Hello.
My name is Antonio Urquízar Herrera.
I am professor of Art History at the History of Art department
of the Universidad
Nacional de Educación 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 Islamic heritage and identity
construction, the case of Spain.
I would like to start posing a couple of questions
and I will try to answer them later.
How were the medieval
Islamic buildings of al-Andalus perceived and early modern Spain?
and how have those interpretations impacted the modern views
of those monuments?
In the very beginning of the
conquest of the Islamic
parts of Spain by the Christians troops coming from the north
those buildings were interpreted as medieval trophies.
The perception of Islamic architecture in terms of cultural
memory was established in 13th century historical literature
with descriptions of the monuments capture
as spoils of war in Cordoba and Seville.
This textual response was perpetuated in the narratives
of the conquest of Granada. Trophies that evidenced
the victory of Christian Spain over Islam.
The more important those monuments, those
Islamic monuments were, the bigger the victory was.
At the arrival of the humanist idea of heritage
in the late 15th and early 16th centuries
there were important changes in that interpretation.
The humanist look at Roman ruins and the new ideas of history
changed the way Early Modern people related to the monuments of the past.
Monuments no longer spoke of the others, but they mainly
started speaking about the owners identity.
Monuments spoke of our past.
Monuments speak of ourselves.
This new situation created a certain
uneasiness toward Islamic monuments in Spain.
How could Christian Spain relate to monuments
that stood for the memory of the Islamic part
in the peninsula, Islamic past in the peninsula?
How could that be negotiated in a context
where all Christian countries in Europe wanted to connect with both
the memories of ancient Rome and the memories of early Christianity?
We can link these
need to intervene in the memories associated to Islamic buildings
in Spain to Pierre Nora's ideas about the Lieux de mémoire.
Islamic mosques and palaces
started to serve as Christian realms of memory.
For that, for doing that, their symbolic content had to be transformed
and historical writing was used to achieve this.
16th century
and 17th century interest in history, archeology and city descriptions
helped the resignification of these buildings.
History writers as Ambrosio Morales, Alonso Morgado, Rodrigo Caro,
Pablo de Céspedes or Francisco Bermúdez Pedraza deployed narrative
seeking for the christianization of the monuments.
Fake narratives pretending a Christian or classical pre-Islamic
origin were invented to do so.
In many cases, they were
pretending that those Islamic buildings
as the tower of the Giralda in Sevilla
as the mosque of Cordoba or even the Alhambra
palace had Phoenician or Roman origins.
There were connections to the Christian Martyrs
that died
under the Roman ruling, or under Islamic ruling in Andalusia.
That happened in Cordoba in Seville. in Granada, but also in many
historical accounts related to minor Islamic remains in other cities.
Also, subsequent interconnections
between local, national and ecclesiastical histories
favoured the frauded reading that turned Islamic trophies into antiquarian
evidence of ancient Christianity in the peninsula.
The integration of Islamic monuments in the history of Christian
Spain was pursued by all these means.
Proof of the significance of this early modern
historiographical appropriation is that it involve in a variety of ways
the most prominent antiquarians and historians
that were active in Spain in that period.
It also identified these Islamic buildings as core evidence to be used
in the debates that shaped the early development of archeology
and had a central role
in the controversial historical debate that arosed
concerning the origin of the nation and its ecclesiastical
history.
One relevant
final question is how those early modern interpretations
have impacted modern views of the Islamic monuments of Spain.
A variety of different layers have arrived
since that those modern those early modern interpretations.
The romantic touristic gaze have defined
the exotic interpretation that still works very strongly.
The postcolonial gaze, stressing the multiculturalism
and hybridism and has in a way connected to the romantic gaze,
changing the balances, but keeping the exoticism at the very center.
That seems to be quite
a difference from the early modern interpretations we have seen before.
However, the situation is not that different.
Identity, otherness and belonging keep being at the very center
of the interpretations and the early modern ideas
about the Christian nature of these Islamic buildings have not vanished.
It is still part of a lively debate
about the position in Spanish identity.
Nobody says today that the mosque of Cordoba was founded by
Noah's grandchildren, as they used to say at the 17th century.
But the bishop of Cordoba
still pretends that although built by Muslims,
the architectural style of the mosque is fundamentally
Byzantine and therefore Christian.
Something similar could be said in relation to the term mudéjar,
which is one of the most successful artistic
labels in contemporary art history.
It was created only in the 19th century, and that concept of mudéjar
refers to Islamic forms and techniques used in Christian art.
But it is also a way to support the notion that
buildings wich were Islamic in appearance
could be Spanish and Christian in nature.