Islam's Spanish Eyes
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=entertainment/profile&id=1094149

"Caliphs and Kings: The Art and Influence of Islamic
Spain," a new show at the Smithsonian's Sackler
Gallery, has a few exquisite objects in it.

An ornamental silk brocade, covered in geometric
patterns, is one of the most gorgeous textiles I have
ever seen. It was woven by hand 600 years ago in the
last years of the Muslim enclave of Granada. It is so
pristine and perfect, however, that it looks like it
was made yesterday on the latest in computer looms.

A carved ivory perfume box, about as big around as a
coffee tin, was made 400 years before that, when
Cordoba's Muslim caliphate controlled almost all of
Spain. Its domed lid is hinged in ornate silver and
luxuriant foliage crawls across its entire surface. It
seems to celebrate the good things in life. A lovely
bit of Arabic verse runs under the half-sphere of its
top, letting the box speak for itself: "The sight that
I offer is the fairest of sights, the still firm
breast of a lovely young woman. . . . "

Despite these and a few other gems, however, this
exhibition isn't really about art. It is about
history. Guest curator Heather Ecker uses its objects
to open a small window onto a patch of the European
past most of us have barely glimpsed.

For centuries after its consolidation in the 750s of
our era, Islamic Spain -- known in Arabic as
al-Andalus -- had the richest culture, by far, of all
of Western Europe. The Christian north, still emerging
from the ruins of the fallen Roman Empire, could only
gape at the wonders found south of the Pyrenees. In
economy, technology, learning, cultural diversity and
artistic sophistication -- in literature, philosophy,
science, music, architecture, cuisine and all the
decorative arts -- there was nothing like Islamic
Spain. If the northerners at long last caught up in
the later Middle Ages, it had a lot to do with what
they had been able to beg, borrow, buy and steal from
their neighbors to the south.

This exhibition's 89 objects include works of
decorative art in cloth, stone, wood and ceramic as
well as manuscripts, astronomical instruments, maps
and many coins. All but a handful are from the
collection of the Hispanic Society in New York, which
agreed to this rare loan show in celebration of its
100th birthday. Though this is said to be the
country's finest collection of art from Islamic Spain,
it's still small and full of holes. (The exhibition
lacks any examples of the fantastic metalwork
developed by Spanish Muslims, for instance.) Shown
without loans from other institutions, the Hispanic
Society's holdings can provide only a hint of that
culture's surviving treasures. But for the purposes of
calling to mind the illustrious and complex history of
the Spanish Middle Ages, even an assortment of minor
objects can do the trick.

Staring at a vitrine full of old coins, for instance,
is not most art lovers' idea of a good time. But for
those with even a passing interest in Europe's past,
the coins in "Caliphs and Kings" are irresistible.
Anyone who has seen the coarse coinage of early
medieval Europe -- even when struck for such famous
leaders as Charlemagne or the German emperor Otto I --
will be impressed by the exquisite refinement of the
gold dinars minted in Islamic Spain in the 9th, 10th
and 11th centuries. When the nascent Christian
kingdoms of far northeastern Spain first try to copy
their neighbors' coinage -- in the years around 1050,
the dinar was the prestige currency for international
trade -- the results are laughably bad. The exquisite
Arabic calligraphy on the Cordoban coin becomes an
illegible blur. The northern mints couldn't hope to
rival the Islamic original; their goal was simply to
nod in its direction, so the world would know the
kinds of people they rubbed shoulders with. Even in
1215, when the Catholic king of Castile struck one of
the gold coins in this show, its Christian
inscriptions were entirely in Arabic: The pope is
invoked as "The Imam of the Christian faith." After
all, many of this king's most powerful allies, rivals,
vassals and subjects would have been brought up
speaking the language of the Koran.

Scholar Maria Rosa Menocal has argued for the thorough
interpenetration of medieval Spain's cultures. She
claims that Alfonso VI, the Christian king who
conquered Toledo in 1085, might have been literate
only in Arabic. He had spent years of exile in Toledo
when it was still Muslim. His legendary champion
Rodrigo Diaz, "El Cid", might have spoken Arabic. Like
many of Spain's medieval warriors, both Christian and
Muslim, he fought on both sides of the religious
divide; his famous nickname comes from the Arabic for
"lord." And an entire class of Christians, the
so-called Mozarabs, had long lived and worked in
Arabic, and would have read the Bible in it, too.

For the important Jewish communities of Muslim Spain,
Arabic was the language of culture, learning and daily
life. Hebrew was mostly reserved for sacred matters.
The great Jewish vizier Hasdai, first minister and
military chief for the Cordoban caliph Abd al-Rahman
III in the 940s, rose in the ranks through his superb
skills in Arabic composition. The famous Jewish sage
Moses Maimonides, born in Cordoba in 1135, wrote all
but one of his works in Arabic. The design of one of
the Hebrew bibles in the Sackler show is heavily
influenced by Islamic models, even though it was made
in Seville in 1472, more than 200 years after that
important Muslim city first fell into Christian hands.

In the years around 1400, when the Hispanic Society's
exquisite silk brocade was woven in Granada, the
Muslims had lost political control of all but that
tiny piece of southern Spain. But their artistic
prestige was still so great that that length of cloth
became one of the treasures of a Christian church,
where it was so carefully preserved that it's come
down to us almost unworn.

Two centuries earlier, it seems that almost every
member of a Christian royal house in Spain would have
been buried surrounded by Islamic silks. One fragment
of a burial cloth included in this show even has an
Arabic benediction woven into it -- the language alone
had yet to carry with it necessary echoes of an
offensive foreign faith.

The fertile mixing of cultures that happened in Iberia
was partly the result of the peculiarly laid-back
brand of Islam practiced by the Umayyad nobles who
first ruled it. They resisted the puritanical Islam of
some of their North African rivals, and reveled in the
pleasures of the body and the mind -- witness the
erotic verses on this show's ivory box, as well as the
love of Greek philosophy and science the Umayyads
helped spread north from Spain. (The show includes a
couple of the astronomical instruments known as
astrolabes that became an obsession among medieval
European intellectuals, after they borrowed them from
Islamic Spain.) They also took to heart the Prophet
Muhammad's notion that Christians and Jews -- the
other "Peoples of the Book" -- deserved special status
in any Muslim polity. Overall, though with occasional
exceptions, the Umayyads and their descendants tended
to profit from the cultures of their predecessors and
neighbors in Spain, rather than striving to stamp them
out.

The growing Christian kingdoms in Spain often followed
the example some Muslim rulers had set. This show
includes 10 beam-ends elaborately carved in the 13th
or 14th century for buildings in Toledo. They were
almost certainly made by Muslims living under
Christian rule. These "Mudejar" craftsmen set the
style -- a distinctly Islamic-flavored style -- for
many of the public works and private luxuries of
medieval Spain. There was plenty of ethnic friction,
even discrimination and persecution, but there was
also evident cross-fertilization. As late as 1400, the
crude baptismal font of a Toledan church seems to have
been made by Muslim ceramic workers -- now much less
skilled than their ancestors -- or by Christians so
deeply Arabized that they included Islamic talismans
in its decoration.

Things began to fall apart in the later Middle Ages,
especially after the Almohads, an intolerant Berber
dynasty, crossed Gibraltar to claim Islam's Spanish
holdings but eventually lost almost all of them.
Crusader popes and nobles and clerics from beyond the
Pyrenees who helped the local Christian rulers against
their Muslim rivals also encouraged an end to whatever
multiculturalism had survived. When Granada, last of
the Muslim outposts, finally surrendered to Ferdinand
and Isabella of Spain in 1492, the conquerors promised
to respect Iberia's 700-year tradition of cultural and
religious tolerance. Within three months they had
reneged, immediately expelling all unconverted Jews
and soon forbidding any Muslim practices as well.

By 1511, decrees were passed forbidding all things
Muslim, including even traditional Islamic dress, "so
that here and henceforth there will be no memory of
the things of the Moors, and they will act and live
like old Christians." The last ceramics in this
exhibition, dating from around that time and probably
made by forced converts from Islam, are far cruder
things than most of the earlier works on show. They
demonstrate how much Spain's Christian culture lost
through its attempts to purify itself.

CALIPHS AND KINGS: THE ART AND INFLUENCE OF ISLAMIC
SPAIN -- Through Oct. 17 at the Arthur M. Sackler
Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. 202-633-1000 or
www.asia.si.edu. Metro: Smithsonian. Open daily
10-5:30.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To know more about Spanish Muslims see:
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Park/6443/LatinAmerica/
and
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Park/6443/Europe/Spain/






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