Islam In The Chanson De Geste

Compare the expression of monotheistic faith in Sura 1, "The Exordium," from the Koran (in your textbook) to the descriptions of the pagan, idol worshipping infidels in Roland. Do you think the Roland poet was genuinely ignorant of Muslim religion, or that he had his own agenda and reasons for presenting the Saracens as demonic heathens? The Song of Roland is a medieval heroic epic, and as such, a bit of fanatical militarism ought to be expected. Consider the state of the European continent at the time of the ascension of Charlemagne. The Roman Empire, that most orderly and efficient institution (a relative evaluation, of course— but it must be said that the orderliness and efficiency of the Roman Empire was relatively phenomenal compared to that of its fragmented successors on the Continent and in the British Isles) lay several centuries in the past, and the monarchs of the Continent battled fiercely for their pieces of the forests primeval, far above the radars of their subjects, who struggled through their brutish and short lives in the walled towns and muddy villages of medieval Christendom. Against this chaotic background arose that stultifying phenomenon from the sands of the East—Islam. Born about 570 AD, Mohammad received the revelation of the doctrine of “submission to the will of God” sometime around 610, and by the early 8th century his armies had conquered the lands of North Africa and the Orient from Morocco to India. It was political stagnation and accompanying social unrest within grand old institutions such as the Persian Empire, as well as frustration with the oppressive rule of the Byzantine overlords of the Levant area, that allowed the armies of Islam to sweep in, annexing the conquered lands to their newly wrought but rapidly expanding empire and effecting mass conversions as they went (famously granting concessions to those they called dhimmi or Ahl-e Ketab, People of the Book; I note this because political fragmentation was in abundant supply during the Dark Ages of Western Europe). By 714, the forces of the governor of North Africa, Musa ibn Nusair, had overrun nearly all of Spain, and had their sights set on the heartland of Europe. So it is not difficult to understand that the Europeans would have regarded Islamic/Moorish culture and religion—not to mention their confidence in their manifest destiny--with outrage, fear and suspicion. What will astonish the reader about the treatment that Mohammad and his religion receive in the Song of Roland is the utter ignorance on the part of the poet of the letter and spirit of Islam. What shall we make of such a phenomenon? This essay will discuss possible explanations for the misrepresentation of the Islamic religion in the Song of Roland, and, by extension, the mediaeval popular consciousness. First, what exactly does the Qur’an say, that the mediaeval Christians should know it or not know it? Sura 1, the Exordium, expresses the primary tenet of Islam: You alone we worship, and to You alone we pray for help.

This is arguably all a new Muslim needs to know; to convert one simply has to profess that “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is His prophet”. As for Mohammad himself, during his life he was adamant that he was fully

human, a prophet only; he frequently alluded to the fact of his own mortality to drive the point home. He was also very much a man of the world, contrasting starkly to the figure of Jesus Christ; he was a successful business man and a devoted family man; he was a military and political leader, as well as the spiritual authority for the new Islamic state (whether, by sanctioning this intertwining of mosque and state, Mohammad set a favorable precedent for his people, is quite another story.) It is also instructive to compare this rigid monotheism with that of mediaeval Catholicism. First of all, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (which, in Christian theology, is also a mystical Unity) seemed suspect to Muslims; it is quite impossible to explain the doctrine in non-metaphysical terms, and thus it appeared to them that Christians worship three separate Gods. Islam does not parse the nature of Allah in this way. A second issue is the propensity of Catholics to emphasize the role of the Saints as intercessors with God; praying to the saints directly, as Catholics do, seemed to impart to them a divine nature, thus implying a latent polytheism. And there is arguably some truth to this criticism, since as we will see, Christianity was frequently overlaid directly upon a pagan culture; thus, for example, the primacy of Mary in Irish Catholicism is seen as a remnant of devotion to the Celtic mother goddess; the Irish St. Bridget has her direct parallel in a Celtic goddess of the same name. Along the same lines, the Zoroastrian religion underwent a spiritual crisis in the time of the Sassanian Empire, when what was seen as polytheistic leanings were introduced to this earliest of monotheistic religions. Some suggest that this internal upset was one of several weak spots that allowed the invading Arabs to so easily conquer the Sassanian Empire. Mohammad himself considered structuring Islamic theology to include “angels” who would be intercessors with God and who would have been identified with the old Arabian deities (the old pagan Arab religion was animistic, but also included a supreme god called Al-Ilah, or The God, and numerous lesser deities). This notion was quickly discarded, however, though it did make its way into the Qur’an, where it is known as the Satanic Verses and dismissed as “uninspired”.

Let us first examine some of the fictions that the poet places in the mouths of Roland and the others, including even the Saracen character in the poem themselves. In line 1015 of Laisse 99, Roland states emphatically, “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right!” This is perhaps the most artless and bold expression of the Christian view of Islam; but it does not come as a surprise to the reader, because the poet repeatedly mischaracterizes Islam as a pagan religion, when Islam is, as we have seen, rigidly monotheistic. At several junctures Mohammad is referred to as a deity (line 851 to 855, for example), when in fact, Mohammad stressed that he was a “prophet” only, and not deity, demigod, nor angel. The poet depicts the Saracen warriors as frequently invoking the name of Mohammad for protection; perfunctory exposure to Arab/Muslim culture indicates that Muslims only (albeit frequently) invoke the name of God by way of supplication. But most ridiculous of all to my mind is the notion that the Saracens not only worship Mohammad, but the Greek god Apollo…and a completely non-existent entity called “Tergevant”. If you will oblige the gratuitous pop culture reference, consider that the only result to be had by Googling “Tergevant” is this short passage in Italian: “I saraceni della Chanson de Roland, spesso chiamati "pagani", non credono in Dio e adorano strani idoli chiamati Mahumet, Tergevant e Apollin...” (The Saracens of Chanson de Roland, often called pagans, do not believe in God and worship strange idols called Mahumet, Tergevant and Apollo…) Tergevant exists only in the mind of the poet, as a memorial to mediaeval European ignorance! There are other, more subtle commentaries on the supposed nature of the Saracen; Marsilion reactively brandishes a sword during a personal encounter with Ganelon, which I argue could be read as an attempt to impute foolish pride and rashness to the Muslim character; in line 21, however, Marsilion’s words read as passive and cowardly, which would render displays of bravado depicted elsewhere false and overcompensatory. Also, early in the poem, when Blancandrin proposes the scheme to force the Carolingians out of Spain, he seems to be suggesting that the Saracens can only defeat the Christian armies by trickery rather than in a forthright confrontation.

The last three are judgements as opposed to outright falsehoods, and thus probably not out of the ordinary—Western culture has a distinguished tradition of applying labels with merry abandon to cultures of which we have little knowledge. But as for the first three examples, so odd is the representation of Arab Moors as pagan idolaters that it certainly warrants further exploration. Firstly, it could be suggested that the poet (or the society of which the original oral epic was a product) made an honest mistake—that is, they were honestly ignorant of the tenets of the Islamic religion—they were afforded absolutely no contact with Muslim peoples, or with the Qur’an, or with Islamic scholarship of any sort. Thus they really would have had no way of obtaining knowledge of Islamic philosophy and practice, and chose to see the encroachment of the Islamic civilization as an invasion by a malignant foreign horde. (Ironically, it was the Crusades themselves that constituted the first European exposure to Middle Eastern culture—the rediscovery of the classical scholarship as preserved within Islamic civilization helped to engender the Renaissance.) I believe that a case could certainly be made for this view, for the average European Christian was ignorant of Christianity itself! That is to say, though they identified as Christians and knew that they worshipped Jesus Christ, they had few cogent ideas beyond that. In an age when books existed only in the odd musty monastic library, they had never seen a Bible, and the mumbled Latin liturgies they regularly endured served as little more than an incantation. In his book A World Lit Only by Fire, William Manchester described mediaeval existence as being governed by elaborate superstitions: They believed in sorcery, witchcraft, hobgoblins, werewolves, amulets, and black magic, and were thus indistinguishable from Pagans. If a lady died, the instant her breath stopped servants ran through the manor house, emptying every container of water to prevent her soul from drowning; before her funeral the corpse was carefully watched to prevent any dog or cat from running across the coffin, thus changing the remains into a vampire. (60-61) To put things in perspective, Manchester reminds us that so unaware were citizens of mediaeval Europe of their surroundings that they would not have been cognizant of the current century, nor would they likely have had any conception of a historical context in which to place it (22). During this, the heart of the mediaeval period (The Song of Roland is a twelfth-century manuscript based on eleventh-century material which concerns eighthcentury events), the extent to which the rationality and pragmatic worldview of the Greeks and Romans was subverted is truly astonishing.

Unfortunately, we cannot let the mediaeval Christians off (at least, not those who did not live under a rock, so to speak) so easily, for history does not attest to our theory. First of all, the Muslim governor of Barcelona had initiated contact with Charlemagne in 777, enlisting his military assistance against the caliph at Cordoba (the presence of the caliph at Cordoba as well as the caliph in Baghdad was the product of a schism caused by the Abbasid revolt of 750-760). Charlemagne himself led his troops through the Pyrenees to challenge Cordoba; it was on the return march after the failed attempt that Basque guerillas fell upon the Carolingian rear guard, killing, among others, the governor of the Breton March, Hruodlandus (Roland). So Charlemagne, although he had previously fought to defend parts of France and Italy against Moorish incursions, did recognize Muslim government in Spain as legitimate. Secondly, Charlemagne did in fact enjoy cordial relations with the Commander of the Faithful, the Fourth Abbasid caliph Harun Al-Rashid, who presided over the golden age of Islamic civilization from Baghdad. Charlemagne, after having been crowned Roman Emperor in 800, foresaw resistance to his coronation as such from the Byzantines (to whom the title arguably rightly belonged), opened a dialogue with and secured cooperation from Harun al-Rashid, lord of the powerful Abbasid caliphate. No love was lost between Harun and the Byzantine rulers, as demonstrated by a communiqué from the former to the latter which has been preserve for posterity, and which begins “The Commander of the Faithful sends his regards to the dog of the Greeks.” Harun, to demonstrate his good faith, sent Charlemagne copious gifts, including gems, gold, luxurious robes, ivory chess pieces, water clocks, and an albino elephant (!) whom Charlemagne kept as a beloved pet. Note also that Charlemagne, depicted in the poem as wise and deliberate, never utters the sort of rhetoric that flows steadily from Roland; it is also evident that the Saracens revere his name nearly as the Franks do. So if we cannot cite simple ignorance as cause of such misguided rhetoric, what can we conclude? I would contend that the Song of Roland is a sort of propaganda which originates with a psychological phenomenon that resulted when the pagan tribes of Northern Europe were forcibly converted (Charlemagne himself, for all of his admirable character traits, was a zealous proselytizer: his right-hand man Eginhard wrote in his biography of the Frankish king that Charlemagne waged eighteen campaigns against the Saxons on the eastern frontier of his kingdom; finally, “Charles gave the conquered Saxons a choice between baptism and death, and had 4500 Saxon rebels beheaded in one day; after which he proceeded to Thionville to celebrate the nativity of Christ.” (Durant). Recall that Roland is a twelfthcentury work by a Norman French poet, based upon an eleventh-century oral poem, which describes events of the eighth-century; consider also that, although Roland is frequently referred to as the first extant work of French literature, the Norman Franks, whose culture produced the work, were not actually Franks at all, but Norsemen—Vikings--who had settled in the region of France subsequently called Normandy in the tenth century. In her essay “Song of Roland: Apocalypse Palimpsest”, Julia Holloway compares the assimilation of the Norsemen into European (European meaning the old Roman sphere of influence, now united by the Catholic church) culture to a palimpsest: in the Middle Ages, it was common practice to obtain a blank piece of parchment by scraping the existing manuscript from an old piece and transcribing the new over top, creating a palimpsest. It was usually not an entirely successful enterprise; frequently the words of the original

manuscript were still visible beneath those of the new. In a like manner was a Christian identity (and Christianity being the religion of that most pacifistic of all historical personages, Jesus Christ) superimposed upon the stark lifeways of the Pagan North, the Christian ethos forced into a framework forged by barren landscape and icy seascape, generations of a rough-and-tumble militaristic existence, a culture in which might made right and transgressions were repaid with blood. In the year 1000, the Norman Otto was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He made the journey to Aix-la-Chapelle, hometown and favorite capital of Charlemagne; there he stood in the old palace chapel and meditated upon the sarcophagus that contained the remains of the legendary Frankish king. As we have established, at this historical juncture, the Norsemen had only recently injected themselves into the European milieu; their sense of self was lost in this new society, which in large part had shared an identity for centuries, defined first by the banner of the Roman Empire and then by Christendom—and they were acutely aware of their status of “Other”, that their pagan beliefs and “barbaric” ways were the binary against which Christian Europe measured their own perceived superiority. Thus the Normans invented a Christian mythology for themselves around the person of Charlemagne and his legacy; rather than acknowledging or attempting to justify their pagan heritage, they dealt with the gap between it and the Christian ethos which they theoretically had to embrace in order to thrive in the new order by projecting their ambivalent feelings about their old collective consciousness onto a relatively unknown entity—the obvious target for such an honor being the Saracens, since it merged nicely with the European fears concerning Spanish Muslim political and military ambitions. So they projected what Holloway calls their “shadow of death” onto the Saracens, and they did it with “conversion fervor” (11); this conversion fervor well sums up the nearly deliriously militant character of Roland (in Laisse 15, Ganelon—a villain—characterizes him as such). As an adjunct to the foregoing “palimpsest” theory, there is a case to be made that the Europeans—invaders and natives alike—realized the obligation to present a united front to the Saracen invaders; Christendom was the only banner under which they could unite, living as they did amid constant political instability and originating from disparate cultures. The Arab invaders were adroit at exploiting political and religious differences among their conquered peoples; they were thus able, as I mentioned, to drive the Byzantines out of their Eastern provinces and obliterate the Sassanian Empire. By coalescing about the Christian front, they were able to obscure the political and cultural anguish which otherwise characterized the Middle Ages, and to present a preemptively victorious mindset to the Saracens. Interestingly, Holloway mentions that the Pyrenees mountain pass where Hruodlandus met his reward at the hands of the “treacherous” Basques greatly intrigued the Normans (I place the word treacherous in quotes because the truth is that the Basques had been repressed and hemmed in on both sides; they saw the advent of the Arabs as liberation from their Spanish overlords, which is just the sort of Achilles’ heel, so to speak, in a country’s political system that the Arabs excelled at exploiting); they saw it as a “liminal pass, a boundary, a margin”, which was “thus used for a magnified psycho-drama of a culture in a looking glass war” (11).

It is ironic and interesting to note the profound effect that Islamic ethics and practices had on the culture of European Christendom, whether or not the denizens thereof realized it at the time. Consider that what became known as chivalry during the Feudal Period is a reflection of the ancient Bedouin Arab system, which when woven together with the influences from Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism as well as Mohammad’s revelations, became the Islamic religion. A famous example involves the First Crusade, which pitted the “English” king Richard the Lion-Hearted against the Kurdish Ayubbid caliph Saladin; well-matched in bravery and military genius, the two came to respect one another greatly. It is said that during a certain battle, Saladin provided Richard with two new horses when his own became a casualty of the war--so anathema was the idea of using an opponent’s disadvantage to one’s own advantage in the time-honored desert code of honor. Saladin’s life verily defines chivalry. In addition to this appropriation of aspects of the Islamic moral code, it is said that the Christian institution of the pilgrimage had been inspired by the Islamic hajj in part (and in part by the Greek practice of penitential exile). In his essay on Charlemagne from The Story of Civilization, Will Durant writes that Charlemage was in the habit of dressing in typical Frankish manner when he was first crowned King of the Franks; that all changed when he was crowned Roman Emperor. Apparently, he was then advised that he ought to adopt the ornate manner of royal dress more typical of the Byzantine rulers, and which they, says Durant, originally learned from the Sassanian Persian rulers at Ctesiphon. He also realized that as Emperor he was entitled to have his subjects kiss his foot. Finally, the Crusades themselves were ostensibly a reaction to the Islamic jihad, the term used to characterize the Muslim offensive in the name of winning converts and lands in pursuit of a global ummah united under Allah; both crusade and jihad infamously translate as Holy War. The Chanson de Roland provides a wide-ranging commentary on the sociopolitical landscape of the late mediaeval Continent. It also tells a tale of which we would have little objective knowledge, were we not able to detect these themes in Roland and in other works of mediaeval literature; namely the psychological implications of the forced mass conversions that remain a poignant legacy of the Middle Ages, and of the consequences of the chaotic cultural interaction, which, when the dust settled, revealed modern Europe. At the same time, we notice the presence of a universal of human nature, the objectifying the “other” in an attempt to escape our own perceived shortcomings. It occurs to me that those works which seem the most foreign to us upon the first reading frequently offer the most compelling insights into human nature on the second, third, and fourth, which in my opinion renders a work literature in the truest sense of the word.

WORKS CITED Durant, Will. “Charlemagne The King”. 18 May 2003. The Knighthood, Chivalry and Tournament Resource Library. 9 September 2004. http://www.chronique.com/Library/MedHistory/Charlemagne.htm Holloway, Julia B. “Song of Roland: Apocalypse Palimpsest.” Florin. 8 September 2004. http://www.florin.ms/olifant.html

Manchester, William. A World Lit Only By Fire. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992. Selection from The Koran. The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume B. Ed. Peter J. Simon. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002. 15661618. “The Song of Roland”. The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume B. Ed. Peter J. Simon. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002. 1706-1767.