Diesen Artikel habe ich für den Common Ground News Service geschrieben. Ausgangspunkt des Textes ist der Film „Out of Córdoba“ von Jacob Bender…
The two greatest thinkers in Moorish Spain were the Muslim Ibn Rushd and the Jew Moses Maimonides. In his film “Out of Córdoba”, Jacob Bender traces the life stories of both men as a counterbalance to the clash of civilisations theory.
Jacob Bender’s “Out of Córdoba” is a film about the greatest unknown chapter in European history: Islamic Spain. For almost 800 years, vast swathes of the Iberian Peninsular were under Muslim control, the Spanish capital Madrid was founded in 1085 by the Islamic emir Muhammad I. Al-Andalus, as Moorish Spain was known, is to this day viewed as an era marked by tolerance, with Jews, Muslims and Christians living for the most part peacefully together under the banner of convivencia – coexistence. Córdoba was the capital in a region that represented a leading cultural and economic centre – of both the Mediterranean and the Islamic world as a whole. The Catholic Reconquista, or ‘reconquest’ completed in 1492 put an end to this period of tolerance: Jews and Muslims were driven out, traces of Islamic heritage destroyed.
In “Out of Córdoba”, American Jewish filmmaker Jacob Bender invokes the spirit of the tolerance of this place, as well as the intellectual legacy of the city’s two great sons, Ibn Rushd and Moses Maimonides. As Bender explains at the start of his film, following the terror attacks on his home city New York he felt the need to discover new hope and idealism as a way of refuting the clash of civilisations theory. Retracing history in the spirit of Ibn Rushd and Maimonides is to a certain extent a pilgrimage of hope.
Moses Maimonides (c. 1138 – 1204) was a philosopher, legal scholar and doctor. He tried to associate faith in God with rational principles and the sciences. Maimonides is regarded as a great medieval scholar and as one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of all time. Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroës (1126 – 1198) was also a philosopher, lawyer and doctor. Like Maimonides, he was also a proponent of Aristotelian ideas and an advocate of logical and free thought, of reason.
In Córdoba, Jacob Bender meets people who are inspired by the free thinking spirit of both men, among them an Imam that reads out a Fatwa against Osama bin Laden, branding him an infidel owing to his violent crimes; but also the Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, who says that Maimonides and Ibn Rushd exert a key influence on his foreign policy approach.
Both thinkers were forced to flee from the devout Almohads to Morocco, and Jacob Bender’s journey also takes him to Fez where he meets André Azoulay, Jewish citizen and chief adviser to the Moroccan King. Azoulay speaks here of a cultural dialogue and emphasises just how urgently we need to listen to the message of both the men from Córdoba, today, 800 years after their deaths.
The film’s next stop is Paris, where Bender meets Tunisian author Abdelwahab Meddeb and the late Mohammed Arkoun, who was born in Algeria and who talks with wonderful flight-footedness about the influence of Ibn Rushd’s on the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. A “Spanish” Arab, whose ideas helped to build the great structure that is the European Church of the Middle Ages – a fact often overlooked today.
In Venice, art historian Michael Barry reports on the significance of Ibn Rushd in Italian Renaissance painting and the special links between the Doge Republic and the Islamic world. “The doges of Venice and the rulers of Cairo were existential allies,” says the Princeton academic.
In Cairo, Bender visits the Ben Ezra Synagogue, where Maimonides’ writings were found in the late 19th century – the great scholar spent the last decades of his life here as personal physician to the Sultan and head of the Jewish community. Following his death, the Sultan decreed a three-day period of mourning. Maimonides’ corpse was then shipped to Jerusalem, where the family had previously lived for a time. For a while now the sexes have been segregated at Maimonides’ tomb – Bender remarks unhappily that the last time he visited, there was no partition in place. And this although one of Maimonides’ fundamental ideas was that all people were created equally in the image of God, emphasises Maimonides expert Menachem Kellner from Haifa University.
One of the film’s most moving moments is an encounter with Rabbi Arik Ascherman in Jerusalem. Speaking en route to the Rabbis for Human Rights office, Bender says that although he could initially see no scope to include contemporary politics in a film about Maimonides, efforts by Rabbi Ascherman to secure Jewish-Muslim reconciliation – with recourse to Jewish religious traditions and Maimonides – seemed to suggest otherwise. Ascherman’s view is that the status quo should be turned on its head and religion made a part of the solution. In a voice quivering with outrage, the Rabbi describes the injustices and the violence that have befallen many Palestinians as bulldozers destroyed their houses in East Jerusalem. He describes his organisation as the „conscience of Israel“, a place where Rabbis campaign for the rights of their compatriots, Israeli Palestinians. Ascherman also says he hopes his efforts will help to dispel the view held by many Palestinians that all Jews are their enemies.
The film’s last word goes to the Christian professor of theology David Burrell: “A tradition isonly a tradition if it criticises itself,” he says. For it is not least critical thought and the capacity for self-criticism that make Ibn Rushd and Maimonides key influential figures of our time. With his film “Out of Córdoba”, Jacob Bender breathes new life into the ideas of both men, the Jew and the Muslim.
Lewis Gropp
Der Text wurde auch auf Qantara (Link zum deutschen Text) und 23 anderen Seiten publiziert, sogar auf Urdu – das haben jedenfalls die Redakteure von Common Ground gesagt, die sich sehr um Übernahmen und honorarfreie Syndikation bemühen.
