Having
quoted a review of Richard Fletcher's Moorish Spain, I decided to go
back to the original. The word convivencia
doesn't appear in the index but, fortunately, I'd marked the relevant
text. And here it is, for completion: Moorish
Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was a land of
tranquility. . . . The Romantic interpretation of Andalusi history
has been propagated by writers such as Washington Irvine and Richar Ford. . .
. The nostalgia of Maghribi writers was reinforced by the romantic
vision of the nineteenth century. This could be flavoured with a dash
of Protestant prejudice from the Anglo Saxon world. A powerful
mixture. . . . Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened
society even in its most cultivated epoch. The Mozarabic Christian
communities whom John of Gorze met on his embassy to Córdoba were
cowed and demoralised. Ibn Hazm, so often and misleadingly presented
as a beacon of enlightenment, was learned but not open-minded. The
Christians of al-Andalus were second class citizens like Christians
under Muslim rule elsewhere in the world such as the Copts of Egypt.
What else should we expect to find? The treatment of Mozarabs by
their Islamic rulers foreshadows that of the Mudejars by their
Christian ones. If the disabilities experienced by the Mudejars can
be known in more detail than those of the Mozarabs, this is owing to
the changing nature and survival of our sources; we know far more
about the thirteenth and fourteenth century than we do about the
tenth and eleventh.
Back to the present and an Advance Scandal Warning: We
already know that a German princess called Corinna is romantically
linked with the king of Spain but the word on the street is that she
has also been dallying with the latter's son-in-law, who's currently
up before the beak for massive financial skulduggery. Sexy emails
which prove this are said to be in the hands of one of the
co-defendants, who's naturally threatening to publish them, if his
trial continues. You couldn't make it up, could you? But it could all
be stuff and nonsense and we will have to wait and see. It's certainly
plausible but almost everything is in Spain these days. Who knows,
she should have been using the Palace for meetings with the Pope.
Which would explain one major event of the last week or so. And also
why His Eminence came here so often. As it were.
Finally
. . . I watched Chinatown
last night, for only the second time since it came out in the mid
70s. A classy film. Or as someone put it: There
is a word, impossible to spell, that describes the alignment of solar
bodies like the planets when they all fall into place together. A
similar word would describe this film. Everything about it is right.
If my memory serves me right, my first daughter was named after one
of the stars. And I don't mean Jack Nicholson. Anyway, if you haven't
seen it, I wholeheartedly recommend it. Just make sure you don't miss
a line as, if you do, you've no chance of keeping up with the plot. Best, then, not to see it with a chatty Spanish woman. Unless you can rewind.
The
word is Syzygy, by the way.
But Alfie knew that, even if you didn't.
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