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There's a good reason why anti-Muslim ideology hasn't found a home in Portugal
by ROBERT FISK
The ramparts of the Portuguese Castle of the Moors - "Castelo dos
Mouros" - fell to the Christians of the Second Crusade in 1147, a
bunch of thieves and drunkards, according to local reports, which
included a fair number of Brits. There's a story that a huge fortune
in gold and coins still lies beneath the castle's broken and
much-restored walls, hidden there by the Moors when Afonso Henriques'
thugs were climbing the hills above Sintra. My guess is there's none.
Our relations with the Muslims have always revolved, it seems to me,
around money and jealousy. Besides, the Crusaders looted their way
across Lisbon - after a solemn agreement with the King that they could
do so - and then massacred and raped their way through the
panic-stricken Muslim population.
It was the only victory the Second Crusade achieved - things went
badly wrong for it in the real Middle East. After that - and the
15th-century expulsion of the Muslims - Portugal's conflict with the
region was economic rather than military, trying to grab the Indian
trade routes from Yemeni Arabs. When Vasco da Gama "discovered" India
and reached Calicut (Calcutta) on 20 May 1498 - this story comes from
Warwick Ball's Out of Arabia - he was greeted by an Arab from Tunisia
with the words "May the devil take you! What brought you here?"
But that was about it. Only well over four hundred years later do we
find the Christian nationalist dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar -
who kept Portugal neutral in the Second World War and thus preserved
its "oldest ally" relationship with Britain - declaring that in the
15th and 16th centuries, his country had defended "Christian
civilisation against Islam", a remark that might have come from Viktor
Orban of Hungary today. It was historical rubbish, and may be the
reason why there is no anti-Muslim ideology in Portugal. If you visit
the enormous tomb of Da Gama in the Jeronimos Monastery church at
Belem, the catafalque carries two magnificent sculptures of medieval
merchant ships but no reference to Muslims. Da Gama's sword is
sheathed under stone drapery. The Manueline monastery cloisters which
I walked through next door, however, are dripping with Arab-style
archways and Arabesque tiles (which you might find today in Algeria
and Tunisia).
The Department of Home Truths, a Fiskian institution I have found it
necessary to deploy around the Middle East, would point out, of
course, that Portugal visited its violence and ethnic cleansing and
racism and slavery not upon the Middle East but upon the peoples of
Africa, where later wars in its very own colonial possessions -
especially Angola and Mozambique - helped to bring down the
pseudo-fascist regime of Marcelo Caetano, Salazar's successor, in
1975.
The Arabs, however, were regarded as exotic and educated peoples whose
own culture was never erased from the streets of Portugal's cities.
The museum commemorating prisoners of 20th-century dictatorship is
located in an original Moorish building in Lisbon called Aljube, which
in Arabic means, "Street of the Watercourse". It can also mean
"prison" - which is what it was under Salazar. Iberian languages, I
should add, are equally strewn with Arabic. The warrior El Campeador,
Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (of Charlton Heston fame), is best known to us
by his Arabic nom-de-guerre, "Sayyid" - El Cid ("the Lord").
Nowhere can present day connections between the Muslim and European
past be more perfectly illustrated than in Lisbon's Calouste
Gulbenkian Museum in the northern suburbs of Lisbon. Old Gulbenkian,
the richest Armenian of his time, the original "Mr Five Per Cent" of
oil earnings, was an extraordinary philanthropist of his time, his
foundation even trying to bridge the insurmountable gap between the
Armenian peoples and their genocider Turkish fellow citizens after
1915. This may be why the short biography of the man available at the
Lisbon institution refers to the Armenian genocide - disgracefully -
as merely "the tragic events".
But the museum displays Muslim/Arab art scarcely a couple of rooms
from Dutch old masters, Thomas Gainsborough's Mrs Lowndes-Stone and a
couple of Turners. A Syrian Mamluk mosque lamp and an Armenian
illuminated bible stand only a few metres from Renoir's Portrait of
Madame Monet. A new exhibition looks at botanical knowledge shared by
Europe with the Mughal empire of Shah Jahan.
But there is one majestic volume among the Muslim books, a
16th-century Iranian copy of the 14th-century poetry of Hafiz, the
400-year-old Safavid scholar's handwriting swooping delicately across
an open page of the volume - but a text, alas, untranslated, and thus
rendered as art rather than literature. But here, abbreviated and
forced into English, is what some of the words say: "If, by good
fortune, I can obtain the dust from my beloved's foot, above my eyes I
will inscribe a line. If her moth searched for my soul like a candle,
I would give up my soul at that very moment ??? After death, even the
wind will not be able to take my dust away from your door."
The lines are not unlike the more ascetic, broken, almost negative
verse of that undeniably finest of modern Portuguese poets, Fernando
Pessoa, who reminds his devotees of both Joyce and Samuel Beckett:
"In the dead afternoon's gold more - The no-place gold dust of late
day Which is sauntering past my door And will not stay -
In the silence, still touched with gold, Of the woods' green ending, I
see The memory. You were fair of old And are in me???
Though you're not there, your memory is And, you not anyone, your
look. I shake as you come like a breeze And I mourn some good..."
This is Jonathan Griffin's translation from the Portuguese, but
Pessoa's work immediately prompted a Muslim visitor to Lisbon to
remark to me how similar it was to the 11th-century Persian poetry of
Omar Khayyam, whose Rubaiyat was itself translated (though not very
well) by the English poet Edward FitzGerald. Pessoa spoke fluent
English.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover that Pessoa not only
read and took copious notes on the Rubaiyat all over the title page of
his copy of FitzGerald's work, but became almost obsessed by Arab
philosophers, including the 11th-century Arab-Andalusian poet
al-Mu'tamid. And he condemned the Middle Ages Arab expulsion from the
Iberian peninsula. Thanks to the work of Italian scholar Fabrizio
Boscaglia and Brazilian researcher Marcia Feitosa, we find Pessoa
espousing "our [Portuguese] great Arab tradition - of tolerance and
free civilisation. It is in the manner in which we are the keepers of
the Arab spirit in Europe that we will have a distinct
individuality??? Let us revenge the defeat inflicted by those from the
North to our Arab ancestors. Let us redeem the crime we committed when
we expelled from the peninsula the Arabs that civilised it."
Perhaps it's no wonder that less than two years ago, Portugal's Prime
Minister Antonio Costa said that his country would receive 10,000
Syrian refugees - double the number it might have taken under the EU's
relocation programme. Compare that to the "protectors" of our
Christian "civilisation" further east.
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