La Convivencia and La Reconquista
Two Tendencies that Shape the Modern World
by Rev. Gilbert Friend Jones
Sept 8, 2019
Good Morning.
In February 2001 I traveled to Berlin to participate in the World Council of Churches’ launch of The Decade to Overcome Violence.
The Council envisioned ten years of creative focus on reducing violence of many kinds. It was an optimistic if solemn assembly. Little did any of us realize that, while we were meeting, extremists were training to weaponize passenger planes and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A mere seven months later those terrorists set the world on a far more violent path.
As I watched the drama of September 11 unfold on my television screen, I was stunned and disoriented. But as the pastor of a large congregation in Atlanta, I also felt the need to provide a place and a time where people could gather in mutual support. Many colleagues said that they themselves were devasted.
Finally, three of us – an African American pastor, a Jewish rabbi and I – offered a simple service of sharing and silence for those who came.
One of the take-aways from that gathering was that none of us knew any Muslim leaders. We could only imagine the pain and fear the Islamic community must be feeling. There were a number of mosques in Atlanta, but we didn’t know anyone to whom we could reach out in solidarity or witness. We needed their presence in this service - and surely they needed ours - but it was not to be.
Soon thereafter we discovered that we were not alone in our hunger to build a meaningful interfaith community. Other faith leaders from local churches, synagogues, mosques, spiritual life centers and temples also were seeking ways to engage one another in meaningful ways.
We organized the Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta, a vital and everchanging program of interfaith fellowship, dialogue, education, prayer and advocacy. It has since spawned a host of additional interfaith partners working together in the Atlanta area.
One of those programs was the brainchild of Wayne Smith. Wayne had built the Friendship Force into a global people-to-people diplomacy enterprise during the Cold War. Tens of thousands of people around the world have made lasting friendships despite hostile relations between their governments.
After September 11, Wayne decided to take an equal number of Christians, Muslims and Jews from Atlanta on a “pilgrimage”.
There would be a faith leader from each tradition. There would be African Americans and Caucasians participating. Gay clergy were invited to give leadership. Our roommates were assigned – and we switched every three days to assure that we always roomed with individuals whose faiths differed from our own. All of us had to lead parts of the journey. We had to share our own stories. Wayne set the itinerary in Turkey and made sure that we visited sites sacred to each tradition. Thus was born World Pilgrims.
Since then nearly 500 Atlantans have shared an interfaith pilgrimage. They are part of a large and vibrant interfaith community.
In 2004 and 2006 I was privileged to organize and lead the next two pilgrimages. We went to Morocco, Gibraltar and Spain. It was important to me to include young people, especially those who were training for careers as religious leaders. It was important to me to model inclusion, and to have women as well as men among the faith leaders for each journey.
Why Spain? Spain had experienced ethnic, political and religious layering over the centuries that made it fertile ground for interfaith travelers. At one time Spain also had evolved a very high civilization in which Judaism, Islam and Christianity intermingled, and in which multiple ethnicities flourished simultaneously. Classical Greek and Roman literature and philosophy had been preserved and transmitted in Spain, and the sciences and arts were highly advanced. That’s what I’d like to talk about this morning.
First the layering:
You may remember that Rome had colonized Spain, calling it Iberia.
As the Empire retreated, Iberia was overrun by Gothic tribes who in turn converted to Christianity, creating the Visigoth culture. To them, this land was Hispania. Visigothic Christians were querulous among themselves, harsh overlords to others, dogmatic to a fault, and fiercely anti-Semitic.
Jews have lived in Spain since Biblical times. Under the Romans, and again under Islamic rule, Spain became home to the largest concentrations of Jews in the world. They called this land Sepharad. From them, of course, came the great Sephardic branch of Judaism.
All these stories became one in Andalusia or, as the Muslims called it, Al-Andalus.
But this story didn’t begin in Spain. It began in Arabia.
From 610 to 631 CE, the Prophet Muhammad experienced revelations that were to become the Qur’an. In 630 CE he conquered Mecca and a new Islamic reality rapidly overwhelmed most of the Arabian Peninsula. A mere thirty years later, Islam came to dominate 33 million people and 4.3 million acres of territory. It had become one of the world’s largest empires.
After Muhammad’s death, he soon was succeeded by the highly civilized and sophisticated Umayyad Caliphate. The Umayyads ruled this new Islamic empire from their urbane capital in Damascus.
A second part of our story begins in Visigothic Spain. To revenge a family insult, a powerful Visigothic nobleman initiated a fateful alliance with the governor of Tangiers against Roderic, the Visigothic king. The intrepid Ṭāriq Ibn Ziyad secretly brought his Muslim army from Tangiers into Spain via Gibraltar.
(To this day, “Gibraltar” bears the name of this Islamic conqueror. The Arabs called it “Jabal al-Ṭāriq” which simply meant Mount Ṭāriq. “Gibraltar” is an obvious corruption of the Arabic.)
On April 26, 711 CE Ṭāriq’s army, consisting of less than 10,000 Berber horsemen, landed on the Iberian Peninsula. King Roderic brought nearly 100,000 troops against him, but Ṭāriq won decisively. It is said that Spain’s Jews, who had received such harsh treatment under the Visigothic Christians, cheered and welcomed the invaders.
Having defeated Roderic, Ṭāriq and his army went on to capture Córdoba, Toledo and Caracca – adding significant territory to the expanding Islamic Umayyad empire.
But back in Damascus, the Umayyads were considered too secular and decadent by their rivals. They were overthrown by the ʿAbbāsids in 750 CE. All the members of the Umayyad family were put to the sword, and an ʿAbbāsids Caliphate was established in Bagdad. Every member of the large Umayyad family was slain but one.
‘Abd al-Raḥmān was a very young man, perhaps 20 years old. Half Arab and half Berber, he escaped into North Africa.
This exiled young Umayyad prince, ‘Abd al- Raḥmān, entered Spain in 750 CE. He made his way to Córdoba where he established the capital of Al-Andalus and what would become the second Umayyad dynasty of Islam.
About 150 years later, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III declared himself Caliph. Under his rule, Córdoba grew to become the largest and most cultured city of Europe. It was the seat of Europe’s first academy of medicine and a center for geographers, architects, craftsmen, artists, and scholars of every kind. Córdoba rivaled the splendors of Damascus or Baghdad. The court of Córdoba, now prosperous, cultivated Arabic literature and the refinements of Middle Eastern life.
Abd al-Raḥmān III’s navy dominated the western Mediterranean. He controlled North Africa. He maintained diplomatic relations with the Byzantine Empire and the various rulers of Europe. Christian kings of northern Spain owed their sovereignty to his support.
The library of Córdoba boasted a collection of more than 400,000 books. From Córdoba the world received algebra and other advances in math, astronomy, chemistry and medicine, - including such products as astrolabes and antiseptics.
The Umayyads had a long tradition of tolerance – especially for so-called “People of the Book”, for Jews and Christians. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s son, al-Ḥakam II, like his father, loved learning. He encouraged writers and thinkers who were not strictly orthodox. Among them were Averroes, Maimonides and Ibn ‘Arabi to mention just three, three of the greatest philosophers the world has ever known.
Averroes work on Aristotle left an indelible mark on the intellectual history of Western civilization.
Maimonides’ mother tongue may have been Arabic, but he is universally regarded as the most important Jewish thinker in the last 2,000 years. The great Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, a near contemporary of both, spoke generously of his indebtedness to Averroes and Maimonides in his own theological development.
Meanwhile, in Sevilla, Ibn ‘Arabi gave voice to the deeply mystical tradition of Sufism. His influence quickly spread throughout the world, from the celebrated poet known to us as Rumi, to Dante, the great Italian poet.
During this period of extended Islamic rule, Christians, Jews and Muslims created a uniquely cultured co-existence that the rest of the world could only envy.
To this day many Jews remember it as their “Golden Age”. The Hebrew language came into its own and great Jewish poets began to sing in a uniquely Jewish voice.
One can still find in the literature, art and architecture of Al-Andalus the great synergism of co-existence, of La Convivencia.
Today’s pilgrim will see Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions carved side-by-side into the walls of Toledo’s synagogues. She will see tributes in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and primitive Spanish preserved on the tombs of Christian kings. In the battles of the times, she will learn that it was not uncommon for Christians to enlist Muslims in their fights against other Christians, or for Muslims to entrust the command of their forces to Jews.
Jews held high offices in both Islamic and Christian courts. Jews translated Arabic documents under Christian auspices into European Romance languages, and great Greek and Roman classical texts into Arabic. While the rest of Europe suffered through superstitions and oppressions in the Dark Ages, a German nun longingly called Córdoba “the ornament of the world”. To her, it was a place characterized by tolerance, dialogue and imagination.
At the same time, the more sectarian Muslims and Christians looked with horror at what they considered apostasy. Waves of fundamentalist Berbers and other Muslims would periodically sweep through Andalucía and wreak havoc on what they saw as a decadent betrayal of their faith. (Perhaps they wanted “to put God back into government.) People such as Averroes, Maimonides and Ibn ‘Arabi all were driven into exile.
In addition, the smaller Christian kingdoms of the north never accepted the defeat of their faith. When they weren’t fighting each other, they launched a rather uncoordinated “Reconquista” or reconquest of what they saw as rightfully their lands. Their bumper stickers might have proclaimed, “Make Iberia Great Again”. Their chants might have sounded like, “They (Jews, Muslims) will not replace us!”
Sadly, the Reconquista culminated in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, the last remaining center of Islamic culture. They united the peninsula once more under a censorious and xenophobic Christian rule.
Among their first acts were edicts requiring Muslims and Jews to convert or flee. Indeed, there are Jewish families today who still have keys their ancestors carried with them into this Diaspora. The Inquisition was empowered.
As interfaith pilgrims travelling together, it was painful to see Santiago Matamoros (Saint James, the Moor-Slayer) trampling over Muslims in reredoses above the altars of many Spanish churches. The beautiful synagogues of Toledo were boorishly converted into churches. The delicate symmetries that inspired and comforted generations of Jews were destroyed.
But the greatest blasphemy came in Córdoba itself.
King Carlos ordered that the grand mosque, one of the most splendid creations of Al-Andalus, be converted into a Catholic church. A large basilica was thrust rudely into the very center of this vast and open prayer hall.
It is said that when he saw it, Carlos himself exclaimed, “You have destroyed something that was unique in the world and have put in its place something you can see anywhere.”
But when he saw it, my friend Imam Plemon El-Amin could only weep. “I would rather they had completely leveled the place,” he said.
A new mosque recently opened in Granada, the first in Spain in 500 years. Not knowing about this, Imam Plemon and I checked into our hotel and asked if there were any mosques in town. “One mosque is too many,” came the gruff reply. Yet in the same hotel, when we asked to hold a Shabbat service, within a few hours the staff somehow cleared out a wedding party, prepared a Kosher meal, boiled the utensils, and went out of their way to accommodate our diversity.
We found the new mosque. It is an exquisite little gem with a breath-taking view of the Alhambra. We sat on the floor together with Luís Sánchez Nogales, a local Muslim professor.
He told us of the 18 years of fees and frustrations it took to get government permits to build the mosque. When it was finally authorized, this building, including its minaret or prayer tower, had to be smaller and lower than a nearby church.
When we tried to engage him in a conversation about La Convivencia, he said this: “The Convivencia that you seek did not exist as a pristine moment in the past. It exists only as a possibility for the future. It is not something that you will discover as you visit sacred sites. It can only be created as you grow to know each other.”
Indeed, the historical records show that La Convivencia (Coexistence) and the Reconquista (Reaction) existed simultaneously. Sometimes one was ascendant, and sometimes the other.
When we look below the surface, we see that — then, like now — our religions were divided against themselves as much as against each other — Muslim against Muslim, Christian against Christian — as well as Muslim, Jew and Christian against each other. Celts, Romans, Goths, Arabs, Berbers and Jews collectively created a unique civilization, and at the same time often saw each other as an enemy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Al-Andalus — like our world today — really was a collection of tensions and tendencies — tendencies toward unity and unprecedented civilized advancement, and tendencies toward sectarian strife and the brutal deconstruction of this achievement. Both existed together simultaneously — respect and detestation, mutual commitment and fierce competition, cooperation and duplicity. It was not that different from today.
When the spirit of La Convivencia prevails, it results in a succession of brilliant accomplishments. But when it fails, the consequences are unimaginably horrible.
As we were crossing the Mediterranean Rabbi Analia Bortz gathered us all on the deck of the ship. “This is a very important journey for me personally,” she said. “Over 500 years ago my family was driven from Spain. They were not allowed to carry anything of value with them. They lost everything. They made their way to Cairo, and eventually to Argentina.”
There was a long, emotional pause. “But now,” she said, we are reversing that history. We are going back. We – Jews, Muslims and Christians – are going back, and we are going back together.”
So let us take courage. There have been other such times when flesh-and-blood human beings struggled against their lower impulses and created great and inclusive civilizations like Al-Andalus, times and places of enduring intellectual, material and spiritual excellence.
When things appear hopeless, we must be determined to make them otherwise.
We have no choice. In today’s world, we must carry on.
Thank you.
In February 2001 I traveled to Berlin to participate in the World Council of Churches’ launch of The Decade to Overcome Violence.
The Council envisioned ten years of creative focus on reducing violence of many kinds. It was an optimistic if solemn assembly. Little did any of us realize that, while we were meeting, extremists were training to weaponize passenger planes and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A mere seven months later those terrorists set the world on a far more violent path.
As I watched the drama of September 11 unfold on my television screen, I was stunned and disoriented. But as the pastor of a large congregation in Atlanta, I also felt the need to provide a place and a time where people could gather in mutual support. Many colleagues said that they themselves were devasted.
Finally, three of us – an African American pastor, a Jewish rabbi and I – offered a simple service of sharing and silence for those who came.
One of the take-aways from that gathering was that none of us knew any Muslim leaders. We could only imagine the pain and fear the Islamic community must be feeling. There were a number of mosques in Atlanta, but we didn’t know anyone to whom we could reach out in solidarity or witness. We needed their presence in this service - and surely they needed ours - but it was not to be.
Soon thereafter we discovered that we were not alone in our hunger to build a meaningful interfaith community. Other faith leaders from local churches, synagogues, mosques, spiritual life centers and temples also were seeking ways to engage one another in meaningful ways.
We organized the Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta, a vital and everchanging program of interfaith fellowship, dialogue, education, prayer and advocacy. It has since spawned a host of additional interfaith partners working together in the Atlanta area.
One of those programs was the brainchild of Wayne Smith. Wayne had built the Friendship Force into a global people-to-people diplomacy enterprise during the Cold War. Tens of thousands of people around the world have made lasting friendships despite hostile relations between their governments.
After September 11, Wayne decided to take an equal number of Christians, Muslims and Jews from Atlanta on a “pilgrimage”.
There would be a faith leader from each tradition. There would be African Americans and Caucasians participating. Gay clergy were invited to give leadership. Our roommates were assigned – and we switched every three days to assure that we always roomed with individuals whose faiths differed from our own. All of us had to lead parts of the journey. We had to share our own stories. Wayne set the itinerary in Turkey and made sure that we visited sites sacred to each tradition. Thus was born World Pilgrims.
Since then nearly 500 Atlantans have shared an interfaith pilgrimage. They are part of a large and vibrant interfaith community.
In 2004 and 2006 I was privileged to organize and lead the next two pilgrimages. We went to Morocco, Gibraltar and Spain. It was important to me to include young people, especially those who were training for careers as religious leaders. It was important to me to model inclusion, and to have women as well as men among the faith leaders for each journey.
Why Spain? Spain had experienced ethnic, political and religious layering over the centuries that made it fertile ground for interfaith travelers. At one time Spain also had evolved a very high civilization in which Judaism, Islam and Christianity intermingled, and in which multiple ethnicities flourished simultaneously. Classical Greek and Roman literature and philosophy had been preserved and transmitted in Spain, and the sciences and arts were highly advanced. That’s what I’d like to talk about this morning.
First the layering:
You may remember that Rome had colonized Spain, calling it Iberia.
As the Empire retreated, Iberia was overrun by Gothic tribes who in turn converted to Christianity, creating the Visigoth culture. To them, this land was Hispania. Visigothic Christians were querulous among themselves, harsh overlords to others, dogmatic to a fault, and fiercely anti-Semitic.
Jews have lived in Spain since Biblical times. Under the Romans, and again under Islamic rule, Spain became home to the largest concentrations of Jews in the world. They called this land Sepharad. From them, of course, came the great Sephardic branch of Judaism.
All these stories became one in Andalusia or, as the Muslims called it, Al-Andalus.
But this story didn’t begin in Spain. It began in Arabia.
From 610 to 631 CE, the Prophet Muhammad experienced revelations that were to become the Qur’an. In 630 CE he conquered Mecca and a new Islamic reality rapidly overwhelmed most of the Arabian Peninsula. A mere thirty years later, Islam came to dominate 33 million people and 4.3 million acres of territory. It had become one of the world’s largest empires.
After Muhammad’s death, he soon was succeeded by the highly civilized and sophisticated Umayyad Caliphate. The Umayyads ruled this new Islamic empire from their urbane capital in Damascus.
A second part of our story begins in Visigothic Spain. To revenge a family insult, a powerful Visigothic nobleman initiated a fateful alliance with the governor of Tangiers against Roderic, the Visigothic king. The intrepid Ṭāriq Ibn Ziyad secretly brought his Muslim army from Tangiers into Spain via Gibraltar.
(To this day, “Gibraltar” bears the name of this Islamic conqueror. The Arabs called it “Jabal al-Ṭāriq” which simply meant Mount Ṭāriq. “Gibraltar” is an obvious corruption of the Arabic.)
On April 26, 711 CE Ṭāriq’s army, consisting of less than 10,000 Berber horsemen, landed on the Iberian Peninsula. King Roderic brought nearly 100,000 troops against him, but Ṭāriq won decisively. It is said that Spain’s Jews, who had received such harsh treatment under the Visigothic Christians, cheered and welcomed the invaders.
Having defeated Roderic, Ṭāriq and his army went on to capture Córdoba, Toledo and Caracca – adding significant territory to the expanding Islamic Umayyad empire.
But back in Damascus, the Umayyads were considered too secular and decadent by their rivals. They were overthrown by the ʿAbbāsids in 750 CE. All the members of the Umayyad family were put to the sword, and an ʿAbbāsids Caliphate was established in Bagdad. Every member of the large Umayyad family was slain but one.
‘Abd al-Raḥmān was a very young man, perhaps 20 years old. Half Arab and half Berber, he escaped into North Africa.
This exiled young Umayyad prince, ‘Abd al- Raḥmān, entered Spain in 750 CE. He made his way to Córdoba where he established the capital of Al-Andalus and what would become the second Umayyad dynasty of Islam.
About 150 years later, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III declared himself Caliph. Under his rule, Córdoba grew to become the largest and most cultured city of Europe. It was the seat of Europe’s first academy of medicine and a center for geographers, architects, craftsmen, artists, and scholars of every kind. Córdoba rivaled the splendors of Damascus or Baghdad. The court of Córdoba, now prosperous, cultivated Arabic literature and the refinements of Middle Eastern life.
Abd al-Raḥmān III’s navy dominated the western Mediterranean. He controlled North Africa. He maintained diplomatic relations with the Byzantine Empire and the various rulers of Europe. Christian kings of northern Spain owed their sovereignty to his support.
The library of Córdoba boasted a collection of more than 400,000 books. From Córdoba the world received algebra and other advances in math, astronomy, chemistry and medicine, - including such products as astrolabes and antiseptics.
The Umayyads had a long tradition of tolerance – especially for so-called “People of the Book”, for Jews and Christians. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s son, al-Ḥakam II, like his father, loved learning. He encouraged writers and thinkers who were not strictly orthodox. Among them were Averroes, Maimonides and Ibn ‘Arabi to mention just three, three of the greatest philosophers the world has ever known.
Averroes work on Aristotle left an indelible mark on the intellectual history of Western civilization.
Maimonides’ mother tongue may have been Arabic, but he is universally regarded as the most important Jewish thinker in the last 2,000 years. The great Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, a near contemporary of both, spoke generously of his indebtedness to Averroes and Maimonides in his own theological development.
Meanwhile, in Sevilla, Ibn ‘Arabi gave voice to the deeply mystical tradition of Sufism. His influence quickly spread throughout the world, from the celebrated poet known to us as Rumi, to Dante, the great Italian poet.
During this period of extended Islamic rule, Christians, Jews and Muslims created a uniquely cultured co-existence that the rest of the world could only envy.
To this day many Jews remember it as their “Golden Age”. The Hebrew language came into its own and great Jewish poets began to sing in a uniquely Jewish voice.
One can still find in the literature, art and architecture of Al-Andalus the great synergism of co-existence, of La Convivencia.
Today’s pilgrim will see Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions carved side-by-side into the walls of Toledo’s synagogues. She will see tributes in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and primitive Spanish preserved on the tombs of Christian kings. In the battles of the times, she will learn that it was not uncommon for Christians to enlist Muslims in their fights against other Christians, or for Muslims to entrust the command of their forces to Jews.
Jews held high offices in both Islamic and Christian courts. Jews translated Arabic documents under Christian auspices into European Romance languages, and great Greek and Roman classical texts into Arabic. While the rest of Europe suffered through superstitions and oppressions in the Dark Ages, a German nun longingly called Córdoba “the ornament of the world”. To her, it was a place characterized by tolerance, dialogue and imagination.
At the same time, the more sectarian Muslims and Christians looked with horror at what they considered apostasy. Waves of fundamentalist Berbers and other Muslims would periodically sweep through Andalucía and wreak havoc on what they saw as a decadent betrayal of their faith. (Perhaps they wanted “to put God back into government.) People such as Averroes, Maimonides and Ibn ‘Arabi all were driven into exile.
In addition, the smaller Christian kingdoms of the north never accepted the defeat of their faith. When they weren’t fighting each other, they launched a rather uncoordinated “Reconquista” or reconquest of what they saw as rightfully their lands. Their bumper stickers might have proclaimed, “Make Iberia Great Again”. Their chants might have sounded like, “They (Jews, Muslims) will not replace us!”
Sadly, the Reconquista culminated in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, the last remaining center of Islamic culture. They united the peninsula once more under a censorious and xenophobic Christian rule.
Among their first acts were edicts requiring Muslims and Jews to convert or flee. Indeed, there are Jewish families today who still have keys their ancestors carried with them into this Diaspora. The Inquisition was empowered.
As interfaith pilgrims travelling together, it was painful to see Santiago Matamoros (Saint James, the Moor-Slayer) trampling over Muslims in reredoses above the altars of many Spanish churches. The beautiful synagogues of Toledo were boorishly converted into churches. The delicate symmetries that inspired and comforted generations of Jews were destroyed.
But the greatest blasphemy came in Córdoba itself.
King Carlos ordered that the grand mosque, one of the most splendid creations of Al-Andalus, be converted into a Catholic church. A large basilica was thrust rudely into the very center of this vast and open prayer hall.
It is said that when he saw it, Carlos himself exclaimed, “You have destroyed something that was unique in the world and have put in its place something you can see anywhere.”
But when he saw it, my friend Imam Plemon El-Amin could only weep. “I would rather they had completely leveled the place,” he said.
A new mosque recently opened in Granada, the first in Spain in 500 years. Not knowing about this, Imam Plemon and I checked into our hotel and asked if there were any mosques in town. “One mosque is too many,” came the gruff reply. Yet in the same hotel, when we asked to hold a Shabbat service, within a few hours the staff somehow cleared out a wedding party, prepared a Kosher meal, boiled the utensils, and went out of their way to accommodate our diversity.
We found the new mosque. It is an exquisite little gem with a breath-taking view of the Alhambra. We sat on the floor together with Luís Sánchez Nogales, a local Muslim professor.
He told us of the 18 years of fees and frustrations it took to get government permits to build the mosque. When it was finally authorized, this building, including its minaret or prayer tower, had to be smaller and lower than a nearby church.
When we tried to engage him in a conversation about La Convivencia, he said this: “The Convivencia that you seek did not exist as a pristine moment in the past. It exists only as a possibility for the future. It is not something that you will discover as you visit sacred sites. It can only be created as you grow to know each other.”
Indeed, the historical records show that La Convivencia (Coexistence) and the Reconquista (Reaction) existed simultaneously. Sometimes one was ascendant, and sometimes the other.
When we look below the surface, we see that — then, like now — our religions were divided against themselves as much as against each other — Muslim against Muslim, Christian against Christian — as well as Muslim, Jew and Christian against each other. Celts, Romans, Goths, Arabs, Berbers and Jews collectively created a unique civilization, and at the same time often saw each other as an enemy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Al-Andalus — like our world today — really was a collection of tensions and tendencies — tendencies toward unity and unprecedented civilized advancement, and tendencies toward sectarian strife and the brutal deconstruction of this achievement. Both existed together simultaneously — respect and detestation, mutual commitment and fierce competition, cooperation and duplicity. It was not that different from today.
When the spirit of La Convivencia prevails, it results in a succession of brilliant accomplishments. But when it fails, the consequences are unimaginably horrible.
As we were crossing the Mediterranean Rabbi Analia Bortz gathered us all on the deck of the ship. “This is a very important journey for me personally,” she said. “Over 500 years ago my family was driven from Spain. They were not allowed to carry anything of value with them. They lost everything. They made their way to Cairo, and eventually to Argentina.”
There was a long, emotional pause. “But now,” she said, we are reversing that history. We are going back. We – Jews, Muslims and Christians – are going back, and we are going back together.”
So let us take courage. There have been other such times when flesh-and-blood human beings struggled against their lower impulses and created great and inclusive civilizations like Al-Andalus, times and places of enduring intellectual, material and spiritual excellence.
When things appear hopeless, we must be determined to make them otherwise.
We have no choice. In today’s world, we must carry on.
Thank you.