borderlands e-journal

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1 borderlands e-journal VOLUME 9 NUMBER 3, 2010 REVIEW ARTICLE Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, Vineeth Mathoor Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Anouar Majid has produced one of the most striking and theoretically challenging books to recast the history of minorities across Europe and America. This is achieved by factually challenging the mainstream and academic conception of minorities as dangerous elements in the society. The fear of minorities is a baseless myth, and the social psychology behind such myths, according to Majid, is a cluster of various socio-political factors. Further, the book challenges the theories arguing for separation of human beings on various grounds, and shows that as humans we all are knotted together with inseparable bonds of shared love and respect. Anouar Majid s new book, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities contributes to the debates examining the legacy of cultural and political aspects of minorities in Europe and America. As one could sense from the title, the book aims to strengthen inclusiveness among the various streams of human civilization. In the book, Majid argues that until we stop rediscovering the strangers in religious, cultural or ethnic minorities, the day is not very far when everyone will shrink to the smallest unit of human society, that is, me (Mam 2007, p. 201). By offering a brilliant and scintillating examination of how the identity of Moor served the Western imagination of enemies for centuries, the book provides a critical history of xenophobia and the persecution of minorities in Europe and America. This study is inspired by many factors, both personal memories and the rapidly changing political and cultural conditions in the West (2009, p. 1). However, the most important factor that inspired the book is Western Europe s recent re-discovery of the old Muslim problem. In this context, Majid takes up a very 1

2 serious challenge in the book to present the historical reality that Muslims, Jews or Blacks can be Moors at any point in time, and in this sense, it is a continuing legacy which needs to be politically and theoretically understood. Opening the debate with historical analysis, Majid shows how the expansion of European power across the Atlantic, Asia and Africa had redrawn the political map of the globe in the middle-ages. He then discusses how the present decline of the native-born European population and the increase of immigrants to Europe have acquired political flavour, bringing the issue of minorities to the forefront of debates. The book is organised into four sections with a clear introduction and conclusion, inviting the reader to consider the problems of cultural stereotypes and Euro-centric thought. In Western Europe and the United States, two issues presently get maximum political attention the anxiety about coexisting with Islam and the problem of illegal immigrants (2009, p. 3). In seriously examining this political turmoil, the book argues that these developments are of recent origin and Islam has been coexisting with Europe for a long time (2009, p. 4). Therefore, it is suggested that Europe s long history of living with Islam must also enable scholars to conceive that socio-political and cultural anxieties always change, and the current European concern about Islam is of historical origin. It is important to note that Majid does not follow a partisan agenda, and agrees with the view that Islam and Christianity have been at war hot or cold since the birth of the younger faith (2009, p. 8). However, according to the book, this does not imply that they cannot co-exist. The author asserts that the recent anti-islamic sentiments in Europe are a relatively new phenomenon, linked more with economic anxieties. At certain points, the book does use a Marxist approach to examine how cultural or religious sentiments take dominant roles under particular social conditions (Caudwell 1990). However, in general Majid uses the concept of culture wars (Huntington 1996). In its overall understanding, the book suggests that there are various factors that contributed to the development of anxieties about living with Islam in Europe, but these are not permanent or eternal issues, and can be solved by changing attitudes and political policies. As we could agree, Europe has had many issues with Islam since the two faiths became politicized and began attempting to dominate Europe, and Majid examines two important events to locate how the problem of faith acquired larger political twists. The first of these was the Crusades. In November 1095, Pope Urban II directed the Knights of France to liberate the Holy Land the city of Jerusalem from the heinous Muslims to protect the stability of Christian Europe. Thus the era of religious war began, by which the Roman Church sought political supremacy. Secondly, four hundred years after the Crusades Spain expelled all its citizens of Moorish/Muslim origin to purify Christian Europe and establish a Christian identity, abandoning nine hundred years history of living with Islam. Majid takes these two 2

3 events to show that the expulsion and torture of minorities is something essential in the European mind, and the recent Islamophobia has roots in these medieval issues. Tracing back the historical roots of nation states to the medieval period, the first chapter, Pious Cruelty, examines the long history of Spanish influence on the development of the modern nation state and the subsequent creation of exclusive state policies. The attitude of Spain towards Granada, the last refuge of Muslims in Spain (Zaimeche 2004), is historically examined (Majid 2009, p. 50). The book demonstrates how the genocide against Spain s Jewish neighbourhoods in 1391 forced Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity, and how it influenced the reduced Jewish community to convert to Christianity or accept expulsion in 1492 (Pasachoff & Littman 2005, p. 145). Further, the study shows, as a result of these developments, the Moriscos had been stamped as traitors who conspired with the Turks to invade Spain. This, the invented Turkish connection, gave ideological justifications for Spain to conduct holocausts and torture and expel the Moriscos. The final result of torture, forced conversion and expulsion was the emergence of Muslims and Jews as an interchangeable synonym of enemy/stranger in the European Catholic imagination. The United States current Middle-East policy is examined in comparison to sixteenth-century Spain (2009, p. 45), and the book argues for more detailed examination of culture as the basis for identity. As we have seen, Majid argues that medieval Spain accelerated the process of creating national (religious) identities and locates the birth of Western liberalism as the product of absolutism and exclusion. Apart from this historical discussion, Majid takes a radical turn and argues that our contemporary issues with religious minorities have connections with the old Spanish policies. He keeps central the notion that economic factors are the reason for present-day migration to the West, but depicts as cultural oppression, and a continuation of the policies of medieval rulers, the attempts of the United States and Western European countries to tackle migration. The New Worlds of Moor, the second chapter of the book, is about the growing anxieties of new Moors the African Muslims in America. Majid asserts that in Western Europe and the United States many people are interested in the path of the Holy Quran as they are convinced of the richness of Islam as a vehicle for changing one s inner-self. The example of Rodrigo de Lepe s conversion to Islam, and the subsequent failure to recognize his contribution in discovering the West Indies, is interpreted as Islam s capacity to become a vehicle for contest (2009, p. 69). Furthermore, drawing from the work of Richard Brent Turner, Majid argues that the development of capitalism succeeded in surpassing global Islam (2009, p. 75). However, it is not clear why modern industrial capitalism is described as triumphing over Islam when available historical data seem to suggest the opposite! Though this chapter has many such methodological issues, at the end of the chapter Majid comes up with a wonderful insight about the term Moor: that not only Muslims but also Jews, Berbers, Moriscos and 3

4 others have identified themselves with the Moorish identity, escalating their confidence in a rapidly changing political atmosphere. The book takes up a very interesting twist in European history as its theme in the third chapter, titled Muslim Jews. The book examines the development of Jewish and Muslim identities as identical categories in the European imagination (2009, p. 92). The development of Jewish cultural heritage within the Islamic nations shows, the book demonstrates, the inclusiveness of both religions and the reason for this relation is theorised to be their geographical proximity (2009, p. 94). The treatment of Jews in the Muslim lands till the fifteenth century was far better than in Christian countries, and this analogy is taken by Majid to show the historically rooted relationship between Jews and Muslims. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jews and Muslims further cooperated and contributed to the development of a common culture. This trend was identified by many political leaders, writers, philosophers and artists who expressed similar views, emphasizing their belief in the common Jewish-Islamic culture and social life. Conversely, political changes led to the establishment of Arab nationalism and Zionism and, as a result, Jewish-Islamic shared cultural roots were down-played as the two cultures became polarised. As modern ideas of nationalism, cultural purity, and new trends in international relations developed, culminating in the creation of Israel, Jews became collaborators of European and American policies, overlooking the historical reality that Jews and Muslims had once constituted the common enemy of Christian Europe. Since the Jewish hostility towards Arab Muslims is a modern phenomenon, the book also espouses hopes of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Muslims. Looking at the religious minorities in Islamic countries and the second-class status conferred on Christians and Jews, referred to as Dhimmitude, Majid examines how Jews coexisted with Muslims (2009, p. 99) at certain historical periods and how such coexistence is still possible. Thinking along this line, the author suggests at the end of chapter that, provided the modern day encounters between Muslims and Jews are examined in light of the history of such encounters, there is no reason to believe that Zionism could not coexist with full Palestinian rights (2009, p. 121). In the final chapter, Undesirable Aliens: Hispanics in America, Muslims in Europe, Majid gives a very interesting historical examination of the recent political developments in the United States to show the similarities between their attitude to Hispanics and Europe s attitude to Muslims. Majid brings to examination the theoretical works of scholars who argue for racial purity and homogeneous identity for America, and shows how this theoretical work is linked with the United States policies towards migrants and illegal immigrants (2009, pp ). Further, the chapter shows the ways in which Chicanos and Hispanics discover their roots in Islam despite American and European Islamophobia. The book seeks to understand why the presence of Cubans and Hispanics worries the American middle-class, and states that these fears are linked to both 4

5 economic and cultural factors. Within this context, the book demonstrates how concerns about racial purity lie within the cosmopolitan culture of America, and how these ideas can dominate the public sphere (2009, p. 131). As Majid has shown in the book, the rediscovery of Moors in Europe and the United States indicates the intricate legacies of culture wars and race theories. The book argues that if political leaders constantly attempt to rediscover the racial origins of nations and uphold notions of cultural superiority, then the world will remain ever divided on the basis of race, religion, colour and many other lines. As the book ends, we realize that we are all minorities living in a world of plurality we are all Moors. Though the author gives a humanist-positivist analysis of history and is essentially hermeneutic in approach, the seriousness of the theme is very relevant. Over all, by offering an insightful historical examination of the West s perception of and attitude to various minority cultures, the book shows how the concept of the Moor serves as an effective metaphor for depicting all minority peoples in the West. Vineeth Mathoor is working on a PhD on social consciousness in Kerala at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and is an active reviewer of books. He has presented various papers on colonial modernity of South Asia in several international seminars. Avenel Publishers, Kolkata will publish two of his articles on social theorists and modernity in South Asia respectively in two edited volumes in References Caudwell, C 1990, Further studies in a dying culture, People's Publications, New Delhi. Huntington, SP 1996, The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order, Simon and Schuster, New York. Mam, S 2007, The road of lost innocence, Virago Press, London. Pasachoff, NE & Littman, RJ 2005, A concise history of the Jewish people, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Zaimeche, S 2004, Granada the last refuge of Muslims in Spain, Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization, viewed 18 November, 2010, 5

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