This isn’t directly related to anything going on right now, but I’ve been wondering about it for a while.
How do Muslims feel about the Spanish poem El Cid. It’s been a while since I read it (or saw yje overblown Charlton Heston film), but I recall that its representation of Islam is scandalously false. You could get away with that when the poem was written for its largely Catholic audience, and political correctness hadn’t even been dreamed of, but it won’t fly today. (I suspect that the author was ignorant of the truth about Islam, and was making the theology up to fit his ideas of what the “bad guys” should be. But for all I knnow it was propaganda.)
This would be one thing if this were a minor and forgotten work, but it isn’t. It’s the National Epic of Spain, which I suspect has a non-negligible Muslim population. I’ve never been to Spain (though I’d love to go), and I wonder:
– How well is El Cid known and read over there? Is everyone familiar with at least the broad outline?
– What do they think of the depiction of the Muslims/
– How do the Muslims feel about the depiction of Islam?
They finally got around to changing the lines in the Passion Play at Obermagau (sp?) a few years ago in which the Jews are condemned, but that play is only a couple of hundred years old. The Poem of the Cid is a lot older, and virtually set in stone.
Not quite a response to your post, I’m not muslim, but I did live in Spain for a couple of years. Muslims do not make up any significant part of the Spanish population, according to this document out of 41 million citizens, only about 450,000 are muslim. The same document talks about an incident of citizens protests when a local muslim group in the town of Premia de Mar tried to build a mosque, but it seems the protest was more anti-immigrant than anti-religious.
More directly related to your post the poem El Cid is very much a part of spanish culture. It is taught at various levels of school, in various levels of depth, and you should know that there’s a real distinction made between the historical and the legendary character, since it is widely acknowledged that El Cid was a real person. But, although it is taught that he probably fought for both moors and christians, and was pretty much of a privateer, it is also taught that much of the disparaging information comes from moor histories. All in all El Cid is seen as a heroic figure, and one of the leaders of the reconquest of Spain from the moors, which are generally seen as the bad guys of the time. I don’t recall any mention being made that the depiction of the moors was anything but accurate.
Thanks for the information – it’s what I suspected, but did not know. But as for the last line:
If you read the poem its depiction of Muslim practices and beliefs would be seen as scandalous and blasphemous by a devout Muslim. I can’t recall the details right now, but I would ceertainly expect them to be inflammatory.
I was looking this up on the search engines, and found a site criticizing the 1961 film as showing the Moors in a very bad light. Yet my own recollection of the film was that El Cid got along well with both sides, ulytimately. “How can anyone say this is evil?” he asks, surveying Moorish culture.
If you get a chance do look up the passages you’re referring to. I recall a whole lot of killing of moors, but nothing really disparaging. Did you read it in spanish or a transalation? I found a spanish version here
CalMeacham: I can’t speak to the modern Muslim take on the poem, but I will say that given it is presumed to have been written ~1140 ( a little less than 50 years after the historical El Cid’s death ), the inaccuracies and stereotypes ( whatever they are - I actually have a copy, but I haven’t read it since the mid-80’s and no longer remember the details of the comments on Islam ) are not surprising. All the more so as the Almoravids ( al-Mourabitun ) who had conquered the area in the early 12th century ruled with a pretty harsh hand, not only causing great distress in the Christian kingdoms ( who suffered a fiscal crisis as there economic connections to al-Andalus were cut ), but also alienating their own non-Muslim populace with harsh taxes.
As for El Cid himself ( Rodrigo Diaz of Bivar ) - He just as frequently allied with Muslim petty rulers as he fought with them. He also was frequently fighting various Christian nobles and kings, sometimes in alliance with, or in defense of, various Muslim potentates. Spain in the latter half of the 11th century was extremely complicated politically, with various Muslim states tribute to rival Christian states and all of them switching alliances from time to time. El Cid was right in the thick of much of this. Then came the fundamentalist Almoravids from Morocco, shaking up and confusing things even more.
Oh and as to the Muslim population of Spain - I’m not sure of the exact demographics today ( i.e. how many are relatively recent immigrants from the former Spanish Morocco orSpanish Sahara ), but remember the bulk of the Muslim population was expelled in the 16th and 17th centuries. Most prominently in the period beteen 1609-1614, when something like 300,000 Moriscos out a total Spanish population of maybe 8 million were expelled ( a particularly heavy blow in some parts of southern Spain - the economic damage and dislocation from this was probably yet another reason for the Spanish decline in this period ).
I read an English translation – the Penguin edition. As I mentioned recently in a thread on languages studied in school, my Spanish has mainly been limited to translating signs in the hispanic parts of town and the occasional sentence on TV. Trying to translate an 800+ old epic would tax it too heavily, I think. I’ll pull out my copy tonight and copy out some of the passages, if I can find them… Tamerlane :
Thanks. I was hoping you or Collounsbury would show up. I figured that the picture of Islam in El Cid would be given by the prejudices of the author, colored by his inventiveness. I take it friom your reply and from bayonet’s that the misrepresentation of the religion is not now a “live” issue.
Okay, I’ve been riffling through my Classics collection for quite a while now, and I have come to one conclusion:
I’ve screwed up.
It wasn’t El Cid, the Spanish National Epic about a battle with Muslim forces, but Chanson de Roland, the French National Epic about a battle with Muslim forces.
I’ve been searching for the exact lines where the author spells out his idea of Muslim beliefs, and I can’t find them. But let me quote from the introduction (by Dorothy L. Sayers! Who also translated!):
"…But like many of his Christian contemporaries [the author] has only the vaguest ideas about the Moslem religion. For him, Saracens are just “Paynims” (Pagans) and therefore (most inappropriately) idolators. They worship an “infernal trilogy”, very oddly made up of Mahound (Mohammed), Termagant (a diabolic personage of obscure origin) and – rather unexpectedly – Apollo, who is in process of degenerating into the “foul fiend Apollyon” familiar to us from The Pilgrim’s Progress. " (Page 20, introduction to Penguin edition of The Song of Roland.)
There’s more, but that should give you a taste of it. I know there’s a significant Muslim presence in France, because I keep hearing about it on the news. Again, I don’t know how highly Roland is regarded in France (pretty high, I’d guess), but is it the kind of thing that people revere without reading? Or is this material well-known but disregarded? Or is it well-known and dealt with somehow in everyone’s minds?
Well, I see I have come to this thread only to find that it’s about the Chanson de Roland, about which I know nothing. But dammit, I’m gonna speak my piece about El Cid anyway.
I only read a part of it in Spanish class, but my instructor talked about it at some length, and it was clear that from his point of view it wasn’t an anti-Muslim poem so much as an anti-Almoravid poem. The Moors had been decent enough folks until the Almoravids came along, he thought. You can see some of this attitude in the beginning of the Charlton Heston movie too. The various emirs are lounging around having a good time and not bothering anybody, when this black-cloaked meanie, who I guess is supposed to represent the Almoravid dynasty, shows up and starts chastising them for not spreading Islam with the sword.
Cal… there are Spanish contemporary versions of El Cid. 13th century Spanish is difficult to read. There are books that come with both a modern translation and the original work.
This is what I have - it’s a side by side translation, with one page being a contemporary Spanish translation by Ramon Menendez Pidal and the opposite page being a English translation by W.S. Merwin. It was published as Poem of The Cid under Merwin’s name by Meridian, 1976. When I was taking a Western Civ class back in 1985, my professor considered it the best paperback volume available. Sadly it seems to be out of print today.