مَآ أَنتَ بِنِعْمَةِ رَبِّكَ بِمَجْنُونٍۢ
“You are not, [O Muhammad], by the grace of your Lord, a madman.” (Quran 68:2)
“…Charlie [Kirk] was violently murdered by an assassin. And martyred, really, martyred for his beliefs.” There is a strange satisfaction a historian feels when they see the enduring relevance of their discipline in the world they currently inhabit. Of course, that feeling swiftly dissipates with the recognition/deep knowledge that there exists a tragic longevity to certain trends in human history – they recur, sometimes with greater potency and seem to defy rationalization. The above statement was uttered in the State of the Union address a few days ago (rest assured that will be the last time I start one of my essays with the words of Trump). It is apparent that martyrs have historically and contemporaneously symbolized a kind of principled sacrifice, a cause so great they are willing to die for it. Their deaths are immortalized by the living, the narratives they produced in life (and are constructed about them in turn) endure, often becoming hagiographies preserved for progeny. As one scholar contends, “sanctity is in the eye of the beholder…an executed man dies in punishment for his crimes, but a martyr dies on behalf of a cause.”
For the purposes of this essay, let us travel back in time to Umayyad Córdoba in the middle of ninth century, when the flowering Umayyad Caliphate held intellectual, artistic and imperial sway over a vast swath of the Iberian Peninsula. This was also the site where forty-eight Christians were executed for their religious transgressions against Islam, condemned for blasphemy and for publicly denigrating the prophet Muhammad and his legacy. What did these ‘martyrs’ profess, what were some of their underlying motivations and how would their anti-Islamic invective serve as an archetype for future writers?
In the eight century, Abd ar-Rahman I, the last surviving member of the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus, travelled westward in the wake of the Abbasid revolution and established a new Umayyad dynasty with its capital in Córdoba (756-1031). Many Christians living in the region either converted to Islam or retained their Christian identity but were heavily influenced by the culture of the governing class. Mozarabs is a technical term denoting any Christian living under Muslim rule. Mozarabs, (from the Arabic musta’rab or Arabized) were Christians who lived under Muslim rule in Al-Andalus from its inception in the 8th century until the early modern period, though some maintain their influence and presence waned after the 13th century. As dhimmis in Córdoban society, they bore responsibilities to the amir and enjoyed certain rights as ahl al-kitab. Generally, the security and mobility of Christians and Jews was guaranteed so long as they paid the jizya and abided by the sumptuary and legal laws instituted at the time (that they not publicly defame Islam or the prophet and refrain from proselytizing their faith through active missionizing or public displays of worship). So long as these conditions were met, Christian communities were relatively left in peace to govern their own affairs.
However, with the assimilation of Christians to Arab and Islamic culture in Al-Andalus, some in the clerical class became increasingly agitated. In addition to the allure of assimilation, Christians began to approach their religiosity with a degree of syncretism and flexibility. For example, some courtiers followed Islamic dietary restrictions, underwent circumcision and generally accustomed themselves to courtly life. Others sought to mold their religious doctrine to Islamic beliefs. One Mozarab bishop by the name of Elipandus in 8th century Toledo maintained that Christ was “the adoptive son of the Father”, a belief deemed heretical by the Emperor Charlemagne. Some Mozarabs’ religious orientation veered towards this style of ‘adoptionism’: articulating their religious principles in a way deemed more palatable to the Muslims around them, particularly when they sought to ameliorate their social position. Yet not all in the Christian communities of Al-Andalus acculturated themselves to the new Muslim environment or sought to relinquish ties to their Visigothic-Christian past. Many Christians retained their faith, either secretly or openly. Others chose a drastically different path, seeking to sever themselves from an increasingly Islamicized society.
It is in the apologetic tracts of Eulogius (d. 859) and Paulus Alvarus (d. 861), prominent chroniclers of the period, wherein the social and cultural grievances of Christians arise and are brought into sharp relief. At the outset of Eulogius’ Memoriale sanctorum, grief provoked by the fall of Cordoba to the Caliphate is expressed:
Cordoba, however, once called Patricia, now called the Royal City, because of his [Abd al-Rahman’s] residence, has been exalted by him above all, elevated with honors, expanded in glory, piled full of riches, and with great energy filled with an abundance of all the delights of the world, more than one can believe or express. So much so that in every worldly pomp he exceeds, surpasses and excels the preceding kings of his race. And meanwhile, the church of the orthodox groans beneath his most grievous yoke and is beaten to destruction.
Eulogius’ mourns the geographic loss of Cordoba through his wistful invocation of its Roman appellation, Colonia Patricia Corduba. He also conveys the worldly excesses of its new ruler: Abd al-Rahman is characterized as a leader entrenched in ‘worldly pomp’ and opulence. The chronicler is also intent on illustrating the ways in which the auditory tranquility of the city’s landscape has been punctured by Islamic customs and traditions, most prominently the sound of the Adhan:
Today the priests of his impiety do the same, having been instructed by him, so that, in the manner of asses, with unhinged jaws and foul open lips, they emit that horrendous proclamation that they declare must be followed by the others: but not before they have stopped up their own ears with their fingers, as if it were some sort of sinful edict that their prophet himself could not bear to hear.
These pressures were brought to the fore in the 850s, producing the Cordovan martyr movement. It is noted in the sources that the movement was instigated by confrontations in the streets between Muslims and Christian priests. According to Eulogius’ account, a priest by the name of Perfectus was stopped by a group of Muslims and ordered to state his beliefs about Christ and Muhammad. He affirmed Christ’s divinity but elected not to speak of the prophet unless his interlocutors were prepared to make a pact of friendship. When the Muslims agreed, Perfectus attacked the prophet Muhammad as one who taught falsehoods and ‘led his followers to perdition.’ The next day, he was brought before the qadi and sentenced to death. Prior to his execution, Perfectus launched into another diatribe denouncing Muhammad. The actions of other martyrs in the movement varied in severity and scale, yet the prevailing purpose and cause of the movement appeared unified and is commemorated throughout Eulogius’ treatise as a testament to Christian resistance in the face of a domineering ruling class.
In terms of the polemical characteristics of the treatise, Eulogius is intent on highlighting the fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity which were, according to him, being buried under a culture of acculturation and accommodation. Theologically, Eulogius explained the ways in which Islam was not (and could never be) Christianity. Regardless of their belief in Jesus, Muslims did not believe in the divinity of Christ for Muhammad “…taught that Christ was the word of God and indeed the greatest of the prophets but not supported by the power of divinity; that he was similar to other men, not equal to their Father.” He portrayed the prophet as the precursor to the anti-Christand a sexually lascivious imposter whose message was a heretical doctrine. These vile tropes would endure through the ages. As a collective, Muslims were characterized as abhorrent and repugnant individuals whose entrenchment in the world and intemperance knew no bounds. Another chronicler of the period stated:
Muslims are puffed up with pride, languid in their enjoyment of fleshly acts, extravagant in eating, greedy usurpers in the acquisition of possessions and the pillaging of the poor, grasping without piety, liars without shame, deceitful without discernment, wanton without modesty, cruel without mercy, usurpers without justice, without honor, without truth, unfamiliar with kindness or compassion ignorant of the humility of piety, fickle, fashion-conscious [ornate], craft, cunning, and indeed not halfway but completely befouled in the dregs of every impiety, deriding humility as insanity, rejecting chastity as though it were filth, disparaging virginity as though it were the uncleanness of harlotry, putting the vices of the body before the virtues of the soul, advertising their characteristic way of life through their acts and deportment.
As Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh urges, let us be unrelenting in characterizing such rhetoric for what it is: cruel, hateful and deliberately ignorant of Islam and Muslims. While holding this to be true, in my mind, it also displays a level of anxious fragility on the part of the authors (one I have yet to theorize). Perhaps it is the ‘petty’ and ‘personal’ tenor of their writings which is so startling for, as one scholar, elucidates “their writings… emerged out of a mixture of ideological fanaticism and personal resentments.” Muslims are characterized as ‘usurpers’ which was presumably aimed at a court official who had taken the above polemicists’ land. Moreover, Eulogius and his ilk were fulminating in a period wherein Muslims had superseded Christians in ways hitherto never envisioned. It was not solely their military and political excellence that provoked rage—it was their cultural and artistic excellence and the ways in which it eclipsed Latinite culture. One cleric lamented, “[t]he Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic…they have forgotten their language.” Moreover, it is vital to acknowledge the differing reception of these martyrs in the Córdoban Christian community. While some did portray them as martyrs of the ‘classical Roman type,’ others critiqued their actions as radical self-immolators whose ‘unprovoked outbursts’ undermined the pragmatic relationship between the Christian community and their Muslim rulers. Regardless of the varied reception of the martyr movement at the time, the symbolic power of martyrological discourse endured in Iberia. For example, Spaniards in the medieval and early modern era of the Reconquista depicted the martyr movement as a proto-nationalist effort of ‘true Christian Spaniards’ who sought to assert their Visigothic identity against the discriminatory policies of Muslim rulers. In their estimation, although dhimmis were granted certain rights, they were perpetually perceived as the ‘other’, regardless of the extent of their assimilation into a growing Arabized society. The ninth century Cordovan martyr movement was a key watershed moment in which anti-Islamic discourse manifested and propelled the cause itself. The afterlife of the ‘Martyrs of Cordova’ movement survived, was commemorated and memorialized as a pinnacle episode in the ‘struggle’ against the ‘pernicious’ forces of Islamic conquest. Martyrdom constitutes a key episode in the collective consciousness of Catholic resistance and sacrifice in the face of the prototypical barbarism of the ‘Saracens’. The symbolic power of the martyr lives on and is revered in a discourse that centers on the immortal sacrifice of Christians and the necessary death of the Muslim in that pursuit.
We live in the world and in that world, ideas are born, circulated, codified and bear material implications. Gabriel Rockhill states, “…ideas are not separate from reality, hovering above it in a pristine realm of conceptual purity. They are developed within particular, concrete circumstances.” In a similar vein, analyzing anti-Islamic rhetoric is not, at least for this writer, a removed endeavor performed in a sealed vessel. The process is fraught with a professional impulse to objectively evaluate and assess the ‘sources’ whilst simultaneously gesturing towards potential underlying social and political motivations for the vituperative characteristics of anti-Islamic narratives, regardless of the time in which they manifest. As Suzanne Conklin Akbari cautiously reminds, “If we are to read canonical writers of the so-called Western tradition today, what ground do we read them on? My question is not ‘Should we read them,’ but rather ‘How do we read them.’” Admittedly, I continue to grapple with this process. For now, I offer one interpretative leap: in the case of the martyr movement, there is a level of psychosocial fragility underlying the polemic of the chroniclers and, in some ways, it reveals more about the authors themselves than the targets of their vitriol.
Bio description: Amanie Antar is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto where she researches premodern iterations of anti-Islamic discourse in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean context, with a specialized focus on Iberia.
