Why Mozarab?

When I was a kid, my favorite movie was El Cid. During its run at the old Belmont Theater, now a health club, on Second Street in Long Beach, I sat through double matinee showings of the movie three weekends in a row. All that mail and the steel, the swords and chivalry, the clash of the knight against the inchoate mob of the Moorish invaders, driven back by the austere and noble hero even after his death.

Just a little punk of a Jewish kid, all I really cared about was the glory of war, the glamour and swagger of steel, the Cid’s confident defiance of death. But like any unselfconscious entertainment, embedded in the movie were deep mythologies of our culture.

Like, for instance, the story of Christ, embedded in El Cid sacrifice of his life for the salvation of his people, which comes to pass as a result of his death. Another myth was that of the great swarming threat of Islam, the horde, the cruel and powerful face of avarice, rapaciousness, and cruelty.

I didn’t notice any of that back then.

The reality is that El Cid was not a crusading knight at all. He was a mozarab, a Christian assimilated into Moorish Spain, though not himself a Muslim. He was also a mercenary, and willing to fight for any prince, Christian or Muslim, as long as the pay was good. Yes, there were always the exchanges of territories among the various principalities, and Christians like the sainted king of France Louis IX stirred up crusades against Muslims and anyone else who deviated from orthodox ideas of proper Christianity. But in the everyday life in those parts of the Iberian peninsula under Islamic rule, Christians, Jews and Muslims were able to leave in relative peace and prosperity. These were still the brutal Middle Ages, but in Moorish Spain it was also a time of stunning and extraordinary artistic, intellectual and economic achievement.

A thousand years later and we live in a time in which the Christian west and Muslim east seem entwined in a life and death struggle. If that comes to pass, it is only because we make it so. If that comes to pass, it will only be because we have all of us—Muslim and non-Muslim—given in to the lazy reassurance of our deep and comfortable mythologies.

Like many, I believe Islam must undergo its own renaissance and reformation, the house of Islam needs to be put in order; it needs to come to grips with what its jinns have whispered darkly to its own weak and disoriented and foolish and bereaved. But the West has its own jinns. And they’ve been whispering delusions into our ears for a long, long time. This blog is mainly for the non-Muslim, like myself, who want to learn about Islam neither to attack it, nor to join it, but to understand it so that, like the mozarabs of medieval Spain, we can all live.