant past, al-Andalus was a state which achieved this kind of peace among three faiths which, in certain places in the modern world, still have difficulty getting along. In the modern world, I think, secularized democracy offers a completely different expression of the multi-religious state.
But I am clearly venturing into areas better suited to another thread. I shall stop here.
[/hijack]
Jerevan Somerville: Well, I’ll briefly extend one hijack while ignoring the other ( though I find your argument on al-Andalus vs. modern democracies interesting ).
Ali was winning the civil war, more or less, when, after a significant victory at the Battle of Siffin, he chose to sit down and negotiate with Mu’awiya. I won’t go into all the somewhat complex reasons of why it happened, but this negotiation caused a split in his heterogenous group of supporters. A series of factions split off to become the Kharijites ( represented today in a very different and attenuated form by the modern Ibadis of North Africa and Oman ) and now opposed Ali, plunging him into what was now a multi-factional and multi-front war.
It was an Egyptian Kharijite who assassinated Ali in 661 with the words ‘The Judgement belongs to God, Ali, not to you’, referring to the negotiations at Siffin. The war had still been in full swing when he died ( he was in Kufa planning a new campaign against Mu’awiya ).
Interestingly enough it was the Kharijites who, much later, both helped weaken the Umayyad state and inadvertently preserved Umayyad rule in Spain. A massive rebellion by Berber Kharijites in North Africa caused the Umayyads to send a large section of their professional “Syrian” army ( on which the Umayyad secular power rested ) to crush it. Instead it was badly defeated in 741, cut off, and forced to retreat northwards into the fortress of Ceuta and Spain. A second army had to be dispatched that broke the rebellion a couple of years later. All of this, however, badly weakened the Umayyads in the center of their empire and was one of a half-dozen contributing causes to their downfall. But it was those loyalist Syrian detachments in Spain from the first expedition that allowed Abd ar-Rahman to launch the coup that established him in Spain after fleeing the disaster that overtook the rest of his clan in the east.
Another few references for you:
The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710-797 by Roger Collins (1989, Blackwell Publishers ). Fairly short, but pretty interesting. Covers both the initial conquest and the Umayyad coup, obviously enough.
Islamic Spain, 1250-1500 by L.P. Harvey ( 1990, University of Chicago Press ). Not just a history of Granada, although they obviously take pride of place.
The Succession to Muhammed:A Study of the Early Caliphate by Wilferd Madelung ( 1997, Cambridge University Press ). An exhaustingly thorough, but very readable survey of the complex internal political struggles of the Islamic community from the death of Muhammed to the death of Ali.
- Tamerlane
Oooh, more treasures. . .
Tamerlane, I appreciate the brief on Ali and Abd al-Rahman. Some of the details c.741 are vaguely familiar, because my research on “the medieval Spains” naturally started with the Muslim conquest of the Visigothic kingdom in 711.
I remember Collins’s book and probably consulted Harvey’s work, though it does not stand out in memory because the period was well past my area of interest: 11th-century Spain and the reign of Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile in particular. Earlier source material was of some interest, where it helped frame the Leonese mentality concerning the fall of the Visigothic kingdom and the pursuit of the reconquista. I was, however, fortunate enough to come across a copy of Pascual Gayangos’s translation of al-Maqqari’s Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain, which was a wealth of transcribed primary source material.
Thanks again for the references. I’ve already ordered a copy of Safron’s book from Barnes & Noble, and Madelung’s book looks interesting as well.
Now, if I could only figure out where to start my new thread topic. . . or exactly what the opening post would be. . .