We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Oct 1, 2013
ANOUAR MAJID, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and other Minorities... more ANOUAR MAJID, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and other Minorities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 228 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-6080-3 (pbk).The title is obviously provocative, paradox- ical and eye-catching, perhaps inspired by the headline displayed on the front page of Le Monde on 12 September 2001, 'We are all Americans', which expressed the universal response of outrage and empathy for the victims of 9/11, before the invention of the phrase War on Terror' and the introduction of the rhetoric of 'us' and 'them'. The Moor, which is not a term much favoured by modern historians, here symbolizes the outsider, or the Other, and the message of this book by a Moroccan-American seems to be that in today's multicultural and interdependent world of plural identities, especially in the melting-pot of the USA, we have all become, in some sense, minorities or outsiders; and if we fail to embrace the Other, at the very least in the imagination, and overcome our religious, cultural and ethnic differences, then we are in danger of losing our humanity.The general thesis of this book is that the cultural roots of European and American xenophobia are to be found in the expul- sion of the Moors from Spain in the early seventeenth century, a shameful example of ethnic cleansing that deserves to be much better known. These Moors, or - to be more accurate - Moriscos, were the descendants of Arabs who were nominally Christian, but continued to practise Islam in secret. In the author's opinion, all minorities living in the West after 1492 are 'in a symbolic or metaphorical sense [...] the descendants of the Moors' and 'the world's non-European natives or religions were all stamped with the taint of Muslim impurity' (p. 5). His argument is that prior to 1492 the European sense of identity was shaped by antagonism to the Moors, or Muslims, and after this watershed many minorities in the West, including Jews, descendants of black African slaves and Hispanic immigrants in North America, would be invested with Moorish attributes, many of them for the good reason that they did actually share an oriental or Judaeo-Muslim heritage. The discovery of that heritage by Jewish orientalists in Europe was a way of resisting European anti-Semi- tism. This is well documented in the chapter entitled 'Muslim Jews'.The extraordinary life of Lev Nussim- baum, the son of an Ashkenazi Jew of Baku, Azerbaijan, who converted to Islam in Berlin when it was a centre of Arab scholarship and died in Positano, Italy, in 1942, was a revela- tion to me, and whetted my appetite to know more. I was equally surprised to learn how the great Jewish orientalist Ignaz Goldziher became convinced that he was a Muslim when he visited Damascus in 1890; and how Benjamin Disraeli, a baptised Anglican who was nevertheless proud of his Sephardic ancestry, regarded Jews as an 'Arabian tribe' and Arabs as 'Jews on horseback', claiming that 'God never spoke except to an Arab' (p. 110). The biography of Muhammad Asad, or Leopold Weiss, who converted to Islam in Berlin in 1926 and chose to be buried in Granada in 1992, fits into the same pattern as the Hungarian Goldziher. Asad, the son of a Rabbi from Lvov in what is now the Ukraine, not only helped to draft the constitution of Pakistan and served as an ambassador for that country at the United Nations but he also completed one of the best and most erudite translations of the Qur'an into English. The rediscovery by black Africans of their Islamic roots is another fascinating, but better- known, story. All of which goes to show how far the status of Muslims has declined since the nineteenth and early twentieth century.There is perhaps one flaw, if that is the right word, in the author's thesis and he himself is dimly aware of it. The Jew was never feared as a member of a civilization that once posed a threat to the whole of Chris- tendom, but surely has a stronger claim to be the prototype of the essential Other, having inherited the 'sin of deicide', for which it was thought the Jewish race was condemned to wander the Earth. …
Uploads
Papers by Roger Boase