Kobrin Replies to Shneidman

In response to Professor Shneidman’s comments, a close reading of my essay indicates that I do not claim that it was the Christians who destroyed the glory of Muslim Spain. My point is precisely that the Muslims experienced and continue to experience their military defeat and subsequent military expulsion as if the Christians had destroyed it. This illogical belief began the moment that Boabdil, the defeated Nasrid king, gazed for the last time at his surrendered Granada. The spot from which he gazed is called to this day “The Last Sigh of the Moor.”

He [Boabdil] gave a deep sigh of despair and burst into tears…. His mother, who had once been a slave in a harem, did not extend a word of sympathy to her distraught son. Her rancor overwhelmed her. ‘You do well to weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man,’ she shouted at him (Paul Fregosi, Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries, 1998, pp. 273-274).

I use the word “destroyed” in the Kleinian sense of feeling annihilated to the point of losing one’s identity. Muslims cannot tolerate being defeated. An example of this is the first, for them essentially unsuccessful attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 followed by the second, for them spectacularly successful attack on September 11, 2001. They feel that they are being persecuted when they lose.

Moreover, it was not I, but Akbar S. Ahmed, the Muslim sociologist, who coined the concept of the “Al Andalus Syndrome” with specific reference to “regular” Islam (Ahmed, Discovering Islam, 1988, pp. 2-3), preceding Osama bin Laden by at least 10 years. He cites the inability to mourn the loss of the land and a fixation/obsession about reconquering it. In addition, Malise Ruthven and Bernard Lewis, to cite only two among many, have noted that Muslims adhere to a doctrine of irredentism — that any land which is taken from them must be re-captured and re-claimed. Bernard Lewis stresses that “For Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced…” (“License to Kill: Usama bin Ladin’s Declaration of Jihad,” Foreign Affairs, 77: 6, 1998, p. 16). (See also Ruthven, A Fury For God, 2003, p. 203.) This is an ideology of Islam, not just the Islamists.

Finally, 1492 looms large not just in the minds of the fundamentalists but also the ummah (the world community of Islam) in all its diversity. Concluding by way of this point, Robert Baer, former CIA agent, who is also fluent in Arabic, has put it well in his recently acclaimed Sleeping with

Page 70

the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (2003), where he writes:

On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a preemptive attack on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, quickly and decisively defeating all three countries. From Jordan, Israel captured the West Bank and Jerusalem; from Syria, the Golan Heights; and from Egypt, the Sinai Desert. It was maybe the most humiliating defeat the Arabs had ever suffered, at least since they were forced out of Spain in 1492 (p. 88; emphasis added).

Baer is referring not only to Osama bin Laden and the fundamentalists, but also to the Arabs and by extension the ummah.

Page 71