Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [211]
49. Lacan said, “Doubling a noun through a mere juxtaposition of two terms … a surprise is produced by the unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning: the image of twin doors symbolizing, with the solitary confinement offered Western man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative which he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation.” See Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977, p. 151.
50. Dr. Dane Kusic suggests an essential difference between the fundamental paradigms of Christendom and Islam: “Rather than functioning in a way of Western dichotomies and strict definitions of mutually exclusive antipodes, Muslim religious and other terminologies often function in a way of synecdoches, where pars pro toto can be supplanted by the totum pro parte and vice versa.” He has developed his model in part from Pierre Bourdieu’s outline of the multiple and overlapping uses of the Kabyle home in Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16, trans. Richard Nice, London: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 96 sqq. See Dane Kusic, “Discourse on Three Teravih Namazi-s in Istanbul: An Invitation to Reflexive Ethnomusicology,” chapter 7, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, 1996, http://research.umbc.edu/~dkusic1/chapter7.html.
Part Two
CHAPTER 3: AL-ANDALUS
1. In his Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), reprinted in Richard Ford, Granada: Escritos con dibujos inéditos del autor, Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra, 1955.
2. But he also recognized the essence of the unforgiving terrain: “But where Spaine has water and Valleis there she is extraordinarily fruitfull”; James Howell, Instructions for Foreign Travell, 1650.
3. Cited in Glubb, Conquests, p. 355.
4. See W. Montgomery Watt and Pierre Cachia, A History of Islamic Spain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp. 9–10, on the alternative possibilities of expansion.
5. The Christian Mozarabic Chronicle and the Continuationes Byzantia-Arabica date from a few decades after the conquest. The first Arabic sources are later. See Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 710–97. Ron Barkai makes the valid point that Byzantia-Arabica is less negative toward the Muslims in its language, and many of the more positive passages do not appear or have been altered in the Mozarabic Chronicle. See Barkai, Cristianos y Musulmanes, pp. 24–5.
6. Tarif gave his name to the first Muslim town in Spain, built close to the former Roman citadel of Julia Traduce.
7. See the Continuatio Isidoriana Hispania ad annum 754, commonly called the Mozarabic Chronicle, trans. Colin Smith, in Smith, Christians, vol. I, pp. 12–13. This chronicle is the first version of the story.
8. See the Chronicle of Alfonso III of the Asturias, written in 883: “Because they had abandoned the Lord, and had not served him in righteousness and truth, they were abandoned by the Lord and were not allowed to dwell in the promised land [terram desideratam]”; ibid., pp. 24–9.
9. See the Historia pseudo-Isidoriana; ibid., pp. 14–16. This twelfth-century text introduced the trope of illicit sexuality into the foundation myth of Spain. In the Mozarabic Chronicle (754), the moral flaw of the king (Roderick) was that he “violently usurped” the crown; ibid., pp. 10–11.
10. The two connected in a confused and uncertain fashion in what, since Julia Kristeva, we have called “intertextuality.” My suggestion here is that Roderick’s story is depicted, by a succession of clerical authors, in markedly Davidic terms.
11. The Estoria de España was written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, when this mythic description of the conquest reached an extraordinary efflorescence.