Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [50]
Each individual understood the stories in his or her own way. The process is perhaps explained as “dissemination,” in the way that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida intends the term. In his view, the way that language is used means that each use—dissémination—disrupts any possibility of fixed or settled meanings. Every time a word is employed it generates a new and subtly different accretion. So the use of language is endlessly destabilizing: “The force and form of its disruption explode the semantic horizon.” There is no limit or end to this process of transformation, no telling what its effect might be. Derrida calls it “an irreducible and generative multiplicity.”52
In its historical context, the martyrs of Cordoba movement (like the myths of the hero king Pelayo) provided a “generative multiplicity.” As we shall see, one martyrdom stimulated another, not through any obvious mechanism but apparently spontaneously. Yet the spontaneity was conditioned by the way in which the seed of martyrdom took root, and by the way in which the rapidly evolving legend of the martyrs was disseminated. What becomes significant here is not the fine detail of the events in Cordoba but their mythopoeic potential. These symbolic acts were resonant and effective in the Iberian peninsula long after the precise historical context in which they had emerged had disappeared. By that point they had become generic, and applicable in a multitude of circumstances. Perhaps symbolic acts, myth, and legend are more potent in some cultures than in others. Iberia (like the Balkans and the Levant) seems, over the centuries, to have been highly susceptible to these influences, where the dead past enters the living present. This process is evident in the stories of the fall of the Visigothic kingdom that were disseminated and formed the foundation myth of Christian Spain.
The ease of the conquest and the speed with which many native Christians converted to Islam led to the growth of a flourishing Arabic culture and to the decay of Christian society. In the eyes of zealous Christians, only self-sacrifice could redeem what Christian vice had permitted in the first place. To make the self-destruction of the martyr more plausible, the horrific consequences of the fall had to be accentuated. This was not easy. Al-Andalus, with some exceptions, fulfilled its Qur’anic obligations to its non-Muslim minorities. Jews and Christians paid the poll tax and were allowed to exercise their faiths. The Christian martyr movement of the mid–ninth century was a protest against increasing assimilation, rejecting the slow decay of both their culture and their faith. Among Christians in the great cities of Al-Andalus, Arabic had replaced Latin as the sophisticated language of culture, while an amalgam of Arabic, Romance dialect, and Berber became a language of home and the street.53 A rich young Cordovan, Alvarus, became the biographer of Eulogius, himself the recording angel for the Christian martyrs of Cordoba. Alvarus conveyed a deep sense of loss in Christian culture.
My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the works of Mohammadan theologians and philosophers not in order to refute them, but to acquire correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be found who reads the Latin Commentaries on Holy Scriptures? Who is there that studies the Gospels, the prophets, the Apostles? Alas, the young Christians who are most conspicuous for their talents have no knowledge of any literature or language save the Arabic … The pity of it! Christians have forgotten their own tongue, and scarce one in a thousand can be found to be able to compose in fair Latin to a friend.54
Alvarus observed two attitudes toward Islam among contemporary Mozarabes. He was not talking about those souls, the muwallid—Christians who had converted to Islam. The majority of Christians recognized the power of Islamic culture,