The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage

AFTERWORD

Afterword I write this afterword nearly twenty years after writing The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Although the book bears an original copyright date of 1987, most of it was in fact written between 1983 and 1985, while I was an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. But it is not those two decades that separate us so decisively from the universe in which this, a book about our vexed relationship with what can fairly be described as the Arabic chapter in western culture, was written. Although some of the ways in which we understand our fundamental historical relationship to the cultures of the Islamic and Arabic world had been changing all through these decades—some for better, others for worse—the most dramatic shifts—again, for both better and for worse—were provoked by the once-unimaginable events that began in September 2001, and which continue into the present and, no doubt, into the foreseeable future. At the very least, it is probably safe to say that virtually any meditation on the complex of historical relations between the Islamic world and the West will be of far greater interest to a wider public than it once was; and it is an even surer bet that those who read or listen will be attentive to the resonances , direct or indirect, for our own times. These are truly astonishing and not altogether happy changes for those of us who long wrote about these topics from inside a universe where they were about as arcane as any philological exercise could be. Indeed, my 1987 preface to The Arabic Role, retained in this edition despite its neo-graduate-student air, revolves around an etymological conundrum that was the original provocation for the book. Back then, medievalists who worked on Islamic Spain did not get asked what they thought about current political events. But now al-Andalus, as Islamic Spain was called in Arabic, is suddenly almost famous and of more than merely academic interest to those who seek to understand how deeply and vividly the Arabic vein runs in our cultural bedrock. Afterword 156 Fortunately, the University of Pennsylvania Press has not asked me to provide my views on these volatile contemporary matters, although their sense that a reprint is called for at this point is to some admirable degree conditioned by a sense of the new relevance of this material, however refracted it may be. I say "fortunately," not because I do not have political views—far from it—nor because I am without a notion of the relevance of my scholarly knowledge and insights to the current state of affairs in a world that many perceive as divided by religious antagonisms of precisely the sort presumed to have been the bread and butter of medieval culture. Rather, I am happy to not write of such things in a context that would necessarily call for easy and even facile formulations, since I am convinced of little except that the moral of the history of the Arabic role in medieval cultural history is anything but easy or facile. Indeed, the story of how European Christians dealt with Arabic culture in the twelfth century (enthusiastically, by and large) and then of how that interaction has been understood in modern scholarship (quite poorly, by and large), is counterintuitiveand surprising in ways I feel myself just beginning to grasp after more than twenty years and several books worth of work in this area. Perhaps it will be another twenty years and as many books again before I come to anything like wisdom on the matter of what this particular past can lend to our extraordinary present. What I have instead been asked to provide for this new edition is a basic bibliographic update, and I do so with the considerable pleasure involved in laying out what turns out to be a rudimentary map of my intellectual and collegial travels of the last two decades. The reader is warned that this small guide to the relevant publications of these twenty years is both partial and prejudiced, since, unlike the original work of scholarship to which it is now appended, it makes no pretense to anything like comprehensiveness. But comprehensiveness, or something quite close to that, is availableelsewhere, and especiallyin the two encyclopedic volumes on Islamic Spain with which any tour of the subject should begin (and could easily end): The Legacy of Muslim Spain, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi...