(Re)conquista

Another psuedo-intellectual history post, I'm afraid. I'll get back to my usual celebrity gossip and detailed personal eating habits soon, I promise! Thanks for indulging me!

One of the first things that anyone here will say to you is how difficult Arabic is to learn. “Even we struggle with it!” they say, shaking their heads and chuckling slightly at the unlikelihood of you ever advancing beyond the basic greetings and food words. And OK, they have a point. It’s really damn hard. It’s a Semitic language (no delightful Indo-European cognates here), the alphabet is different (but hey, at least it’s an alphabet!), the orientation is different, there are no vowels anywhere, and (most daunting of all) the spoken dialect is literally a different language from the standard or classical Arabic, and the dialects of different countries are often mutually unintelligible.

So yes, there are many strikes against me. My 60-word vocabulary is nowhere near the 2,000 words or so required to get by in most basic daily situations. And a lot of the words I know (like “very”, “every”, and “also”) don’t really help me get a sense of the conversation. When I listen to conversations, it goes like this: “I Arabic arabic arabic Arabic also Arabic Arabic Arabic Arabic very Arabic Arabic Arabic. And you?” To which my standard reply is either “alhamdoulilah”, which means “Thank God”, or “inshallah”, which means “God willing”, either one of which are appropriate in almost every occasion.

However, while going over some food vocabulary, I solved a linguistic mystery, one that has made my Arabic learning if not a lot easier, at least a lot more interesting. And to explain the mystery, I need to tell you about an historic period that has influenced my life in 2 very important ways.

Tariq ibn Ziyad invaded Spain in 711 from Morocco, landing on the rock of Gibraltar (which still bears his name: it means The Mountain of Tariq), and within 50 years had conquered 75% of the Iberian peninsula, including all of Andalucia, most of Castilla, Catalunya and Barcelona, and most of Portugal. Only Asturias, a thin, mountainous strip in the north, and Galicia in the northwest remained of Christian Spain. This—and how do I put this delicately?—scared the Vatican shitless. To have Muslims to the East in Turkey and the Holy Land, not great, but not as threatening. To have Muslims to the East and to the West? This was serious. But other kingdoms weren’t as concerned—or at least not ready to commit troops to push an increasingly entrenched Caliphate out of Spain. So Rome did what Rome did best in those days: it found the body of a saint. And not just any saint, but St. James the Minor, one of the original 12 disciples, who had been assigned to minister to the heathens in Iberia. He hadn’t been a terribly successful saver of souls and was killed shortly after his arrival. His body had been lost. But suddenly, in the 8th century, just after the Muslim conquest of Spain, his body reappeared. Where, you ask? In the westernmost reaches of Spain, which, as you recall, had just had 75% of its territory conquered by the Muslims. The Church immediately declared this to be a venerated pilgrimage site and declared an indulgence for any pilgrim who made it to Santiago de Compostela. It became enormously popular, and one of the first tourist attractions for medieval Europe. If Rome was a political pilgrimage and Jerusalem a military one, Santiago was just a nice, long walk. Christians from all over flocked to Santiago, and the church had a touchstone for reclaiming Spain for Christendom. (For those of us living in a post-Dan Brown age, the Knights Templar formed to protect pilgrims along the way, setting up hospitals, hostels, and even proto-banks, as well as hiding the truth about the Holy Grail and the Holy Feminine.)

The pilgrimage has continued uninterrupted to this day. It’s important to me because I was also a pilgrim back in 2002, just after I graduated from college. It remains among the 2 or 3 happiest summers of my life, and one of my best travel experiences. El Camino de Santiago (the Road of St. James) made me connect to Spanish history in a way that I didn’t think possible. It also made me think of the Arab conquest, because St. James had two manifestations: Santiago Peregrino, where he appears as a pilgrim with a shell, a drinking gourd, and a walking stick, and Santiago Matamoros, which was alternately translated as St. James the Moor-Slayer or, as I saw in several cathedrals along the way, St. James the Arab Killer. The origins of the pilgrimage, like St. James, has two faces: peaceful and bloody.

Eventually, and I hope that I’m not spoiling anything for you, the Catholics won—but it took them until 1492, a year school children across the U.S. know for a very different reason. For nearly 800 years, the language of most of Spain was Arabic, not the romance language we know and love today. There was also a hybrid Latin/Arabic dialect called Mozarabe, (mose-AH-ra-bay), which had romance word cognates but written in Arabic script. The first Spanish poetry every written was in Mozarabe. And it’s impossible for two languages to exist side by side for over 700 years without some influence. Which (finally) brings me to my linguistic mystery.

When I was learning Spanish, it puzzled me to no end that the word for “olive” was “aceituna” (ah-say-TOO-na). In French, it’s olive. In Italian, it’s olivo. What made Spanish different? When I learned the Arabic word for olive, though, it all made sense: zeitun (zay-toon). And when you add the definite article to it, it becomes as-zeitun. This applies to all sorts of other words. Aceite is “oil” in Spanish. Zeyt is “oil” in Arabic. Cereza is “cherry” in Spanish. Ceriss is “cherry” in Arabic. Zumo is “juice” in Spanish. Zum is “juice” in Arabic. Once I figured this out, I went to Wikipedia to confirm my suspicions, and there’s a nice long list of Arabic cognates in Spanish for those of you who are curious. It was pleasing to see concrete evidence of something that I had known abstractly before. And it makes Arabic a little less daunting.