#72, November 4th, 2005

 Lionizing the Trickster

At a dinner of philosophers last week, a Professor of Philosophy from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Jaime de Salas, suggested that teaching American political philosophy abroad these days was becoming easier and easier. Google and Amazon could take care of many of the bibliographic limitations that non-American academics in the past used to have. Now it was relatively easy for everyone to keep current with the literature and the major debates swirling around the American Academy. Furthermore, they could now participate in these same debates.

This made sense to me, and I added that the same was true for the study of history, but what was also becoming increasingly clear was that historians were beginning to think differently about their subjects. Through their understanding of post-colonial studies and literary criticism, and all those other dangerous interventions, historians have become more appreciative of the need to imagine that their subjects did the equivalent of googling and surfing the web. They may have had more limited technology, yet their imaginations were much more expansive than they were given credit for. They were not just tied to their villages unlikely to come into contact with people from other districts and other continents, or people of a different race or religion.

The other night, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis gave a superb lecture on her book which will be published early in 2006, on the life and work of Al-Hassan Ibn-Muhammad al-Wezzani. Better known as Leo Africanus, Al-Hassan was born in Granada in Spain in 1493 or 1494 of well-educated and affluent Moorish parents.  He became a soldier, a merchant, and an ambassador, before being captured by Christian pirates in 1518. The pirates, for some reason that I don’t recall from the talk, handed him over to Pope Leo X, who essentially gave him freedom to roam in Rome. He was baptized, Giovanni Leone, hence the name by which he became known.

Al-Hassan went on to write The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained, a book that would be published posthumously and which would receive Christianizing treatment at the hands of its editors. The book was also translated into several languages in the course of the following century.

The thrust of Davis’ artful presentation was Al-Hassan as the trickster, crossing cultural boundaries, and managing to make critical statements about European culture without offending his hosts. He also hid well his continued worship of Islam in the face of the desire of the Pope and his entourage that he should become Christian like them.

What came to mind on hearing this is Cervantes’ use of the Moor as the historian for his hero, Don Quijote. For Cervantes deploys this historian in a role similar to that performed by Al-Hassan for his readers. Here, in Don Quijote, we find a Moorish commentator providing an objective and detached perspective of something central to western culture and criticism – namely the long-lost practice and genre of romance (which clearly was, in Cervantes’ view at least, something of questionable provenance). Asked about this, Davis informed me that it was indeed possible that Cervantes had read one of the translations of Leo Africanus and that he may indeed have been invoking him through this historian-narrator. She also suggested that this might have worked well as an epilogue to her book, and that she would look into it further. It might even, perhaps, make an excellent article in its own right. Stay tuned – perhaps something will come of this.