Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [54]
Recemundus exemplified the larger numbers among Christians who were determined to function effectively within an Islamic society. He compiled an elaborate Calendar of Cordoba, which combined astronomical, agricultural, and Christian liturgical details. He presented a copy to Abd al-Rahman’s successor, Hakam II. In fact he prepared two versions. The longer contained details of all the martyrs of Cordoba and their feast days and was used by Christians. On the copy presented to the caliph, these details were tactfully (and prudently) omitted. In essence,
the realities of Islamic rule ultimately favoured this kind of compromise … a radical Church appealed to some Christians, but such a Church could only become a focus of more violence. It could not maintain the stable relationship between government and subject population that would allow Christians to go about their daily lives in peace.62
The martyrs movement, attempting to promote a violent reaction among Muslims, used arguments that had already been developed in the Levant. One of the martyrs had come to Spain from the Syrian monastery where John of Damascus had written his polemic against Islam. Many of the same themes were introduced into the Cordoban diatribe against Islam. The Prophet Mohammed was accused of being sexually promiscuous, and ensnared by a preoccupation with the body. Paul Alvarus, who wrote the life of Eulogius, contrasted Christ, who preached peace, with Mohammed, who taught men to fight; while Christ promoted chastity, Mohammed, the glutton for all forms of pleasure, practiced incest.63 All the long catalog of by now traditional insults was offered up:
Muslims are puffed up with pride, languid in the enjoyments of fleshly acts, extravagant in eating, greedy usurpers in the acquisition of possessions … without honour, without truth, unfamiliar with kindness or compassion … fickle, crafty, cunning and indeed not halfway but completely befouled in the dregs of every impurity, deriding humility as insanity, rejecting chastity as though it were filth, disparaging virginity as though it were the uncleanness of harlotry, putting the vices of the body before the virtues of the soul.64
This led naturally to the assertion that Mohammed was a precursor of the Antichrist; in later polemics he became the Antichrist himself.
This wild rhetoric echoed the assaults that Christians had made against the pagan emperors of Rome. These had reminded their own adherents of the evil against which they were struggling. More important, they concealed a weakness in the case for godly martyrdom. For Islam did not demand that Christians worship false idols. Many Muslim scholars were even reluctant to accept converts from Christianity, arguing that they polluted Islam. One scholar, Ibn Haddah, wrote, “They say that temptations will come with the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] and they will be due to them.”65 Although marriage between a Muslim man and a non-Muslim woman was not forbidden, it was seen as fraught with spiritual danger. A Christian or Jewish wife would be a source of instability and corruption in a Muslim household, for she would inevitably be tempted to lead her children from the true path of Islam.66 In this some Islamic jurists and the Christian Alvarus were in agreement: separation was better than any form of contact.
However, in Cordoba