Arabic-Islamic views of the Latin West : tracing the emergence of medieval Europe

451 Pages·2015·2.12 MB·English

by  Daniel G. König

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/2015, SPi
ARABIC-ISLAMIC VIEWS OF THE LATIN WEST
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/2015, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/2015, SPi
Arabic-Islamic Views
of the Latin West
Tracing the Emergence of
Medieval Europe
DANIEL G. KÖNIG
3
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/2015, SPi
3
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Preface
Images of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ play a pivotal role in various forms of discourse
involving Muslims from all over the world, including from Western Europe. It is
against this background that the study at hand questions established interpret-
ations of how ‘the Islamic world’ perceived ‘Europe’ in the foundational period
of their shared history. From a historian’s perspective, it calls for the necessity of
reflecting upon the large variety of different factors at work in forming a highly
differentiated range of ‘Muslim’ perceptions.
My choice of topic, however, arose from the wish to combine my training as a
historian of the cluster of non-Muslim societies commonly defined as medieval
Western or Latin-Christian Europe with my training as an Arabist. At the begin-
ning of my research, the medievalist’s predilection for the history of Europe was
still dominant. Inspired, inter alia, by Norman Cousin’s dictum that the most sig-
nificant thing about the first lunar voyage ‘was not so much that man set foot on
the moon but that he set eye on the earth’,1 I believed in the necessity of explaining
European history not only from within, but also ‘from the outside’. To understand
how medieval Western Europe was perceived from an Arabic-Islamic perspective
I began compiling and organizing many theories and scraps of knowledge recorded
by Arabic-Islamic scholars between the seventh and the fifteenth century. Soon
engrossed in the intricacies of Arabic-Islamic source material, I realized that my
endeavour to write a history of Europe from an extra-European perspective
amounted to an effort of describing the interplay of radiation and impact in macro-
historical terms. Thus, I began tracing manifold processes of reception cutting
across a millennium and thousands of square kilometres. Seen together, these pro-
cesses constituted what I termed an ‘information landscape’.
This information landscape is of course much more complex than the initially
chosen dichotomy of the observer and the observed would seem to suggest at first
sight. The period and area of investigation cannot be described in terms of a cul-
tural bipolarity marked by two antagonistic cultures. Rather, the emergence of this
information landscape is grounded in historical processes that helped to bring
forth ‘contact zones’, ‘third spaces’, and a great number of people moving in and
between multiple and permeable cultural spheres and milieus. However, the study
at hand does not pertain to the field of social history and neither focuses on the
political, economic, social, or cultural relations between Christians and Muslims
nor on transcultural phenomena resulting from their interaction. The study rather
belongs to a field commonly defined as history of historiography: it endeavours to
understand how the representatives of an intellectual tradition defined by the use
of one language (Arabic) and adherence to a specific interpretation of the divine
1 <http://history.nasa.gov/EP-125/part2.htm>.
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vi Preface
(Islam) traced the emergence of a neighbouring non-Muslim sphere over the
centuries.
The ‘protagonists’ of this study, the Arabic-Islamic scholars responsible for the
documentation of medieval Europe, constituted a particular but highly differenti-
ated group within a much greater mass of Muslims involved in relations with
Latin-Christian Europe. Their writings do not necessarily reflect the entire range of
views held on medieval Western Europe by Muslims in the area and period under
investigation. Notwithstanding, they reproduce different kinds of information
acquired during various encounters between Muslims and various aspects of the
Latin-Christian sphere. As individual records, they are an obvious product of a
specific historical constellation marked by the time, place, and social milieu of
their production. Their chronological analysis allows to trace if and how the notion
of a Latin-Christian sphere emerged in an Arabic-Islamic scholarly tradition that
accumulated data over the centuries in reaction to important geopolitical develop-
ments and resulting social processes. The Arabic-Islamic expansion, the assimila-
tion of intellectual and human resources drawn from a large variety of subject
populations, regional diversification, developing foreign relations between Islami-
cate and non-Muslim societies as well as the subjection of various Muslim popula-
tions in the course of Latin-Christian expansionism had a considerable impact on
how Arabic-Islamic scholars perceived and recorded the highly differentiated and
ever-changing orbit of medieval Western Europe.
In recording the histories and describing the contemporary societies of
non-Muslims, Arabic-Islamic scholars clearly acknowledged that the non-Muslim
sphere, including medieval Western Europe, merited attention. In spite of the
occasional derogatory or polemic comment, many a scholar regarded non-Muslim
societies as alternative manifestations of human existence that could demand
respect. As Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) highlighted, not only Muslims, but all
humans, regardless of their origins or allegiance, are capable of sophisticated
thought:
The intellectual sciences are natural to man given that he is capable of thought. They
are not restricted to a certain [religious] group (milla), but to a specific state of mind
that can be encountered among all groups. . . . They have existed in humankind since
the inhabitedness of the Creation.2
In acknowledging and accepting the multiplicity of human societies, creeds, and
forms of existence, Arabic-Islamic scholars were not unfaithful to their creed, for
the Qurʾān can be read as advocating the multiplicity of human orientations,
stating (5:48) that:
had God willed, He would have made you one congregation (umma). However, He
wished to put you to a test with regards to what He has given to you. So compete in
2 Ibn Khaldūn, tārīkh, ed. Zakkār and Shaḥāda, vol. 1, p. 629: ‘wa-ammā al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya allatī
hiya tạbiʿiyya li-l-insān min ḥaythu innahu dhū fikrin fa-hiya ghayr mukhtasṣạ bi-milla bal bi-wajh
al-nazạ r fīhā ilā ahl al-milal kullihim. . . . wa-hiya mawjūda fi l-nawʿ al-insānī mundhu kāna ʿumrān
al-khalīqa.’
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Preface vii
good works. To God you will all return, and He will inform you about what you used
to differ.3
If all this is taken into consideration, it becomes obvious that the Arabic-Islamic
world in its entirety was never slave to a rigid, uncompromising, and unchangeable
interpretation of Islam. Multiple perspectives, not one single ‘Muslim’ world-view,
characterize(d) its approach(es) to the non-Muslim world.
Working on such a large chronological and geographical scale, I was neither able
to proffer a critical analysis of every individual source, nor to acknowledge the entire
range of scholarship on the innumerable phenomena relevant within this wide
framework. It was, for example, not possible to provide background information on
every source or to correlate every Arabic-Islamic statement on a particular aspect of
Latin Christendom with the latest state of the art on this subject. I consciously
paid this price to be able to trace, in the longue durée, how Arabic-Islamic scholars
described the non-Muslim societies of medieval Western or Latin-Christian Europe
over the centuries. It is under this provision that I would like to hand this study over
to the scholarly community and the interested public for criticism. This is done in
the hope that, in spite of its flaws, the study will prove useful to future scholarship
and interesting to its readers.
However, before introducing the reader to the subject, I would like to express
my thanks to all those without whom this book could not have been written.
When the main idea of this book was conceived in spring 2007, the birth of our
first child was imminent, my contract was nearing its end, a first application had been
rejected, and I was desperately looking for employment. I am sincerely indebted
to my PhD supervisor Matthias Becher (Bonn) who, in this situation, offered to
provide me with a temporary post at his chair should all other options fail. When
the possibility arose to apply for a position at the German Historical Institute in
Paris, my wife unfailingly encouraged me to propose a research project that suited
my interests and skills rather than the anticipated expectations of the academic
job market.
Thus, I was able to take up a post in the institute’s section for Late Antiquity and
the Early Middle Ages in November 2007. In her quest to reform the institute’s
research structure, the director, Gudrun Gersmann, provided me with the marvel-
lous possibility of coordinating a research group on exchange processes in the
medieval Mediterranean. Soon a father of two, always in fear of not being able to
secure the next position before the temporary contract ended, I was an industrious
but sometimes nettlesome employee to deal with. The directing ‘triumvirate’,
headed by Gudrun Gersmann and flanked by Stefan Martens and Stephan Geifes,
deserves my warmest thanks for its understanding and support. All of my col-
leagues at the institute were generous in many ways and made these four years of
working routine very enjoyable. However, I would like to single out Karin Förtsch,
Dunja Houelleu, Martin Heinzelmann, Torsten Hiltmann, and Anna Karla, all of
3 Qurʾān 5:48: ‘wa-law shāʾa llāhu la-jaʿalakum ummatan wāḥidatan wa-lākin li-yabluwakum fī mā
atākum fa-stabiqū l-khayrāt ilā llāhi marjiʿukum jamīʿan fa-yunabbiʾukum bi-mā kuntum fīhi
takhtalifūn.’
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viii Preface
whom encouraged me in professional and/or personal matters. Supported by
Martin Kintzinger and Claudia Zey, my colleagues Rania Abdellatif, Yassir Benhima,
and Elisabeth Ruchaud from the research group ‘FranceMed’ opened up the field
of Mediterranean studies for me, and, especially Yassir Benhima, generously
acquainted me with many an important scholar both in and outside France. This
institutional and personal support enabled me to explore the fascinating range of
high quality research offered by the French academic system, in and beyond the
field of relations between Europe and the Islamic world. I would like to thank
Magali Coumert, Jocelyne Dakhlia, Philippe Depreux, Sylvie Joye, Wolfgang
Kaiser, Edouard Méténier, Christian Müller, Philippe Sénac, Michel Sot, Dominique
Valérian, and Eric Vallet for their welcoming gestures and assistance. Thanks to my
colleagues in the extremely enriching DFG-priority programme ‘Integration and
Disintegration of Cultures in the European Middle Ages’, headed by Michael
Borgolte and Bernd Schneidmüller, I was able to remain connected to the German
medievalist scene. Along with those who invited me to present papers in various
locations, they regularly provided me with helpful criticism and inspiration. This
also goes for Sāmir Qandīl who, with the help of his generous colleagues headed
by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ramaḍān from the history department of ʿAyn Shams-University,
made possible a conference on ‘Images of the Other’ in Cairo, and supplied me
with a recent Arabic study on the topic of this book.
The summer of 2011 saw my family and I moving to Frankfurt am Main
where Bernhard Jussen employed me as researcher and lecturer at his chair for
medieval studies, leaving me almost completely free from other obligations.
Now father of three, I received much help from my colleagues, in particular from
Mi Anh Duong, Tim Geelhaar, Christian Kleinert, Ulla Kypta (who read parts
of the manuscript), Falk Müller, Peter Gorzolla, Christina Weitzel, and Dirk
Wiegandt. In addition, I was supported in different ways by Frank Bernstein,
Moritz Epple, Hartmut Leppin, Jan Rüdiger, and, in particular, Stefan Leder,
whom I would like to thank again for coming to Frankfurt as part of the exam-
ining board at the occasion of my habilitation. Under these circumstances, I was
able to acquire the academic qualifications needed to apply for a full professor-
ship in 2013.
I owe great thanks to Antje Flüchter for informing me about a call for appli-
cations for a start-up professorship at the cluster ‘Asia and Europe in a Global
Context’ at the University of Heidelberg. This ‘last-minute call’ opened up a fascin-
ating research landscape. I received a warm welcome not only from the cluster’s
administrative staff and researchers, but also from the historical department—from
Nikolas Jaspert, Jenny Oesterle, Klaus Oschema, and the ever-encouraging Bernd
Schneidmüller among others. During the past two years, many fruitful discussions
have taken place with my colleagues from the DFG-network ‘Transcultural
Entanglement in the Medieval Euromediterranean’, and I owe much to Georg
Christ, Saskia Dönitz, the inimitable Şevket Küçükhüseyin, Margit Mersch, Britta
Müller-Schauenburg, Ulrike Ritzerfeld, Christian Vogel, and Julia Zimmermann.
Last but by no means least, Aouni Shahoud Almousa and Rosanna Sirignano have
provided invaluable assistance to my teaching and research in the past year.
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Preface ix
It is in this stimulating context that I was able to prepare the final manuscript,
improved thanks to the helpful comments of Bernhard Jussen, Stefan Leder,
Hartmut Leppin, Moritz Epple, Jan Rüdiger, and three anonymous reviewers.
Noha Stephanos’ painstaking correction of my Arabic transcriptions saved me
from many an embarrassment, all remaining mistakes being my own. I am also
most grateful to Mandi Gomez for her patient, friendly, and very conscientious
copy-editing that considerably improved the manuscript. It is thanks to my editors
Stephanie Ireland and Cathryn Steele, production editor Carol Carnegie and pro-
ject manager Manikandan Chandrasekaran, and their colleagues from Oxford
University Press, including proofreader Karen Parker, that this book found its
material form, the cover image having been designed by Shareef Fahim.
Writing this monograph would not have been possible without the unfailing
support of my parents-in-law, Karl and Mathilde Rossa, and my mother, Johanna
König, who regularly stepped in at short notice to help out our family in times of
necessity. I would also like to give heartfelt thanks to my sister Barbara for many
years of backing and encouragement, to my brothers Hans and Christian, as well
as to Şevket Küçükhüseyin, Stephan Cursiefen, and Shareef Fahim for their sup-
port during the difficult last phase of preparing the manuscript for publication. My
wife, Agnes Rossa, and my children Carmen, Penelope, and Simeon, have endured
many phases of high tension from my side, but have nevertheless given and right-
fully demanded the support and loving care that forms the basis of a stable family
life. It is to them that I would like to dedicate this book.
Daniel G. König
Frankfurt/Heidelberg,
15 May 2015