Blog del Profesor Francisco Vidal Castro

Congreso IX Estudios de Frontera

IX ESTUDIOS DE FRONTERA

ECONOMÍA, DERECHO Y SOCIEDAD EN LA FRONTERA

CONGRESO HOMENAJE A EMILIO MOLINA LÓPEZ

ALCALÁ LA REAL – JAÉN10 Y 11 DE MAYO 2013

 Consecuente con el proyecto concebido en torno a 1995, de promover cada dos años un Congreso Internacional sobre Estudios de Frontera, la ciudad de Alcalá la Real invita una vez más a todos los estudiosos del tema a la cele­bración de los Novenos Estudios. Tendrán lugar en mayo de 2013 y versarán sobre asuntos tan interesantes como economía, derecho y sociedad.

Una peculiar economía capaz de promover un intenso y constante inter­cambio de productos entre cristianos y musulmanes, por medio de comercian­tes especializados, los almayares cristianos, moros y judíos.

Puede que radique en ello el que los diferentes grupos sociales, dotados de sus propias culturas, estén interesados más que en los enfrentamientos, como se ha subrayado hasta la saciedad, en la búsqueda de ámbitos de nego­ciación, intercambio, acuerdos y pactos. Es decir, estamos ante una sociedad de carácter incluyente, pese a que en el siglo XVI nuevas razones e intereses impusieran la exclusividad.

Se trataría, por tanto, de una sociedad no marginada de la ley –“out law”– como alguien sostiene, sino ante una rica vida articulada por un derecho con­suetudinario o expresamente pactado en cartas de paces y treguas, cuyas huellas no paran de mostrar los más variados documentos.

La presente edición de Estudios de Frontera pretende reconocer y ho­menajear la rigurosa labor investigadora desarrollada a lo largo de muchos años en interesantes libros y artículos, por el Catedrático del Departamento de Estudios Semíticos de la Universidad de Granada, D. Emilio Molina López. De todos son conocidos sus brillantes estudios sobre el Reino Nazarí.

Esta edición de Estudios de Frontera es un paso más en el conocimiento de este abigarrado y apasionante mundo que en tierras de Jaén cuenta con uno de sus mayores exponentes. Concientes de ello las autoridades locales y provinciales no quieren dejar pasar esta oportunidad y se disponen a añadir un nuevo eslabón a la ya larga y fructífera cadena de estos eventos. El Ayun­tamiento de Alcalá la Real y la Diputación de Jaén, fieles a su cita bianual, convocan a todos cuantos investigadores estén interesados a los 9 Estudios de Frontera que se celebrarán los días 10 y 11 de mayo de 2013.

Congreso Estudios de Frontera 9-2013 

¿Quién le teme a la Ira Musulmana?

La portada de una conocida revista norteamericana (ver abajo) muestra a gritos el sesgo mediático que ha estado en boga durante las últimas dos semanas: que el mundo musulmán está ardiendo con ira anti-occidental por causa de un video islamófobo, y que hay hordas de manifestantes violentos en las calles amenazándonos a todos… ¿Pero nos están diciendo la verdad? Ciudadanos, nuevos medios y redes sociales están respondiendo y el blog Gawker ha hecho una gran sátira de esta histeria mediática ofreciéndonos unas imágenes alternativas de la ira musulmana (conocida en las redes como #muslimrage):   

    

 

 

 

 

Siete puntos que se pueden haber escapado entre tanta ‘Ira’:

Como el resto del mundo, la mayoría de los musulmanes consideran el video islamófobo de 13 minutos, “Innocence of Muslims” (Inocencia de los Musulmanes), ofensivo y además una basura. Las protestas contra el video se han extendido muy rápido, alimentadas por agravios existentes y comprensibles, contra las políticas americanas y occidentales neo-colonialistas en el Medio Oriente, así como por sensibilidades religiosas en torno a las representaciones del profeta Mahoma. Pero la cobertura de este tema en los medios a menudo omite varios puntos importantes:

1. Según las primeras estimaciones, en las protestas contra el film han participado entre un 0.001 y un 0.007% de los 1.500 millones de musulmanes del mundo – una pequeñísima parte en comparación con quienes protestaron a favor de la democracia en la Primavera Árabe.  

     

  El resto del artículo, elaborado por Avaaz.org, se puede leer completo aquí: http://www.avaaz.org/es/7_things_you_should_know_global/?bxbzdab&v=18152

        

El caso de Hula demuestra el retraso de la inteligencia occidental en Siria

El islam salvó al judaísmo

Jewish Chronicle 25 May 2012

So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?

David J Wasserstein

ISLAM SAVED Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth. The argument for it is double. First, in 570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity – also in Christendom – through the medieval period into the modern world.

By the fourth century, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the Roman empire. One aspect of this success was opposition to rival faiths, including Judaism, along with massive conversion of members of such faiths, sometimes by force, to Christianity. Much of our testimony about Jewish existence in the Roman empire from this time on consists of accounts of conversions.

Great and permanent reductions in numbers through conversion, between the fourth and the seventh centuries, brought with them a gradual but relentless whittling away of the status, rights, social and economic existence, and religious and cultural life of Jews all over the Roman empire.

A long series of enactments deprived Jewish people of their rights as citizens, prevented them from fulfilling their religious obligations, and excluded them from the society of their fellows.

This went along with the centuries-long military and political struggle with Persia. As a tiny element in the Christian world, the Jews should not have been affected much by this broad, political issue. Yet it affected them critically, because the Persian empire at this time included Babylon – now Iraq – at the time home to the world’s greatest concentration of Jews.

Here also were the greatest centres of Jewish intellectual life. The most important single work of Jewish cultural creativity in over 3,000 years, apart from the Bible itself – the Talmud – came into being in Babylon. The struggle between Persia and Byzantium, in our period, led increasingly to a separation between Jews under Byzantine, Christian rule and Jews under Persian rule.

Beyond all this, the Jews who lived under Christian rule seemed to have lost the knowledge of their own culturally specific languages – Hebrew and Aramaic – and to have taken on the use of Latin or Greek or other non-Jewish, local, languages. This in turn must have meant that they also lost access to the central literary works of Jewish culture – the Torah, Mishnah, poetry, midrash, even liturgy.

The loss of the unifying force represented by language – and of the associated literature – was a major step towards assimilation and disappearance. In these circumstances, with contact with the one place where Jewish cultural life continued to prosper – Babylon- cut off by conflict with Persia, Jewish life in the Christian world of late antiquity was not simply a pale shadow of what it had been three or four centuries earlier. It was doomed.

Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult.

But this was all prevented by the rise of Islam. The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed the world, and did so with dramatic, wide-ranging and permanent effect for the Jews.

Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence. Their fortunes changed in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic and cultural terms – all for the better.

First, things improved politically. Almost everywhere in Christendom where Jews had lived now formed part of the same political space as Babylon – Cordoba and Basra lay in the same political world. The old frontier between the vital centre in Babylonia and the Jews of the Mediterranean basin was swept away, forever.

Political change was partnered by change in the legal status of the Jewish population: although it is not always clear what happened during the Muslim conquests, one thing is certain. The result of the conquests was, by and large, to make the Jews second-class citizens.

This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class citizen was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all. For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship represented a major advance. In Visigothic Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, the Jews had seen their children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity and had themselves been enslaved.

In the developing Islamic societies of the classical and medieval periods, being a Jew meant belonging to a category defined under law, enjoying certain rights and protections, alongside various obligations. These rights and protections were not as extensive or as generous as those enjoyed by Muslims, and the obligations were greater but, for the first few centuries, the Muslims themselves were a minority, and the practical differences were not all that great.

Along with legal near-equality came social and economic equality. Jews were not confined to ghettos, either literally or in terms of economic activity. The societies of Islam were, in effect, open societies. In religious terms, too, Jews enjoyed virtually full freedom. They might not build many new synagogue – in theory- and they might not make too public their profession of their faith, but there was no really significant restriction on the practice of their religion. Along with internal legal autonomy, they also enjoyed formal representation, through leaders of their own, before the authorities of the state. Imperfect and often not quite as rosy as this might sound, it was at least the broad norm.

The political unity brought by the new Islamic world-empire did not last, but it created a vast Islamic world civilisation, similar to the older Christian civilisation that it replaced. Within this huge area, Jews lived and enjoyed broadly similar status and rights everywhere. They could move around, maintain contacts, and develop their identity as Jews. A great new expansion of trade from the ninth century onwards brought the Spanish Jews – like the Muslims – into touch with the Jews and the Muslims even of India.

ALL THIS was encouraged by a further, critical development. Huge numbers of people in the new world ofIslam adopted the language of the Muslim Arabs. Arabic gradually became the principal language of this vast area, excluding almost all the rest: Greek and Syriac, Aramaic and Coptic and Latin all died out, replaced by Arabic. Persian, too, went into a long retreat, to reappear later heavily influenced by Arabic.

The Jews moved over to Arabic very rapidly. By the early 10th century, only 300 years after the conquests, Sa’adya Gaon was translating the Bible into Arabic. Bible translation is a massive task – it is not undertaken unless there is a need for it. By about the year 900, the Jews had largely abandoned other languages and taken on Arabic.

The change of language in its turn brought the Jews into direct contact with broader cultural developments. The result from the 10th century on was a striking pairing of two cultures. The Jews of the Islamic world developed an entirely new culture, which differed from their culture before Islam in terms of language, cultural forms, influences, and uses. Instead of being concerned primarily with religion, the new Jewish culture of the Islamic world, like that of its neighbours, mixed the religious and the secular to a high degree. The contrast, both with the past and with medieval Christian Europe, was enormous.

Like their neighbours, these Jews wrote in Arabic in part, and in a Jewish form of that language. The use of Arabic brought them close to the Arabs. But the use of a specific Jewish form of that language maintained the barriers between Jew and Muslim. The subjects that Jews wrote about, and the literary forms in which they wrote about them, were largely new ones, borrowed from the Muslims and developed in tandem with developments in Arabic Islam.

Also at this time, Hebrew was revived as a language of high literature, parallel to the use among the Muslims of a high form of Arabic for similar purposes. Along with its use for poetry and artistic prose, secular writing of all forms in Hebrew and in (Judeo- )Arabic came into being, some of it of high quality.

Much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period. Sa’adya Gaon, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra (Moses and Abraham), Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Yehudah al-Harizi, Samuel ha-Nagid, and many more – all of these names, well known today, belong in the first rank of Jewish literary and cultural endeavour.

WHERE DID these Jews produce all this? When did they and their neighbours achieve this symbiosis, this mode of living together? The Jews did it in a number of centres of excellence.

The most outstanding of these was Islamic Spain, where there was a true Jewish Golden Age, alongside a wave of cultural achievement among the Muslim population. The Spanish case illustrates a more general pattern, too.

What happened in Islamic Spain – waves of Jewish cultural prosperity paralleling waves of cultural prosperity among the Muslims – exemplifies a larger pattern in Arab Islam. In Baghdad, between the ninth and the twelfth centuries; in Qayrawan (in north Africa), between the ninth and the 11th centuries; in Cairo, between the 10th and the 12th centuries, and elsewhere, the rise and fall of cultural centres of Islam tended to be reflected in the rise and fall of Jewish cultural activity in the same places.

This was not coincidence, and nor was it the product of particularly enlightened liberal patronage by Muslim rulers. It was the product of a number of deeper features of these societies, social and cultural, legal and economic, linguistic and political, which together enabled and indeed encouraged the Jews of the Islamic world to create a novel sub-culture within the high civilisation of the time.

This did not last for ever; the period of culturally successful symbiosis between Jew and Arab Muslim in the middle ages came to a close by about 1300. In reality, it had reached this point even earlier, with the overall relative decline in the importance and vitality of Arabic culture, both in relation to western European cultures and in relation to other cultural forms within Islam itself; Persian and Turkish.

Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews. In the case of the Jews, however, the cultural capital thus created also served as the seed-bed of further growth elsewhere – in Christian Spain and in the Christian world more generally.

The Islamic world was not the only source of inspiration for the Jewish cultural revival that came later in Christian Europe, but it certainly was a major contributor to that development. Its significance cannot be overestimated.

David J Wasserstein is the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. This article is adapted from Iast weeks Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
The Lectures are now available as audio files on the website here:http://www.soas.ac.uk/religions/events/jordan-lectures-in-comparative-religion/

Congreso Internacional 5ª Primavera del Manuscrito Andalusí: Manuscritos para comunicar culturas

Programa del Congreso

Hoja de inscripción (gratuita)

La postergación de las mujeres causa el atraso de la sociedad según el filósofo andalusí Averroes

Al-Andalus iluminó con su alta cultura la Europa medieval. Su luz resplandeció en aquellos oscuros siglos como un primer Renacimiento. El cordobés Averroes fue la estrella más brillante de una constelación de sabios que supieron recuperar el legado griego y recrearlo con el aporte añadido del Islam oriental y con el esfuerzo propio de generaciones de andalusíes.

En el enlace siguiente se recoge un resumen del pensamiento y trascendencia de la gran figura de Averroes (Ibn Rušd, s. XII), filósofo cordobés universal, a partir  de una entrevista a Andrés Martínez Lorca, autor del libro:  Averroes, el sabio cordobés que iluminó europa (Córdoba: El Páramo, 2010), quien resalta que el racionalismo de Averroes y su crítica social le lleva a ideas tan avanzadas como que la mayoría de las mujeres son más hábiles que los varones en capacidad de organización; cuando han sido muy bien educadas, las mujeres han llegado a ser filósofos y gobernantes; una de las causas de la pobreza en la sociedad es la falta de preparación de las mujeres y su no participación activa en la vida económica.

http://www.rebelion.org/docs/123064.pdf

La Mujer en el Islam: Refutando tópicos

Vídeo resumen del  DVD de la Dra. Lisa Killinger, de USA, “Women in Islam: Through Western Eyes”, 2007

http://www.veoislam.com/dra-lisa-killinger/la-mujer-en-el-islam-refutando-topicos-video_bccc469f9.html

Virtus inter pares. Proyecto de Innovación Docente sobre educación en valores para la convivencia de la Universidad de Jaén.

Perfil en Facebook:

 http://www.facebook.com/pages/PROYECTO-VIRTUS-INTER-PARES/103821382986911

Página en Slideshare:

 http://www.slideshare.net/virtusinterpares

Canal en youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/virtusinterpares

Cuenta en Tuenti:

http://www.tuenti.com/#m=Profile&func=index&user_id=71538354

Grupo en Google:

http://groups.google.com/group/virtus-inter-pares/members_invite?hl=es

Matrículas y ayudas para cursos de lengua árabe por Casa Árabe

Casa Árabe abre el período de matrículas para los cursos de verano y la convocatoria de ayudas para estudiar árabe en países árabes o en el Centro de Lengua.

MATRÍCULAS CURSOS DE VERANO

Desde el 1 hasta el 15 de junio estará abierto el plazo de matrícula de los cursos de árabe para el próximo verano, que se desarrollarán entre el 28 de junio y el 23 de julio. Además de cursos intensivos y semi-intensivos, la novedad este verano son las clases de conversación de árabe moderno estándar y de dariya marroquí. Las tardes de tertulia, los martes de 18:00 a 20:00 horas, estarán abiertas a todos los estudiantes, tanto de los cursos de verano como de trimestres anteriores.

Más información

CONVOCATORIA AYUDAS PARA ESTUDIAR ÁRABE

Hasta el día 3 de junio estará abierto el plazo para solicitar una de las ayudas para estudiar en países árabes dirigidas a los estudiantes del Centro de Lengua. Casa Árabe ofrece dos ayudas para estudiar en el Centro de Lengua Árabe de la Universidad de Jordania y otras dos para el IFPO de Damasco de Siria.

Además, Casa Árabe convoca ayudas para estudiar árabe en Madrid en sus cursos intensivos de julio, dirigidas a personas sin conocimientos de árabe que residan fuera de la Comunidad de Madrid, preferentemente en una localidad donde la oferta formativa del árabe no exista. Las solicitudes para estas ayudas pueden presentarse hasta el 6 de junio.

Más información

Asombroso discurso de un veterano estadounidense de la guerra de Iraq (“Amazing speech by war veteran”, subtitulado en español)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kWU-JHetMM