Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [49]
But it is also true that, with the qualifiers I have already indicated, first Islamic and then Christian states in the peninsula successfully accommodated minority populations. For the first three centuries, Christians coexisted with Muslims in Al-Andalus, and for the second three centuries, the Christian states of the north came to pragmatic arrangements with their Muslim minorities. However, there were two periods of great stress in which compromise was deliberately abrogated. One relates to Christians under challenge as a minority within an Islamic state, and the other to an embattled Muslim community within a Christian state. The first took place in the ninth century in Muslim Cordoba, where Christians deliberately sought martyrdom to redeem their early failure to resist Islam. The second was in Christian Spain throughout the sixteenth century, with its first epicenter in the old Kingdom of Granada. Here the victorious Christians decreed a radical policy of mass conversion. It ended with the ethnic cleansing of all the descendants of the “Moors.” The first episode—the martyrs of Cordoba—I shall discuss now. What came to be called the Morisco problem appears in the succeeding chapters. But both, I believe, revealed the consequences of fracturing the unspoken assumptions that had allowed convivencia to work. Here the lessons for the Balkans and the Levant today are very clear.
The Muslim population in Al-Andalus grew very rapidly during the first two centuries after the conquest. In the eighth century, Muslims were a small and isolated garrison. As they intermarried with the local population the number of Muslims by birth grew steadily. But the bulk of the growing Muslim community were not immigrants from North Africa or their children, but converts from Christianity. There were both individual conversions and the adherence of whole families, and perhaps even whole towns and districts, but there was no pressure for forced conversion. Christians and Jews were allowed to practice their faith but they were marginal, outside the main body of society in both economic and social terms. The demands that Islam made on its adherents were no greater than those of Christianity, and conversion was an attractive option, for non-Muslims were second-class citizens within Islamic society. As we have seen, in practice many of the more rigorous restrictions on Jews and Christians were not enforced, but the sense of inferiority, whether enforced by law or not, did not disappear.
In the mid–ninth century, however, there was an attempt among the more zealous Christians to arrest the erosion in their numbers and to stress the separation between Christians and Muslims. The Christian martyrdoms in Cordoba quickly formed what literary critics would term a topos, an easily recognized point at which a historical incident expanded to assume legendary or mythical proportions. These events for Christians came to epitomize the inevitable hostility between the two cultures. They magnified the antithesis between them so as to dramatize and laud the cultural identity of one community, and to demonize the other. Over time, and by accretion, these tales of a historic reality were transmuted into a potent subliminal sense of a fearsome, dangerous, alien power—a complex image built upon biblical prophecy, upon the shadowy character of the Antichrist, and upon a daily experience of the Muslim presence that seemed to exemplify all of these elements. In this mythopoeia, the events—the Muslim conquest and the martyrdoms—are added like new meat to a stockpot.51 They strengthened the mixture, blending, and eventually merging, into the simmering. In Christian theory this was, indeed, the wonderfully reinvigorating effect of the blood of the martyrs, as it spread and revived the Christian community.