Moorish expulsion of the Moors  |
| Manuel Reyes Mate |
Manuel Reyes Mate
philosopher and researcher at the Consejo Superior Scientific Research (CSIC)
Chapter 8 of Don Quixote tells how the knight liberator of captive ladies to a duel challenge Biscay, taken by jealous jailer. Suddenly, the narrator interrupts the story because it is over the text he is serving as an "inspiration." Then we realize that the story of the gentleman is not an invention of the author, but a copy or translation of an existing text. As the narrator does not want to leave us in suspense, is going to Toledo in search of old papers in case it with one that follows the story. There he finds one, in Arabic, which tells how the fight ends. Its author is Hamete Cide, name un-Christian.
Cervantes's gesture is highly significant. When he writes that First Party, 40 years ago when Philip II commanded to destroy the books in Arabic and has been forbidden to speak gibberish and use their costumes and rituals. At the precise moment that incubated the expulsion of the Moors, he puts the proscribed language as the inspiration of the text that follows the adventures of the celebrated gentleman. With this act was not intended to restore the culture that had disappeared, but undermine the hegemonic discourse of traditionalism and place as a hallmark of the contemporary memory of the forgotten.
In 1609, Felipe III decreed the expulsion of the Moors. With it, Spain is determined to erase from his memory a historical era in which Arab-Muslim as part of its geography and because of this, of Europe.
Viewing television images of fanatics shouting in Arabic or reading the clichés about the Muslim fundamentalism unrepentant, We have to be incomprehensible Moorish world prestige that pays Cervantes memory. We say that thanks to the Arab translators of Toledo and Naples, West recovered the Greek culture. Is inaccurate, because these translators also interpreted, and what Europe learned was not what Aristotle said, but how we understand the Avicenna, Averroes or the Persian al-Farabi. "The philosopher par excellence, Paris XI and XII century," says the historian Alain de Libera-were Arabs, not the Greeks. " To be modern was to be Averroist. It was they who raised the need to distinguish between faith and reason, a distinction on which could be built then illustrated and secular modernity.
The memory of the expulsion of the Moors for 400 years should give rise, on the one hand, a political reflection on our collective identity built on exclusion, in this case, the absence something that was so characteristic as Moorish and, secondly, to review the clichés about Islam that has made West.
As regards the political debate, the German sociologist Helmut Dubiel notes a shift in the approach of collective identities. Is occurring, says, "gradual rejection of triumphalist reading of national history." By knowing what the history is the negation of the other, put in solfa national pride, that is, the satisfaction of belonging to a story with many heroes, martyrs, flags and anthems. Then appears a new political, sensitive to a history built violence based on exclusion. "They are rather, he says, the guilt shared in common throughout their history they have created human beings in an existential sense of belonging, as determined by repressed guilt." What that means is that the secret of the common bond would not be in the blood, or on earth or in the language, or religion, or heroic deeds, but in the silent complicity. It is, of course, the case of modern Germany and that could be an example to follow. The theoretical challenge to nationalism is evident.
The revision of stereotypes that make up our cultural imagination of "moro" requires discarding all these discourses that associate Muslim fundamentalism and Arabic medieval or inability to science. It has already been noted how the seed of an autonomous and secular conception of the world put Averroism. An example of the distortion that the Christian West has made the Muslim world gives us the fate of Albert of Cologne. This scholar, teacher of Thomas Aquinas, who recently wanted to know "what Latinos hold", ie Christian teachers, was actually a scientist Arabs. In the early twentieth century, the Church made a saint, St. Albert the Great, to have a patron saint scientists. The Arab scientist happened to be the pattern of modern science, as Max Weber, are matters of European genius ("Protestant and Germanic"). History disavows.
For their blunders and our prejudices are pushing the Arab-Islamic world to the corner of fundamentalism. The memory of the fourth anniversary of the expulsion of the Moors could be the opportunity to acknowledge what we owe and draw up a record of what we have lost that tragic decision. There is no reason for celebration, but for the memory.
