The roots of coexistence

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1991 by Miguel Cruz Hernandez

THE periods between 711 and 1086 AD in the Islamic territories of al-Andalus and between 1085 and 1370 in Christian Spain were golden ages of social and cultural coexistence. What religious and legal foundations were they based on?

Judaism never defined a social status for other religions, since until the Babylonian diaspora it considered itself the only monotheistic faith. Thereafter, when it lost its political independence, its own social status became identified with that of the Jewish people.

At first Christianity too had no status as an independent social entity. Saint Paul directed Christians to accept the Roman Empire, to pay taxes to it, obey its magistrates and observe its laws, holding that the power it exercised was God-given. It was only after the conversion of Constantine's day, when Christianity became the civic religion of the Empire, and the Empire was Christianized by the Church, that the tolerance early Christianity had shown was gradually eroded.

In the Middle Ages, Christians came to consider Jews as deniers of the faith because they had refused to regard Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah, and as deicides insofar as they were held collectively responsible for his death. As for Islam, medieval Christians at first considered it a fraud and its prophet, Muhammad, an imposter. This view was only gradually modified as a result of cultural coexistence on the Iberian peninsula.

Islam, on the other hand, took as a starting-point the fundamental unity of the Faith, as revealed to the first man, reiterated by all the prophets, and socially codified by divine messengers, notably by Moses in the Torah for the Jews and by Jesus in the Gospels for Christians. Muhammad was then sent in his turn because these religious laws had become distorted and were incomplete. For Muslims, Muhammad is the final messenger, the seal set on the work of the prophets, and the Qur'an is the true and definitive revelation of the Faith.

Muslims consequently considered Jews and Christians as People of the Book (Ahl al-Kitab), whose incomplete systems of belief nonetheless allowed them to know and venerate God, to understand and obey His commandments, and to merit eternal salvation.

People of the pact

Following the principles spelled out in the Qur'an, Islam gave full recognition to only one social grouping, the umma, the community of the faithful, whose members are theoretically equal. But the faith expanded into lands that were socially highly organized and inhabited largely by Christians and Zoroastrians, with Jewish and Buddhist minorities. Al-Andalus, with its Mozarabs and Jews, was one of these lands. All those who possessed a revealed Book and who agreed to a position of subordination by signing a pact became "tributaries". There was no legal problem where Christians and Jews were concerned. Zoroastrians, initially at least, were granted a similar status, even though they were not considered to have a revealed Book.

Legally speaking, the tributaries did not belong to the umma, but enjoyed protected status as dhimmis or "people of the pact", and were implicitly treated as the members of another society, which did not exist in political terms but whose religious structure assumed responsibility for administering the tolerated social rights.

The relationship between the umma and the ahl al-Kitab was based on the concept of a pact which could be either expressed or tacit. In the Christian context, the parties to the pact were, on the one hand, the Christian nobility and bishops, and on the other the caliph. The accord held good not just for the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus but also for those of the taifas, the petty kingdoms that flourished after the collapse of the caliphate.

When, from the ninth century on, the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula began to englobe sizeable Jewish and Islamic communities--the latter of which were known as mudejares--the Christian kings took up the Islamic policy of offering protected status. As the incarnation of the link between the different communities, the kings of Castile and Leon even assumed, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the title of "Lord of the Three Religions".

A unique social fabric

The way in which medieval Islamic society was organized does not easily lend itself to forms of class analysis practised by modern social science. In any case, the cohabitation of Muslims with dhimmis (Mozarabs and Jews) took different forms in the different social strata within each community, and the relationships that were established did not always exactly coincide with those prescribed by law.

Social cohabitation and cultural coexistence worked to the advantage of the Islamic aristocracy, the khassa, which consisted of the ruling family and the upper ranks of the military and civil authorities, and of the freedmen and clients of the monarch. The notables of Islamic society (a'yan)--men of learning, successful craftsmen, merchants and great land-owners--also benefited from the arrangement. The masses, on the other hand, found it hard to live alongside Mozarabs and Jews.