Hello.
My name is Antonio Urquízar Herrera.
I am Professor of History at the History of Art
department in the Universidad
Nacional de Educacion a Distancia in Madrid, Spain.
I am part of the teaching staff
of the MOOC material culture of Islam in Europe.
I'm going to talk about writing and reading on Islamic
material culture in Europe.
The image on the screen
belongs to the manuscript of a book entitled Las
Antiguedades de las Ciudades de
Espana, a book published by the Spanish historian
Ambrosio de Morales
in 1575.
Morales was chronicler to King Felipe II.
He was some kind of father of archeology in Spain.
What we see here is a detail of a page of the manuscript
that he was preparing to send to press.
It is the very beginning of his very long description
of the ancient mosque of Cordoba.
As we can see the whole paragraph
is completely full of substitutions, amendments and crossing notes.
Of course, there are corrections in other parts of the manuscript,
that is usual when you are preparing it for the press.
But the extent of these corrections is not normal.
It does not happen in other parts of the manuscript.
It shows that Morales was particularly hesitating
while describing and explaining the mosque.
That description was particularly complicated to him.
He had a conscious concern as to the best way
to work his presentation of the mosque of Cordoba.
As I said before, Morales was chronicler to King Felipe
II he was writing at moment
of the biggest expansion of the Spanish Empire.
He was writing some decades after the Christian conquest of Granada
by the Catholic Monarchs, and he was contemporary
to the Morisco uprising in Granada.
That uprising that led to the final expulsion of the Moriscos
at the beginning of the 17th century.
What was he hesitating about?
The crossing out showed it very clearly we can have a look at them
from the top left to the right, and we can see, for instance,
how he changed the word superb for strange and famous.
And he had a lot of problems with that word, strange,
he was inserting it, deleting it inserting it away.
He was also hesitating about the use of awe inspiring
or
the references to how famous this building was.
That was one of the largest and most sumptuous and strangest buildings.
And then he changed that and he introduced also comments about
how the look of that building was very old and how
there was a lot of diversity in it.
But there were also another kind of
amendments in this text.
Strange
was a word that according to Sebastian de Covarrubias,
Dictionary of 1611 meant singular and extraordinary,
but also it referred to that which is not ours.
And this idea that this building was not completely
something belonging to us was something that moved
Ambrosio de Morales to make other kinds of amendments.
For instance, there was a sentence
where he was saying that the building peculiarities were due
to the building being a construction funded by the moors,
and because the two Islamic kings have founded it.
But then he crossed out these two uses of founded
and replaced them with built and erected.
Also, there were other amendments explicitly erasing the term mosque
when referring to the building's original use.
What we see here is that there are a lot of substitutions
and crossing outs
which are related to identity, to otherness, to belonging.
He was hesitating
about the use of words that were connected to those things.
And these hesitations are not far away
to what modern writing and reading on Islamic material
culture in Europe has shown, and this still shows.
Ambrosio de Morales
was marked by the existence of his time's cultural canons.
One of the most important was the classical canon.
The mosque was foreign to that canon
and he had problems with that, mostly because he wanted to praise
the building, and the mosque was not a Vitruvian building
oddity and diversity came from there.
But also the building was off the Christian canon.
Modern writing also works
under the shadow of a canon or sometimes of multiple canons.
Art history has been a long standing canon, not any anymore,
but it has been.
The divide between objects that could be studied
as works of art and any other kinds of objects
is not regent now. The great share of Islamic
material culture, was not central to the art history canon.
Textiles, for instance, calligraphy, metalwork as well.
Art history deals now with all kinds of objects
and other disciplines, such as cultural studies deal as well
with objects that used to be the reign of art history.
But in previous decades
we have seeing how art history marked
a divide there, and that it is still the thing that we can read now.
Also postcolonial studies and colonial studies
have been stressing identity and it has been a canon for decades now.
The relevant thing here is to acknowledge
the existence of the canon and to understand its impact.
Edward Said's Orientalism, a book from 1978,
almost 400 years after Morales was writing
that book has been by far the most influential
book in relation to the last decades interpretation
of the historical relations of Europe with Islam.
This is a book with many virtues,
a book that has changed scholarship in many ways.
A very relevant one is the acknowledgment
of the dependencies of academic writing
with a larger political and cultural context.
Orientalism has created a framework that has been largely criticized
in relation to medieval and early modern Europe,
but the framework still runs.
Above all
Said's claims that Napoleon's invasion of Egypt was, quote,
the first time the Orient was revealed to Europe
in the materiality of its text, languages and civilization has been
an statement particularly relevant.
Since this meeting of cultures have previously taken place elsewhere
in Europe,
most notably in the Iberian Peninsula, in Venice and in the Balkans,
criticism of Said's claim has led to a detailed analysis of the contact
between Christianity and Islam in medieval and early modern world.
As John Tolan has pointed out, the pre-modern vision of Islam
in the West must not be automatically categorized
in terms of its Saidian orientalism
avant la lettre.
To address this issue, its paramount
to assess the validity of defining oll pre 19th century relationships
between European and Islamic culture in terms of colonization.
In general, the balance of power between pre-modern dominant
and subaltern discourses was very different from today's.
In this regard, many authors have argued that
while a colonial explanation may be used to discuss the Crusades,
it does not apply to the case of Christian dwelling under
Islamic political rule,
or to Christian living in fear of being invaded by Islam,
since they were in a position of inferiority.
Among other problems
that have been pointed out in Said's discourse
one is that his view of a monolithic Western is comparable
to his critique on the Western's monolithic view on the East.
Could we also speak of a certain occidentalism here?
Maybe.
the lack of nuances is very important,
and it is even more acute in relation to medieval
and early modern sources,
as Morales hesitations show.
One example of the need
to not apply
plane versions of postcolonial theory to medieval and early modern
situations can be seen
in the case of the Christian conquest of Islamic Spain.
Even if we accept that the process of cultural colonisation took place
as a part of the Christian conquest of al-Andalus,
it is nonetheless evident that there is no direct equivalence
between this process and the modern relationship between
Europe and Islam.
The work of many authors,
Mercedes García Arenal, Miguel Angel de Bunes, among them
has clearly demonstrated that this difference is due to the
particular conditions of alterity experienced in the Peninsula.
The Muslims were the other within and this is of central importance
if we are to understand the process of Christian conquest
and the moriscos subsequent situation.
Also, it is of central importance if we are to understand
the moriscos material culture and architecture.
As has been said, Said himself stated in his preface
to the Spanish edition of Orientalism that the relationship
between Spain and Islam could not be merely characterized as imperial.
Identities is a matter central to our times.
It is so in politics and culture and in Academy.
Identity offers a research angle
which is extraordinarily rich
and one that is relevant to society.
Concepts as otherness and hybridity that depend upon
the previous idea of identity have become central as well.
And there are other interesting angles
connected to material culture as materiality
or the global circulation of things
but often they appear in relation to identity.
Identity seems like
just the right angle when dealing with Islamic material culture
in Europe. However, identity is a very tricky subject,
one that tends very easily to erasement of nuances
and very commonly to the projection
of modern ideas and modern expectations to the past,
as we have seen while checking Said with Morales.
So I would say that it wouldn't be bad
if as Morales did in front of the mosque of Cordoba
we would also stop for a while and hesitate about the use
of all these ideas before sending our manuscripts to the press.