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Opinionista

Things we lost as the bombs rained down

Kalim Rajab is a director of the New National Assurance Company, SA's largest empowered insurance company. He previously worked in the diamond industry, and was educated at UCT and Oxford. He writes in his personal capacity about SA, current events, film appreciation and culture. Catch him on twitter at @kalimrajab

We stand to lose so much more than the lives of Palestinians - we stand to lose forever, the memory of the long, warm embrace that was our shared Judeo-Islamic past.

The streets of Toledo are desolate, ghosts of what they once had been. The scene is in the old Jewish quarter of the capital, but today there are no Jews left. Toledo – the wonder of its age and the cultural and linguistic capital of European thought and scholarship for centuries, a gem prized as the most intellectually advanced of its time – has lately become a site for bonfires.

A man from a far-away place has arrived in Toledo today, and he wanders the windswept streets. He knows from experience that this neighbourhood was once that of books, and of men who translated books for the entire civilised world. He looks for the great mosque, but it has been torn down. At least the great old synagogue still stands – but alas, it has now become the Convent of Santa Maria la Blanca. The neighbourhood is now one of rag sellers. The books which once used to be translated here now cannot be read aloud, cannot even be kept. The reason for this is that before being translated in Latin, they would originally have been written in either in Arabic or in Hebrew.

Toledo, you see, had once been the capital of Muslim Spain. But that was over a hundred years ago, the man reflects, and it is now 1615. Ever since the reconquista of 1492, Moors (the insult-ridden name for Muslim Arabs from North Africa who had conquered the Iberian peninsula in the 7th century) and their Jewish compatriots had been forcibly thrown out of the Peninsula by the new Christian conquerors, or forced to convert to Christianity upon pain of death. Those Moors who converted derisively became known as moriscos; the converted Jews conversos.

The man knows about the pain of forcible conversion. He himself comes from a family of conversos, although he has been careful to hide this fact. His name is Miguel de Cervantes, and he will go down in history as the father of one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written; indeed the father of what we moderns have come to regard as the novelistic form itself. As Cervantes comes across a bonfire of old Arabic books being burnt, something causes him to pick up a journal about to destroyed. It is a manuscript in Arabic script, and the feeling which has caused him to stay the manuscript’s destruction now causes him to buy it. Searching around for a morisco who still speaks Arabic and who can translate it for him, he finds one and convinces the reluctant old man to do so in the relative safety of the Convent’s cloisters. There, in hushed whispers, the man translates a tale of giants and of tilting windmills. It is the tale, the morisco tells him, of Don Quixote de la Mancha, and it has been written by the Arab historian Cid Hamid Benengeli.

Was one of the greatest works in European literature originally written in Arabic? Or rather, why does Cervantes – who completed the epic in Spanish almost exactly four hundred years ago – claim that he was not the author, but merely its translator from the original Arabic text?

As it turns out, Cervantes’ claim was simply a historical fiction- “a jest”, as the cultural critic Edward Rothstein calls it. Cervantes had written Don Quixote all along. There was no Arab historian named Benengeli. But Cervantes risked declaiming ownership of his great work for a purpose. His was a jest which openly yet enigmatically proclaimed itself to be so – for in the puritanical Christian society in which Cervantes lived, no morisco who could still speak Arabic would have existed. No Hebrew-speaking conversos would have either. And certainly, if people such as these existed they would not have openly translated the forbidden language Arabic in the cloister of a convent.

Cervantes’ jest, then, was an allusion to highlight the shared trauma which Muslims and Jews had undergone together at the hands of Christians in medieval Europe. It was an allusion – never openly stated, but unmistakable to readers – that the glories of Christian Europe were centrally located in the original glories of Muslim and Jewish co-thought. Cervantes seemed to be saying that as great as his work may be, it owed its genesis to the flowering of civilisational genius under Europe’s Judeo-Islamic past.

For a thousand years, The Economist noted recently, Islam and innovation were twins. In much the same way, one can say the same about Muslims and Jews, whose fortunes were inseparably intertwined for millennia. From Ummayad Cordoba to Nasirid Granada, from all the lands under the great Ottoman civilisation to the cosmopolitanism that was the Levant and Palestine, this was not a grudgingly shared moment, but a long and loving embrace. The Spanish scholar Maria Rosa Menocal, in examining Muslim Spain, holds that “Muslims, Christians and Jews did not have separate cultures based on religious differences but rather were part of a broad and expansive culture that had incorporated elements of all their traditions; a culture that all could participate in regardless of their religion.” She cites the famous Jewish poets of their day who wrote in Arabic, and the Jews of Toledo who built synagogues with the same horseshoe arches as the Great Mosque of Cordoba. She cites the frequent examples of Muslim leaders entrusting the running of the empires to their faithful Jewish viziers. Today, this common history – this shared heritage – is largely forgotten, most principally because of the Israeli-Palestinian question dating from 1948. The memory of a thousand years – ten centuries! – of symbiosis has become a palimpsest, to be completely painted over by the last seventy.

But do we find ourselves in a temporary break with the past, or will it become permanent? Can we realistically expect the warm embrace ever to return? Without trying to be flippant about the devastating and lasting effects which the last seventy years have had on Muslim-Jewish relations, until fairly recently there was always a sense by optimists that, as long as hopes of a peace process could be worked out with a two-state outcome, a successful denouement could somehow be achieved, and this would eventually be able to check the madness of hatred and recriminations. In other words, there was hope that in time the warm embrace could be reclaimed.

The effects of the last month have shown how illusory this optimism had been. I suspect that future generations will look back at the events of 2014 as a crucial chapter where the break with the past was made permanent; locked away forever. There is no denying that over the seventy years there have been massive setbacks – the original sin of the nakba, Shatila in 1982, the second intifada of 2000, Gaza in 2009, to name only the headline-grabbing ones – but somehow Gaza of 2014, and the complete denial of the Israeli people to see the humanity in the people whom their army have oppressed, seems to have definitively destroyed all hope that a return to the past is possible. For Muslims and Jews, the true nature of their shared heritage stands forever to be lost – and both sides seem willing to do so.

Up until a few years ago, Muslim and Jewish leaders at least paid lip service to their shared heritage, even if few of them believed it. Today, as bombs rain down in Gaza and the positions on both sides of the ideological battle become more entrenched, even the lip service has disappeared from the discourse. Among many Muslims – certainly amongst many of the South African Muslims I am a part of – the predominant and accepted narrative is the absurd one that Jews have been divinely sanctioned in the Quran to be enemies of Islam. I say absurd because to believe this narrative is to selectively read certain verses over others, to misunderstand the spirit of the entire Book and also to distort the example of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Yet as absurd as it is, its predominance has become unassailable. It has become the False Truth. And judging from the level of discourse in South African society, the other ideological camp is similarly bleak. This camp holds that Islam is a monolithic, intolerant, warmongering religion and its followers anti-Semitic. The narrative here, to quote one published South African, is that what Palestinians want to perpetuate is a “medieval form of Islamic colonisation” over the land of Israel. As the Israeli writer Etgar Ketet has recently said of Israeli society, “While right-wing thugs chanting ‘death to Arabs’ on the streets of Jerusalem are considered patriotic, mere expressions of empathy about the deaths of women and children in Gaza are perceived as betrayal.”

Today, there are sadly few examples anywhere in the world of Jews and Muslims working together sustainably. Artistic collaborations are few; societal ones as infrequent. The few organisations which do – the noble Maimonides Foundation, for example, or the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, based in New York – are not yet influential enough in their outreach and often struggle to make their voices heard. The loudest voices always drown out the sweetest.

Are we to be the generation in which the steady hardening over the last seventy years finally solidifies into permanent enmity? The past has never appeared more out of reach than it does today. With each bomb which falls, our collective hatred grows. And our ability to remember our shared heritage reduces to nothingness. DM

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