Signs of Spectacular Resistance: The Spanish Moor and British Orientalism

“In 1492,” as the children's rhyme goes, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue….” The rhyme makes no mention of another, equally momentous and cataclysmic event of that year: the fall of the Nasrid dynasty bringing to a close Islam's 750-year stewardship of Spain. It is a matter of wonder how rapidly and completely that history has been willed into forgetfulness to the point where, to say the least, there exists a frozen zone in the European imagination when it comes to the subject matter of Khalid Bekkaoui's fascinating book. The historical coincidence of Columbus and Abu-Abdullah, New World discoveries and Old World extinctions, marks a momentous transition in our histories, as Europe disowned its past and turned towards an imperial future beyond its borders. Muslims suffered most from the forced conversions, burned libraries and ethnic cleansings, but the Inquisition also severed Spain, and consequently Europe, from its Muslim inheritance to the point where the very term, “The Spanish Moor,” conjures a strange contradiction: a European Muslim, between cultures, both included and excluded, neither the one nor the other. Europe had created its first, but by no means its last, colonial hybrid. But, however much the Catholic monarchs might have wished it, Al-Andalus did not simply disappear; its influence endures – often faint and elusive, sometimes powerful and conspicuous – in European customs, folklore, food, medicine, mathematics, music, science, architecture, language. And on the British stage. William Congreve, born just a few short kilometres from where I write this, in Bardsey, a village close to Leeds, has Manuel say to the captive Zara in The Mourning Bride: “I release you, / And by releasing you, enslave myself.” This short exchange captures, for me, the essence of Dr. Bekkaoui's inquiry. Ranging as it does from Dekker to Stockdale, from the end of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, his book returns us again and again to those moments when the contradictory states of releasing and enslaving become peculiarly enmeshed in each other. In this illuminating work, the Spanish Moors, as seen by dramatists from this distant island, emerge in all their perplexing “betweenness” as being capable of enslaving their captors. Khalid Bekkaoui convincingly argues that the Spanish Moor fulfils the role of a speculum mentis on the English stage; to act as simulacrum of fear and loathing, but also of admiration and desire. Abandoned by history, the Spanish Moor's liminal nature provides Dekker, Dryden, Congreve, Stockdale and numerous others with a theatrical space where they can entertain and explore ambivalent emotions about nationhood and historical destiny, where they can permit their political and religious sympathies to be displayed, where they can test prevailing notions of the integrity of race and miscegenation. The Spanish Moor is also a prognostication of their own nation's engagement with others: are these stories of liberation or colonisation? Of Fath or Reconquesta? Who has dominium over the world? None of these texts, Dr. Bekkaoui argues, presents us with a wholly ‘non-coercive knowledge’ of the other, but the Moor does exist as an uncanny double who persistently challenges notions of Western identity and allows us to peer into the contradictory codes inherent in texts fractured by profound anxieties.