The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage

CHAPTER ONE: The Myth of Westernness in Medieval Literary Historiography

CHAPTER ONE The Myth of Westernness in Medieval Literary Historiography Leave to us, in Heaven's name, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle , and keep your Omar, your Alchahitius, your Aben Zoar, your Abenragel. —Pico della Mirandola Modern civilization's myriad pretensions to objectivity have unfortunately tended to obscure the fact that much of our writing of history is as much a myth-making activity as that of more primitive societies. We often regard tribal histories or ancient myths that do not cloak themselves in such pretensions as less objective than our own. We are prone to forget that history is written by the victors and serves to ratify and glorify their ascendancy—and we forget how many tracks are covered in that process. The writing of literary history, the close and often indispensable ancillary of general history, is preoccupied with the myths of our intellectual and artistic heredity, and it, too, tells those stories we want to hear, chooses the most illustrious parentage possible, and canonizes family trees that mesh with the most cherished notions we hold about our parentage. The most general, and in many ways the most influential and pervasive , image or construct we have is that of ourselves and our culture, an entity we have dubbed "Western," a clearly comparative title. Whether it is spoken or unspoken, named or unnamed, we are governed by the notion that there is a distinctive cultural history that can be characterized as Western, and that it is in distinctive, necessary, and fundamental opposition to non-Western culture and cultural history. Few of us, even less as laymen than as scholars, have conceived of developments or tackled specific problems in the literary and cultural history of western Europe assuming anything other than that this is an appropriate model. While the value and accuracy of such a characterization for the modern (that is, usually the Renaissance and post-Renaissance) period is for others to decide, and while it has recently been the object of intense criticism ,1 its relevance for those whose scholarly domain is further back in time, namely Europe's medieval period, has been less carefully examined. In fact, the continued relatively routine acceptance of the cliched EastWest dichotomy for the medieval period is particularly noteworthy because medievalists have for some time been attempting to overthrow a series of other cliches and simplistic perceptions of the Middle Ages. But this particular aspect of the myth of our past appears to be so fundamental that questioning it is not part of the various programs for the reorientation and revival of medieval studies, and its precepts continue to be part of the foundation of most studies, including many viewed as new, even revolutionary, in their approaches. What many consider to be the ravages of the new criticism have left at least this part of our oldfashioned notions intact.2 The irony is that while the Kiplingesque dichotomy, with its tacit presupposition of the superiority of West over East, had its grounding in the visible particularism of Europe and the irrefutable dominance of European empires over their colonies in more recent periods, the medieval situation has been characterized by many, with ample documentation, as something more resembling the reverse. A surprising number of historians of various fields, nationalities, and vested interests have described the relationship in the medieval world as one in which it was al-Andalus (as Muslim Spain was called by the Arabs) and its ancestry and progeny that were ascendant, and ultimately dominant, in the medieval period. It has been variously characterized as the age of Averroes, as an Oriental period of Western history, a period in which Western culture grew in the shadows of Arabic and Arabic-manipulated learning, the "European Awakening," with the prince, a speaker of Arabic, bestowing the kiss of delivery from centuries of deep sleep. For a considerable number of historians , the "renaissance of the twelfth century" is a phrase that in part masks a revolution instigated and propagated by Andalusians and their cultural achievements.3 Remarkably little of the information and few of the hypotheses that The Myth of Westernness 2 have informed these views have passed into the realm of common knowledge , however. Even less so has this story—or its beginnings, the beginnings of a cultural history different from the one we are more used to nurturing—penetrated the ranks of the literary historians of medieval Europe .4 The resistance to a...