Fun at the Fringes

You won't ever catch the Guardian describing the Temple Mount as the ancient synagogue-turned-mosque, will you?

Cordoba's wondrous Mezquita, medieval not ancient*, has an even more convoluted history, as construction began during the Emirate in the late 780s, making use of the site and partial ruins of the christian Basilica de San Vicente.

From what I can gather from today's more informative news stories (not including the Grauniad) is that the fire and subsequent roof collapse took place in an area which reveals how the building was not simply repurposed like Hagia Sofia over in Constantinople — though there was a lapse of around 300 years before the new owners went full Trump on the old mosque, adding a cross-shaped baroque chapel of comparative gaudiness and vulgarity, smack in the middle of the combo-structure, which quite shocked us when we came across it during our visit in the early noughties.

Yesterday's incident has of course set off all the usual suspects in Spain. Like the 'How dare you refer to this building as a Mezquita and not La Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción' types. (Some may be suspecting that the see-saw cycle at this location is as yet incomplete.)

There is an abiding myth that Islamic Andalucía was an unlikely paradise of tolerance, diversity and cultural exchange. The reality was somewhat different.

Christians who did not immediately convert became dhimmis, sub-citizens who paid a special tax called the jizya. Those who switched to Islam were referred to within the hegemonic culture as muwalladun (or muladi in Spanish), a word derived from the language of cattle breeders, meaning “cross breed”.

Though some dhimmis, Christians and Jews, rose to prominence in the bureaucracy (largely because they were naturally detached from the existing pattern of loyalties in the regime) the majority were treated as inferiors and subjected to periodic oppression, executions and so on.

Yet what is really fascinating here is that while neither of the two competing blocks could in any way be described as broad-minded melting pots, some seriously interesting and important cross-cultural transfers were taking place as a result of MIGRATION.

For the people doing all the fleeing across the civilisational borders — such as the dhimmis who ended up as 'Mozarabs' in Spain or the Muslims who had lived under Christian rule and then made a beeline back to the Emirate — were escaping the constraints of forced social inequality and opened up new opportunities, not just for themselves, but also for their host societies.

* It's tempting to believe that this little slip was very deliberate on the part of the newspaper.