When my grandfather came to the United States from Syria in the early twentieth century, he brought with him the mores and values of a Middle Eastern Jewish culture that has not been protected and secured for his descendants. The literary texts as well as the documentary history of his world have been almost completely forgotten amidst a sea of adaptation to a very different way of seeing things. My grandfather was heir to many traditions that were to him a very intimate and organic part of the world in which he grew up: a world that was increasingly collapsing and falling prey to new modes of identification.
Longform
More than any other period in Islamic history, the Moorish kingdom of al-Andalus has always shown a remarkable capacity to insinuate itself into the present. The early twenty-first century is no exception.
History, wrote the Roman Catholic saint Gregory of Nyssa (335–395), is a non-stop sequence of new beginnings. Some sixteen centuries later, we are still tied up with the idea that history is all about decline
The Arabs conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711, integrating it into the Islamic Empire, and in 1492 the Catholics put an end to the peninsula’s last Muslim entity, the Kingdom of Granada. These eight centuries represent the longest civilisational period in the history of what we now call Spain, and the Arabs called al-Andalus.
Somewhere in the Gobi desert lurks a wormlike creature so elusive that no one can fully describe its attributes properly. Some say it spews acid when threatened. Others allege that it dispenses electric charges, or even explodes at will. While it has not yet been proven to exist, the Mongolian death worm is nevertheless ‘real’ to many who live in that part of the world.
Every Muslim has heard of al-Andalus, where Europe meets Africa, where the Mediterranean almost closes its lips. It’s a land of sonority and luminosity, a storied land, an imagined land.
Al-Ghazzali, the Muslim theologian and jurist, considered the Muslim society of his time to be so deeply afflicted with social sickness, ‘an epidemic among the multitude’ as he calls it, as to be virtually insane. The only cure was a ‘moral therapy’, a heavy dose of religious devotion and piety. Religion, it seems, was not unlike Erasmus Darwin’s rotating chair: it would spin those persistently ‘straying from the clear truth’, those insistent ‘upon fostering evil’ and ‘flattering ignorance’, at great speed, thus rearranging their brains into pious order, while, as an added benefit, forcing them to spew out their heresies.
I always thought mum would want to be buried in Pakistan. I understood the appeal of being buried in one’s ancestral graveyard. There’s a romance in being laid to rest in the company of your loved ones.
A poster on a Facebook page of a friend declared: ‘PAKISTAN Lovers before doing any Bakwas in the name of Aman ki Asha… read about this hero first’. The reference to ‘Pakistan lovers’ alludes to those in India who believe that it is possible for India and Pakistan to have much better relations.
I am a very unfashionable woman. I grew up in the only Wahhabi household in North London in the late 1970s. My father had studied in the strict Salafi universities of Saudi Arabia, and our understanding and idea of Islam was therefore very different to the cultural Islam practised by the vast majority of Asian Muslims.