lor entendiment en trobar et en chantar. (Frank 1955:186)
One of the first and most basic problems encountered in an attempt to reimagine the cultural texture of this period is that many of the terms we must and do use can often be quite misleading. Foremost among these is the term “Islam” when it is used to denote the cultural entity that flourished principally in Spain and Sicily but that was also a significant force far beyond the geographical and temporal limits of its political boundaries. The term Islam has most commonly been used to denote that entity because it is the name of the religion under whose impetus military expansion initially brought it from the Middle East to Europe. It is also used in opposition to the term “Christian,” which in Robertsonian and neo- or pre-Robertsonian views of the Middle Ages is assumed to be the cultural and intellectual force that strictly dictated and delineated the parameters and texture of both intellectual and artistic activities. As such, both terms are part of the general terminological apparatus that denotes an insurmountable separation between the two entities and that relegates to the category of non-European most of what is Islamic.
Such a perspective can be seriously misleading, however, because among other things it implies an identity between the religion and the cultural entity that, in terms of the way al-Andalus interacted with the Latin-Romance culture of the rest of Europe, was very often not perceived or was not the primary identification made. Its analogy would be of failing to distinguish, when dealing with the Middle Ages, between what is Latin (or Romance) and what is Christian, with the resulting misapprehension of the non-Christian cultural and intellectual strains and texts that are written in Latin (or in a Romance language).
But the problem is neither merely terminological nor due exclusively to the relative lack of sophisticated knowledge we tend to have about Islam and the Arabs in medieval Europe. It is also the case that there is much debate among scholars who are specialists (as well as among Arabs and Muslims who may not be scholars) on the question of the relationship between what is Arabic and what is Islamic. In any area of research where the distinction is potentially relevant, conflicting opinions on the nature of the relationship between these two terms almost invariably surface. All that one can say without much fear of contradiction is that Islam and Arabic culture are not necessarily identical and that at different times and in different places, the nature of the relationship has varied. At least this much can and should be said about their relationship in the Middle Ages in Europe: On the one hand, many different racial and ethnic groups were and became Spanish Muslims; on the other, the Arabic language became the prestige language for many who were not.
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