Revisiting history is revisiting oneself.
My upbringing involved Anglicanism: 1066 belongs to England; crucifixion belongs to Christ; “ibn” means “son of” for Arabs and not for Jews; the Vizier is a Muslim politician out of the Arabian Nights; and Jews suffered pogroms at the hands of Christians.
In time I found out that there were other views: that in 1066, England fell to the Normans; that Herodotus recorded crucifixion with nails half a millennium before Christ’s death; that “ibn” while Arabic is commonly used by Sephardic Jews; that a number of Jews have held powerful positions in Muslim states; and that pogroms are not limited to Christianity.
In 1066, Granada was a Berber Muslim kingdom with a vizier, Joseph ibn Naghrela, the leader of the local Jewish community. On 30 December, a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace and crucified him. Upwards of 1,500 families were slaughtered.
Each culture has a different version of what happened. Both sides do agree that one instrument of provocation was a poem of Abu Ishaq written earlier in the year:
Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them, the breach of faith would be to let them carry on.
They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violators?
How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent?
Now we are humble, beside them, as if we were wrong and they were right!
Whether – as the Jewish narrative has it – the poet wrote after failing to get a job at the palace, the theme is a theme across history, the tension between faith to the teachings of one’s own God and the faith of trust in our neighbours and our rulers. When is what is rendered God’s and when is it Caesar’s?
And “Vizier”? It may or may not be Arabic. By one etymology it is, drawing on the Arabic “wazara”, to bear a burden, and “wazir”, helper. By another, we are taken right back to pre-Islamic Iranian languages: one has “vizir”, a legal document; another, “vicira”, an arbitrator.
I am taken with the first suggested etymology. It is well known that the Moses of Pharoah’s court seeks that his brother Aaron be his helper and the Quran records this role as that of wazir.
Mark Chagall, 1957.