Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [48]
An infinity of traps and entanglements lay at the heart of convivencia. Sexual temptations across the caste boundaries were the most dangerous and contaminating. However, we should read the law codes and prohibitions less as a representation of what actually happened, and more as an effort to prevent the dangers of uncontrolled proximity. Islam never prohibited marriage between Muslim men and women of the other castes, while concubines or slaves were used sexually by men without regard to their faith. By law the children of Muslim men were supposed to follow the faith of their father. But the realities of human life, in the past as in the present, did not always correlate with the prescriptions of the law. All those instances that I have cited are from a period when the very concept of a mixed society had come to seem dangerous in the extreme, and these crimes were, I suspect, as much metaphors of the risks implicit in godless mixing as a serious attempt to prohibit actual conduct.43 In the minds of the pure in spirit only an absolute separation or isolation of Christian, Jew, and Muslim could achieve what they sought to accomplish by writ and the threat of punishment.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE CITY, TOWN, OR VILLAGE IN AL-ANDALUS was divided along invisible lines. Each community had its own zone, which outsiders might enter at their peril. Equally, through a fragile social consensus, other areas would be common ground: these might be a marketplace, a road, places where water was drawn or where clothes were washed.44 In Islamic Spain, the tribal element was added to the presence of the non-Muslim castes, and that too could provoke violence. There was a word in Arabic, nefra’a, to describe the “sudden panicky ‘snapping’ ” that breaks the peace of the suq.45 Convivencia could continue only so long as the physical or cultural barriers were not breached.46 Then there were also episodes of heightened religious or social tension, in which the sense of division between Christians, Jews, and Muslims was accentuated. But the daily practice of life was closer to what Américo Castro described as “integralism.”47 In defining “integralism” Castro fell back on cultural stereotypes for both Christians and Muslims.48 “The Moslem feels himself in things, the Hispano Christian feels things in himself, in his person.” For Castro, Muslims were poets and dreamers, Christians were activists: “The Spaniard speaks of himself, of his body, of his pleasures, and of his afflictions. Everything is justified and takes on value the moment it is referred to his person.”49 He found it hard to define how these two opposites interacted. But applied to these shared communities of Al-Andalus, with their endless internal boundaries and barriers which crisscrossed and intersected with one another, the idea of integralism makes sense. Cordoba or Seville, with its hundreds of districts and quarters, was a patchwork.
Arab, Berber, Christian, and Jewish zones were juxtaposed, their boundaries partly permeable and partly not.50 Linguistically certainly, and to a degree culturally, the various peoples of the cities were integral in the limited sense defined by Castro, but they also remained separate and isolated within their separate groups. Religion was often not the sole determinant: Arabs and Berbers, both Muslim, remained apart in their clans, and frequently fought each other. Christians and Jews stayed within the bounds allocated to them by the laws of Islam, but even within their communities there were distinct gradations of wealth and status.
The success of convivencia depended on this segmentation, on a settled social structure that permitted multiplicity. However, no effective grand theory has emerged from the long history of Al-Andalus after 711, and to talk of convivencia as a fixed and settled entity, as Castro did, is a mistake. It was a structure of concession in which