The socio-cultural links between the Islamic West and the Mashriq were continuous throughout the Middle Ages , and have been studied from varied perspectives, such as the circulation of scholars and travelers or the transmission of knowledge and artistic innovations. The aim of this chapter is to study these relations from another dimension: the production and reproduction of the collective memory and shared symbolic narratives focused on remembrance and emotion, which allow us to analyse and understand the social and cultural phenomena that were developed and how they interacted with each other.
To this end, I will focus on a case study, the creation and transmission of the different narratives on al-Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ’s death (d. 1149), which will take us through time and space: from Almoravid Ceuta to Mamluk-Ottoman Cairo, going through Almohad Marrakech, Merinid Maghrib or Nasrid Granada.
Through different reports and narrative genealogies, and the contexts in which they were created and transmitted, I will study how ‘Iyāḍ, author of the Kitāb al-Shifā’ (Fierro 2011a, p. 19–34; Albarrán 2015), an Islamic world’s bestseller, became a symbol with numerous edges that overlapped with others like al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) or Ibn Tūmart (d. 1130), and how his death became a place of memory linked with many phenomena of different types. Lieux de mémoire, a notion created by Pierre Nora (Nora 1989, p. 7–24), are signals and references, such as facts, objects, places or institutions, which represent certain values, symbols of collective interest that become part of the memory. Moreover, they are also disputed episodes, whose memory generates identities, consensus and obligations. That is, they are mediators of memory, through which it is molded and transmitted. They are references that are changed, fashioned and refashioned in different ways in their process of oral and written transmission, which are produced and reproduced because they are meaningful for the collective memory, and therefore they appeared in different ways and versions in the sources, expanded or reduced, with new characters or actions.
In this sense, the figure of ‘Iyāḍ, distilled through his death, experienced processes of appropriation and re-reading from many different angles, just as had happened with his own work, the Shifā’ . This re-use of ‘Iyāḍ’s memory in different contexts, its remembrance and re-memorialization in various situations, the plural visions towards his figure and work that provoked processes of recontextualization and resignification, have not been studied yet. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to show how ‘Iyāḍ—through the narration of his death—became a place of memory that was, in addition, common to the entire Mediterranean and to the Islamicate world, a collective symbol within this broad context.
Consequently, I also aim to show an example of how the Mediterranean not only served as a vehicle for the mobility of people and transmission of goods and ideas, but also for these collective imaginary and shared memories and emotions, which thus are part of the different kind of relations existing between the various Mediterranean societies. Therefore, ‘Iyāḍ’s commemoration—understood as a dynamic process where reports from the past are recovered and re-narrated in a given present to serve future aims—became part of the cultural legacy of the Islamic West in the Mashriq and the Mediterranean, where it was molded and re-signified.
1.1 Brief Note on ‘Iyāḍ’s Life
‘Iyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī, better known as al-Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ, was born in 1083 in Ceuta.1 The following year, the Almoravid leader Yūsuf b. Tāshufīn took the city and used it to gain control of al-Andalus, a territory fragmented in the so-called Ṭā’ifa kingdoms, threatened by the Christian advance.2 One of the legitimation tools implemented by the Almoravids was the alliance of the Berber dynasty with the Mālikī fuqahā’. Following this policy, ‘Iyāḍ was sent in 1113–1114 for a study journey to al-Andalus sponsored by the Almoravid power. In 1121, he was appointed chief qāḍī of Ceuta, remaining in this position until 1136, year in which he became judge in Granada. Shortly after, due to a conflict with Tāshufīn b. ‘Alī, the local Almoravid ruler of Granada, ‘Iyāḍ was dismissed from this judicature (Kassis 1988, p. 49–56). He was reappointed as qāḍī in Ceuta in 1145 by Ibrāhīm b. Tāshufīn (d. 1147), when the Almohad movement had already begun to challenge the Almoravid dominion of the region.3 In this sense, ‘Iyāḍ seems to have served as the de facto ruler of Ceuta against the new dynasty.
After a couple of resistance attempts led by the qāḍī , ‘Iyāḍ finally decided to surrender the city to the Almohads on May 1146. Nevertheless, and taking advantage of the defeat of the Almohad troops against the bargawāṭa, who started a rebellion in Salé and Tanger, and the triumph of Muḥammad b. ‘Abd Allāh b. Hūd al-Māssī, who also rose up in arms against the Almohads in the Sūs, Ceuta, led by ‘Iyāḍ, expelled the Almohad power. In that same year, a dinar featuring a clearly anti-Almohad legend was minted in the city (Kassis 1983, p. 505–14; Fierro 2006, p. 457–76). But, in spite of the efforts of the qāḍī and his allies, in May 1148 the Unitarian caliph’s troops conquered again the city. ‘Abd al-Mu’min forgave ‘Iyāḍ’s life, but he was dispossessed of his judicial office and forced to leave his native city without his family. He was eventually ordered to reside in Marrakech, where he died, and his remains were buried near Bāb Aylān.
‘Iyāḍ’s intellectual production is vast...