Arabia: Dream of reality
Nonetheless the Arabs built an empire greater than Rome at its zenith. Under Islam they developed a world culture which transmitted to Europe the intellectual influences that engendered the Renaissance. Historians recognize that no people of the Middle Ages contributed more to human progress than the Arabs. Other ancient peoples such as the Phoenecians have disappeared, but the Arabs remain, and in a cultural sense we owe them.
Thus, though solidarity and internationalism play a role in the European Left’s pro-Arab sentiments, ideology is not the only factor. Nonetheless today we are almost obliged to think, “poor Arabs!” crushed between Israeli arrogance and thirst for vengeance and American blindness and thirst for oil.
THE ARAB PAST IN SICILY
The Saladin-Richard relationship mirrored the interwoven relationship between the Arab world and Europe, a relationship that so overshadows the European-Israeli relationship today as to be incomparable. One forgets that for ancient Greeks and Romans, Jews were just another of the Semitic peoples, cousins of the Arabs.
When the star of Islam was rising three centuries prior to the Third Crusade, Arab sea rovers arrived in Sicily. In 831 Palermo fell to Arab armies. Through skillful political administration, Arab agricultural techniques and gifted artisans the new rulers turned the fertility of the Mediterranean’s biggest island to great account and made it one of the richest parts of the Sultan’s realm. Within Palermo’s walls were 300 mosques, the Sultan's court, prison, arsenal and council chambers. Beyond the four city gates lay the caravansaries and the merchants' quarters. In Islamic Palermo there were bazaars of oil vendors, money-changers, grocers, tailors, blacksmiths, coppersmiths and corn sellers, great open air markets that still today are in the same places. Arab Palermo was a meeting place for traders from everywhere—Greeks, Sicilians, Lombards, Arabs, Berbers, Persians and Tartars.
Arab Sicily abounded in exquisite carving and metal work, vases of gem-like glass, silken veils and hangings woven with gold, precious carpets and richly ornamented books. Arab inscriptions curled feather-like about the tops of palaces that one can still see today. Arab medicine was taught at the university. The spoken languages were Arabic, Latin, Greek and Italian dialects. Poets read in the court and the music of flutes and tambourines wafted through the city. The Arab system of government and land tenure was so successful that much of it remained.
The Arab world was already then part of Europe.
Contrary to theories proffered by some contemporary Jewish historians such as Madame Bat Ye’Or, the Moslem heritage in Europe has been largely positive.
After the Norman conquest of Sicily in the 12th century, the second King of Sicily, Roger II, continued to cultivate Islamic culture, which then predominated in all the Mediterranean lands. John Julius Norwich in his The Kingdom In the Sun (Faber & Faber, London, 1970) has reconstructed beautiful images of Norman Sicily most of which were inherited from Arabs after their 200 years of rule: gardens of exotic foods from the East—corn, melons, tomatoes, celery, onions, cucumbers, herbs and salad greens unknown in Europe—irrigation canals, arable lands criss-crossed with little rivers and mills along their banks, the arms of windmills spreading above wheat fields, turrets and courtyards, lemon and orange orchards, olive and palm trees, and stone lions in the Moorish fountains.
Moslems were part of the cosmopolitan group King Roger gathered round him in the mixture of cultures that coursed through south Italy: Latin, Norman and Byzantine. In that ethnic mix were Greek men of affairs, learned lawyers, French and Provencal troubadours, Arab poets, administrators and story-tellers, and an Arab cook in Roger's kitchen. As in Moslem times, this island off the tip of Italy waxed rich.
After Roger II’s death in 1194 Moorish influence in Sicily declined. But it left behind treasures that spread from there and from Spain to become a part of Western life: silk weaving and Moorish pottery, embroidery, brilliant jewels and fine dress. From the Arabs came the pointed arch and other decorative motifs, details of fountain construction and design, the use of the olive as food and the game of chess. The Arabs introduced many words into the Italian language, such as carciofo, artichoke. Arab ways are persistent in southern Europe from Granada in Andalusia to Messina in Sicily. Many things in modern Sicily, from cathedrals to donkey carts, are still ornamented with Saracen arabesques and Eastern designs. And lemon orchards are called lemon gardens, giardini di limoni.
One feels a certain melancholy about the brief Norman era in Sicily, a melancholy marking the gentle Sicilian people today and recalling the nostalgia in Argentina for a former Europe that lives chiefly in peoples’ fantasy. It has been said that the complex Norman Kingdom of Sicily and South Italy contained the seeds of its own destruction, in itself a melancholic consideration. The 64-year old Kingdom was too heterogeneous, too eclectic and cosmopolitan to develop a national tradition of its own. It couldn’t last. Though the Normans and Lombards, Greeks and Saracens, Italians and Jews of that great Sicilian Kingdom co-existed happily, they never coalesced into a nation.
To be continued
