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.