“What I wanted to say and continue to say is what I believe to be the reality: Portugal and Spain have roots that are not exclusively European.” —José Saramago

Milan Kundera has spoken succinctly about Miguel Saavedra de Cervantes’s legacy in the formulation of the canon of the European novel. Limitations of space forestall any attempt to go into extended discussion of his many incisive and provocative ideas. What I’ve been able to gather from his articles and interviews may be summarised, simplistically, in the brief statement that Kundera considers Don Quixote the seminal text of the European novel because Cervantes takes “the world as ambiguity,” where one is “obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths”.

Cervantes’s main contribution was to create in the form of the novel a hospitable space where a “welter of contradictory truths” could coexist without vying for supremacy. The novel’s purpose is — or should be — to present the bad, the good, and the ugly without editorial comment or judgement. The problem is that such expression is predicated on the freedom of speech. What if portrayal of the uglier visage, the ghastly underbelly of reality led one to incarceration or, worse, outright death? Or what, precisely, would be the fate of one writing in early 17th-century Spain, with minions of the ghastly Inquisition — established in 1478 by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile to ensure the orthodoxy of Muslim and Jewish converts — breathing down his neck? It is ironic that Kundera’s novels had themselves been the victim of Czech censorship and his surrealist contemporary Záviš Kalandra was executed for his outspokenness.

Kundera’s perception of the nature and function of the novel as a meeting ground of contraries is exactly right. However, the question begs to be asked: what circumstances created in Cervantes the inevitable need to perceive the world as “ambiguity”, to make the novel don a dissimulative mantle in order to express its conflicting truths? Why is it that Don Quixote dwells on the dietary habits of its characters? Why should it be necessary to portray Dulcinea del Toboso as having “the best hand at salting pork”? Why it makes Ricote — a Morisco — “who had so ardently defended the liberty of conscience he was able to practice during his brief stay in Germany, to praise Philip III and his gallarda resolución — the ‘illustrious resolution’ — which decreed the massive expulsion of Ricote’s race”? In other words, if ‘deconstructed’ and stripped of historical context, what would Dulcinea del Toboso’s dexterity in “salting pork” signify?

On the writer’s use of coded language to present his contemporary reality

Cervantes’s milieu was rife with ambiguity, paradoxes and ironies. The very opening of Don Quixote throws the dizzying question of identity of el verdadero autor (the real author) into sharp relief. Yet neither Kundera nor other mainstream Western critics have felt it necessary to talk about this milieu in their investigations of the origins and the nature of this, Europe’s first modern, indeed, “meta-novel”. They show absolutely no awareness of peninsular history between 711, when the Muslims crossed the strait of Gibraltar into Visigothic Spain, and their final expulsion in 1609. In the intervening centuries they had wrought such overwhelming changes in every aspect of Spanish life that it assumed a character entirely different from the rest of Europe. Shouldn’t all this have contributed to Cervantes’s awareness of his world as a “welter” of staggering contradictions?

After all, Cervantes and his creation didn’t just step out of nowhere. The Western novel, whatever it was, could scarcely match the genius of Don Quixote, not even Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza. Written in 1528, 87 years before Don Quixote’s first part appeared on the scene, Delicado’s ‘novel-in-dialogue’ is also rich in culinary delights, for its protagonist Lozana, a Jewish converso, “has a flair for cooking Morisco specialities. […] But this beautiful Lozana, born in Córdoba, seems ‘Moorish’ [Muslim] as well. Her name is Aldonza Alarosa”, the second part of which derives from the Arabic al-‘ars (“bride”). Whether Cervantes or Delicado, their work requires some knowledge of its historical context to fully appreciate its many layers of meaning and allusions, above all its contradictions that necessitated such obliquity. “We must,” as Luce López-Baralt cautions “read this Spanish literature of the Siglo de Oro astutely — and with some suspicion — for its black humour demands the careful and attentive reading of virtual code-breakers”; otherwise, for instance, when Pablos in Francisco de Quevedo’s 1604 picaresque novel El Buscón (The Swindler) says that his mother is “descended from the litany”, we wouldn’t know that “he is speaking of his scorned lineage, for when the converts — both Muslim and Jewish — were baptised, they often chose the most pious names of Christianity: San Pablo (St Paul), Santa María (St Mary), San Juan (St John), de la Cruz (of the Cross), de Jesús (of Jesus), Rosario (Rosary)”.

It is not that Don Quixote cannot be read outside its historical context. But if read with the knowledge of the relentlessly repressive climate of the Iberian peninsula in the 15th through 17th centuries, it will add greater poignancy and value to Kundera’s argument. Above all, it will show how an accomplished writer confronts history, creatively manipulates it and, in the end, quite transcends it in a stunning work of narrative art. Rosa María Menocal calls “poetry … as an act of history”, but by “poetry” she means all aesthetic forms, including visual.

Much of what has appeared — the examples, the argument, the explanation — in the piece on Cervantes in the April 3 edition of Books&Authors need not be revisited here as the material in question has been dealt with thoroughly years ago in the work of, among others, López-Baralt (‘The Legacy of Islam in Spanish Literature’), Menocal (lectures, articles, and books, pre-eminently The Ornament of the World), and L.P. Harvey.

Cervantes’s milieu was rife with ambiguity, paradoxes and ironies. The very opening of Don Quixote throws the dizzying question of identity of el verdadero autor (the real author) into sharp relief. Yet neither Kundera nor other mainstream Western critics have felt it necessary to talk about this milieu in their investigations of the origins and the nature of this, Europe’s first modern, indeed, “meta-novel”.

The origins of the incomparable cultural achievements of medieval Spain have remained a contested and a highly politicised field all along even among scholars; some have gone so far as to call its intercultural harmony, The Convivencia a “myth”. However some others, mainly scholars of Andalusian medievalism, have acknowledged the debt Spain — and by extension, Europe — owes to Muslims in many fields of human activity, from agriculture to philosophy, and everything in between. They have also spoken exhaustively and eloquently about Cervantes’s use of coded language to present his contemporary reality.

In many ways, the Muslim culture of al-Andalus, if not entirely unique, is still significantly different from its counterpart in other geographies where conquering Muslims settled for good. I hesitate to call it ‘Islamic’ or ‘Arab’, as it is usually called, because of the religious overtones implicit in the former and the unmistakable pointer to ‘ethnicity’ in the latter. It was a secular culture whose main impulse came from the incoming Muslims but it went further than the mosque to engulf the gamut of styles of living which may or may not be strictly Islamic; and these Muslims were not all Arabs. For one thing, the newcomers were themselves a mix of ethnicities (Arab, Berber, etc.,), for another, as time wore on, appreciable numbers of Spanish Catholics had converted to Islam.

At least among some Western scholars, the influence of Muslim literature, arts, sciences, philosophy, Sufism, etc., on Spain is no longer in dispute. However, contemporary Muslims often overlook that Spanish culture evolved as a synthesis of what all the three monotheistic communities of the peninsula were able to bring to it, though its predominant element and ethos was unmistakably Muslim. This fact may appear somewhat paradoxical in the face of the Christian Reconquesta and the ferocious zeal with which it was pursued. Surely, even as the Christians continued to adopt Muslim culture in many of its manifestations in their social and aesthetic life, the religious and political tensions between the two religious communities didn’t evaporate. Nonetheless, this did not, generally, vitiate the process of cultural assimilation. The spirit of tolerance, enshrined in the oft-quoted lines of the Sufi poet Ibn Arabi, seems to have characterised their interaction. Menocal, after reproducing the same lines in Michael Sells’s translation (given below) as evidence of this spirit, observes that it “does evoke the Andalusian moment and its ability to hold together a series of contradictory truths, to create societies with all sorts of imperfections but which, nonetheless, did provide the time and place where the three notoriously fractious children of Abraham somehow managed not only to live together but — more importantly — to build buildings and write poetry that could not have been written if they had lived without each other”.

Marvel,
a garden among the flames!

My heart can take on
any form:
for gazelles in a meadow,
a cloister for monks,

For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka‘ba for the circling pilgrim,
the tables of the Toráh,
the scrolls of the Qur’án.

I profess the religion of love.
Wherever its caravan turns
along the way, that is the belief
the faith I keep.

As for taqiyya (dissimulation), the guarantees given to Muslims at the time of the surrender of Granada in 1492 didn’t take long to be revoked. The Inquisition was already active well before the formal annulment of the terms of the Capitulation.

Faced with the stark choice between conversion to Catholic faith and expulsion or death, many Muslims immigrated to North Africa, but many more had no desire to abandon their ancestral homeland, being mostly indigenous Catholic converts to Islam already for centuries. The only way left to avoid expulsion or death was to convert, but even as they did so, they secretly continued practicing Islam. They were the Morisco, clandestine Muslims, never above suspicion of orthodox Christians who considered them insincere and, hence, crypto-Muslims. Eventually, the suspicion led to their expulsion in 1609.

The Morisco made many compromises to ensure permanence of their stay in their homeland; however, grave doubts about the shar‘i status of their clandestine existence persisted, so much that they were prompted to seek a fatwa from a mufti who was then living in Oran. Surprisingly, as Harvey points out, the mufti allowed “for the relaxation of the strict rules and precepts of Islam. There was virtually nothing which the Muslims could not do, so long as they were under duress”, and sincerely denied in their heart what they professed outwardly. They could bow to images in Christian churches, eat pork, drink wine, and “if forced to do so … even deny their faith”. But none of this helped.

The Morisco have themselves recorded the sad story of their last days in Spain in what is called Aljamiado literature. It was written in one or the other Romance languages, but with Arabic characters and discovered long after the last Morisco had been chased out. In it “we feel, with singular pathos and sorrow — the disappearance, or extinction, of an entire people, and see as well their efforts to hold back the inevitable historical forces which were about to descend upon them and crush them”. Besides the Young Man of Arevalo’s Tafçira and La Mora de Ubeda’s Breve compendio, which circulated clandestinely among the Morisco, some manuscripts were discovered in 1728 hidden inside a column of a house in Rica and later, in 1884, under a false floor in a demolished house in Almonacid de la Sierra. Earlier, in 1588, in the cathedral precincts, and again in 1595, in Sacromonti in Granada, a cache of what appeared to be Christian relics was discovered. The latter discovery turned out to be 19 lead tablets (plomos) in crude Latin but, again, in Arabic script, pretending to date from the first century A.D. Both Harvey and López-Baralt have given a fairly good inventory of the contents of these plomos. Of course it was a hoax. What stands out palpably, if painfully though, is the evidence of the Morisco’s desperate attempt at religious syncretism in order to continue practicing Islam and not have to leave their motherland. This was done, among other things, by making some adjustments to Islamic precepts. This, however, didn’t stop the arrival of the fated day!

At any rate, the Morisco were practicing taqiyya since 1492. But the stipulations of Islamic law for a Muslim living under non-Islamic rule unequivocally required him to leave the land of the unbelievers, unless the stay was temporary. But did political and religious refuge in Muslim lands bring the exiles the coveted peace? Far from it, it confronted them with the crisis of identity twice over. One such immigrant has left a heart-rending account of his experiences. Let me quote from López-Baralt: He was “an anonymous 17th-century Morisco whose tragedy as refugee gave him a name — el refugiado de Túnez, or the Tunis exile. … We must remember that in Spain the Moriscos had been subjected to a long process of deculturation: their Arabic language, religion, customs, names and clothing were prohibited by successive legal edicts, … and by the time of the 1609 expulsion they had been virtually absorbed into the mainstream of ‘official’ Spanish culture — this in spite of their clandestine activities and their secret practice of the last remnants of their Islamic religion. When exiles arrived in Tunisia, Morocco and other Islamic countries, they were received as veritable Europeans, for they almost invariably lacked the basic elements of their ancestors’ Islamic culture. Like many of his fellow exiles, the Tunis exile suffered this violent double process of cultural absorption in his life time: he was forcibly integrated into the Spanish cultural mainstream as a child, and then back into his forgotten Islamic culture as an adult in Tunisia. The autobiographical chapters of his dramatic text reveal the inner conflict of a soul perpetually without country. He had tried very hard to be a Muslim in Renaissance Spain, yet was now trying to remain a Spaniard in Muslim Tunisia. He hated Spain’s oppressive establishment, yet longed for his Spanish language and especially his Spanish poetry — Garcilaso, Lope de Vega, Góngora — whose verses he quoted by heart.”

The recrudescent forces of censorship still raise their ugly head from time to time, but their ferocity tends to be aimed, generally, against political dissent in recent times. Lucky for us: while a Cervantes could only express covertly through the language of allusion, or literary taqiyya, a Juan Goytisolo in our time can proclaim loudly and adamantly: I am a Morisco! And never forgive Spain for deliberately suppressing its and, therefore, his Andalusian identity and heritage. And lucky also for us that we can hear distinct echoes of voices that evoke the memory of nomadic gypsies in the poems of the Granadian Federico García Lorca, himself a victim of Franco’s fascist Spain.

(The material for this essay has been gathered from the work of the three medievalists named in the text.)