Abstract
Spain during the time period 711 to 1492 was one of the most brilliantly creative and affluent nations in the Western Europe. During this epoch, Spain was populated by Muslims, Christians, and Jews who served as rulers, military leaders, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, and merchants, as well as consumers. The highest levels of cultural creativity and affluence are traceable to those rulers who encouraged religious tolerance, regardless of their own religious affiliation. I propose that this historical pattern is a valid one for marketing systems in contemporary Muslim–Christian–Jewish societies. Enforcement of religious orthodoxy by the government appears to discourage cooperative entrepreneurial activities and to reduce affluence, whereas government support of interfaith endeavors is linked to advances in science, business, and the arts.
The editors of this special issue of Marketing Theory on Islamic marketing have asked me to write a commentary on the current state of affairs in marketing theory as it relates to Muslim countries and to Muslim consumers. My perspective on these topics is probably a bit different from most academicians currently writing on them. A glance at the references and authors in this issue reveals that most fall into two groups: (1) Muslim academicians who are very knowledgeable about Islam as a religion and about Islamic culture, but who are perhaps less exposed to western-style marketing and consumer behavior theories and (2) western-educated and acculturated marketing and consumer behavior researchers who have had little exposure to or knowledge of Islam as a religion or culture. Then there are those few unique and ambidextrous individuals who grew up in Muslim countries, have Muslim religious identities, but are graduates of western marketing PhD programs. These individuals are presently at the forefront of research and theorization on Islamic marketing topics and would include scholars such as Ozlem Sandikci and Guliz Ger.
My perspective aligns with none of these. Born in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, I was raised as a Protestant Christian (see Jafari et al., 2011 discussion of Protestantism and Islam). I knew virtually nothing about Islam or Muslims while I was growing up. My only exposure to the Middle East was on the television (e.g., the Six-Day War between Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Israel in 1967) and the presence of a Syrian girl and a Lebanese girl in my high school, both of whom came from Christian families. Notably, they were both very beautiful and bright but had a difficult time socially, because they were considered “not really American” and “not really White.” My state of knowledge about Islam, therefore, could be labeled as “profoundly ignorant”—a label likely appropriate for many contemporary westerners.
Then about 12 years ago, I discovered some major anomalies in my ancestry. Rather than being English and Scottish Christians (and therefore archetypically “White” and “American”), my ancestors had actually arrived in North America during the early 1500s through the early 1600s and intermarried with the Native Americans. Where did they come from?—Spain. They were Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors who had been banished from Spain under threat of death (or forced conversion to Christianity) from 1492 forward. This new knowledge presented me with a large psychological conundrum—I had been raised as a Christian, only to discover that “they” were the pursuers and persecutors of my ancestors.
However, this discovery did help to explain some of the unusual marital and naming practices in my family over the generations—that is, cousin to cousin pairings were the norm, and the names included Allafar, Farabba, Alzina, Jaell, Palestine, Percia, Raisa, Gamaliel, Juanita, Dovey, and Omar—not your normal British names! Significantly, not only did these intermixed Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish names appear generation after generation in the same families, religious practices also suggested a blending of Jewish, Islamic, and some Christian behaviors. As late as the 1800s, women in our community were photographed wearing black hijabs covering their hair and black or dark dresses with long sleeves and lengthy skirts. Prayers were sometimes offered by men kneeling to the floor and houses of worship maintained gender segregation, with the men seated on the right and women to the left, together with two gendered entry doors. (Hirschman, 2005). Clearly, though little recognized or acknowledged by historians, there were Muslims (and Sephardic Jews) dwelling in North America prior to the formation of the United States—and prior even to the first British colony at Jamestown (Hirschman and Yates, 2012)
Perhaps even more importantly—given current political and religious tensions—these early Muslim and Jewish settlers got along very well with one another and later got along well with their Christian neighbors. Why was this possible then, but not now? Certainly the necessity of forming a “critical mass” of Spanish-speaking settlers in a strange, new environment might have been one causal factor for their original coalescence, but I believe a stronger argument can be made for the cooperative relationships between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the land from which my ancestors came—Medieval Spain.
In 711, a small army crossed the Mediterranean Sea at its narrowest point between Muslim North Africa and Christian Spain. The army consisted of a few trained Syrian Muslim troops and a larger contingent of recently Islamicized Berber tribesmen. The force was led by Tariq Ibn Ziyad, governor of Tangier. Remarkably, this expeditionary force managed to defeat the Christian Visigothic government that had been in power since 410. Within a few years, Muslims were firmly in control of the Iberian Peninsula and large portions of the population converted to this new religion. However, the Muslim rulers were not adept at making the social and economic changes necessary to improve their new domain. Social life was chaotic and international trade shrank.
Then, in 750, a refugee prince from the recently deposed Umayyad dynasty in Damascus, Syria, the center of Islamic culture and political power, made his way to the new Muslim Spain (termed Al Andalus, “the land of the Vandals” in Arabic) and became its ruler. If contemporary stereotypes about the fundamental incompatibility among Muslims, Jews, and Christians were in any way accurate, the next 700 years would have been a bloodbath. It was not. In fact, the next seven centuries witnessed the creation of some of the most sophisticated work on philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics to take place during the Middle Ages, together with the development of a culture of extraordinary affluence, greatly expanded international trade, and monumental architecture.
However, these same centuries also witnessed periods of violent ethnic conflicts, violent internecine conflicts, and even prototypical slanders of the religious “Other.” What caused these differences? Using historical documents from the Muslim presence in Spain as my guide, I distilled three propositions relevant to those who desire to create marketing harmony among consumers practicing these three Abrahamic religions. These propositions are put forward in brief below and then each is discussed with supporting historical evidence.
Proposition 1: You are not Muslim-/Christian-/Jew-enough for me
Having converted to Judaism as an adult, I can testify to the fact that there are some Jews for whom I will never be “Jewish-enough.” Some tell me that one can never be “really Jewish” unless she or he is born to Jewish parents. Others will tell me that even if someone is born Jewish, they are still not Jewish-enough, unless they are Orthodox Jewish and maintain a fully kashrut lifestyle. Then there are others who insist that even if you are born Jewish and lead a strict kashrut lifestyle, you are still not Jewish-enough unless you “were born a Jew, live a completely kashrut lifestyle AND live in Israel—and your ancestors founded the state of Israel!” As ridiculous as this reasoning is (and despite the fact that it would then reduce the number of Jewish-enough Jews to around 5000 people), there are Muslims who seem to follow the same logic (Izberk-Bilgin, 2012). (And to be fair, the same judgments are directed by Evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians toward other Christian denominations.) In the United States, there is even a cultural saying for this type of invidious comparison, “Holier than thou,” which refers to persons who try to compete with one another on the rigor of their religious observance.
Let us now take a look at Medieval Spain. In 749, the ruling family for all Islamic territories was the Umayyad dynasty (Mann et al., 1992) that had been in power in Damascus, Syria, since 644. But in that year, a competitive family, the Abbasids (Mann et al., 1992), took control in a bloody coup that left every member of the Umayyad clan dead, save one. The sole survivor, a young prince named Abd al Rahman escaped the coup and fled to North Africa, the homeland of his Berber mother. In 2 years, he had raised a Syrian/Berber army and set out on a military campaign—not to Damascus to take back his birthright but rather across the Strait of Gibraltar to Al Andalus where he defeated the reigning Muslim caliph in 756. Now ensconced in Muslim Spain, Abd reestablished the Umayyad family as a powerful presence within Islam—albeit a great distance from his former home in Damascus. The capital of this new Umayyad realm was named Cordoba and became known as the “ornament of the world” by the 10th century (Menocal, 2002). As will be discussed under Proposition 3, Cordoba and Al Andalus under the Umayyad rulers served as a center of higher learning and international trade with personal freedom and wealth unmatched anywhere else in Europe (Mann et al., 1992).
But the gentle reader may protest that all this extravagant affluence was gained by bloody coups and internecine violence among Muslims. Doesn’t that show that Muslims are “not normal”; surely Christians and Jews have never engaged in such unsavory activities. However, if we turn our attention to Britain half a millennium later, we find Tudor England, a famed Christian realm, engaging in even more violent intrafaith machinations.
Tudor King Henry VIII (1491–1547), after murdering two of his wives and fathering only two legitimate children, Mary and Elizabeth, died in 1547, leaving a realm torn between the Protestant and Catholic forms of Christianity. His daughter Mary Tudor’s reign brought strict Catholicism to dominance and led to the execution by beheading, burning, and hanging of over 284 English citizens who happened to be Protestant. Mary died childless and her younger half-sister Elizabeth, a Protestant (whose mother, Ann Boleyn, was beheaded by their father, Henry VIII) assumed the throne in 1558. Subsequent uprisings by English Catholics led to the violent deaths of 400 of her subjects.
Among those Elizabeth additionally had killed on religious grounds was her royal Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, whom she ordered beheaded in 1587. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the throne passed to Mary of Scotland’s son, James Stewart, a Catholic. By 1638, England, Scotland, and Wales were embroiled in a Christian-on-Christian civil war that would cost over 100,000 lives, lead to the beheading of the monarch, and plunge the nation into bankruptcy for decades. It is not a given religion, per se, which creates social chaos—it is persecution of those whose opinions and beliefs differ from the majority viewpoint.
Proposition 2: it is not the religion, it is the ruler
Our second proposition states that societal prosperity and productivity are not a function of the religion of the ruler but of the ruler’s leadership skills and attitude toward other faiths. Over the period from 711 to 1492 in Spain, rulers varied in religious affiliation (Muslim, Christian), competency (high, low), and attitudes toward other religions (positive, negative). Virtually all historians of the period come to the same conclusion: the several Spanish “Golden Ages” within this span of time occurred under rulers who were both competent and tolerant (Mann et al., 1992). Perhaps the two most remarkable examples occurred under the Umayyad dynasty, 750 to 1031, when the ruler was Muslim; and under Alfonso X, 1250 to 1284, who was Christian.
Historians note that Abd al Rahman’s “clear sighted governance transformed al Andalus into a marvel…His reign marked the critical turn in Muslim Iberia’s fortunes. [Prior] erratic rule yielded to the Umayyid’s steadying dynastic hand…The first four Umayyids ruled for a combined 80 years” (Lowney, 2005: 65). During this time period, Muslims, Jews, and Christians led a generally harmonious existence in Al Andalus, even at the village level. As Lowney (2005: 208) remarks, “ The few anecdotes that can be pieced together suggest that ordinary Muslims, Jews and Christians sometimes triumphed to forge accommodations with neighbors of different faiths, creating a common life unlike any achieved or even imagined elsewhere on Europe’s continent in the Medieval era.”
We turn now to a comparable Christian ruler, Alfonso X who ruled Spain from 1252 to 1284; called Alfonso the Wise, he was a scholar and a competitive intellectual who desired to make Castilian Spain the center of the arts, sciences, classical scholarship, and new literature for all of Europe (Mann et al., 1992). Alfonso’s “brilliant gambit” as Menocal (2002: 22) puts it was to replace Latin—the prevailing European language since the Roman Empire held sway—with a written and spoken form of Castilian Spanish. He desired for the Spanish vernacular to become “a written language that could serve the institutions of a civilized and modern society: to record the history and the laws, extend science and education, and become the appropriate vehicle of literary and even religious texts” (Menocal, 2002: 224).
Translating the treasure trove of documents housed in the Iberian libraries required a squadron of multilingual, multifaith scholars. Concurrently, new works on technology, philosophy, and literature were produced and inscribed in the new “Spanish” language. Many of these new works were developed from materials collected by the earlier Muslim rulers and dated from the eighth century forward. Included among them were the Indian cycles of animal fables and the Persian-based and Babylon-adapted master text of A Thousand and One Nights.
Among the other culturally significant texts made available in Spanish were Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed one of the most important works on rationalism then in existence and Mohammed’s Book of the Ladder translated from Arabic into Castilian by a scholar named “Abraham the Jew” of Toledo. Surely this is evidence of a culture that valued knowledge above religious orthodoxy.
Proposition 3: Life is better when we all get along
We now consider the third proposition: Tolerance of religious diversity contributes to intellectual advancement and economic prosperity. Spain between the years 711 and 1492 provides us with a unique and compelling example of what can be accomplished when religious diversity is embraced, rather than restricted. Menocal, a historian of the period, writes of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain (2002: 27):
Within the stability of the of the long reigns and orderly successions of Abd al Rahman’s sons, grandsons and great grandsons, there was a vast economic revival…even in the once decimated countryside, where the introduction of new crops and new techniques, including irrigation, made agriculture a prosperous concern…The pan-Mediterranean trade and travel routes… vital to cultural contacts and continuities were reconfigured and expanded…The new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive, but following Quranic mandate, by and large protected them.
Consumerism was celebrated in the affluent cities. Lowney (2005: 66–67) reports that a royal court musician named Ziryab arrived in Cordoba from Baghdad in 822 and opened a music conservatory. His many students studied song, dance, and poetry. His arrival also stimulated a new hairstyle “parted in the middle, not covering the forehead, and smoothed behind the ears.” Ziryab additionally instructed the Cordobans on harvesting wild asparagus, using deodorant, introduced the use of bleach to make linen clean and white, and pioneered the fashion of seasonal apparel changes. Style consciousness swept into Spain.
By 1031, however, the Cordoban caliphate had fallen—a victim of in-fighting among rival Muslim factions. But the fall of Cordoba led to the development of several smaller realms throughout Al Andalus. Within cities such as Seville and Toledo, religious tolerance prevailed and so did creativity. Muslim mathematicians adopted and improved upon the Hindu-Indian numerical system, while the rest of Christian Europe was still tied to cumbersome Roman numerals. These same Andalusians introduced the zero to mathematics and developed the algorithm for algebra.
As Lowney(2005: 77) tells it:
The Persian Muslim mathematician al-Khwarzimi…grasped the potential uses of the numerical system pioneered by Indian mathematicians. While Europeans were still unsure of what the zero was or why it mattered, Arab scholars were cranking through quadratic equations and complex geometric proofs…Al Kwarzimi’s treatise, Al-jabr wal-Muggbula (“Completing and Balancing”), introduced algebra.
After that point in time, the Christian reconquest of Spain began in earnest, but several of the new rulers welcomed the presence of both Jews and Muslims in their re-taken territories. The most prominent of these was Alfonso X whom we already mentioned as a tolerant and learned king. Perhaps the outstanding scientific endeavor authorized by Alfonso was the Muslim/Jewish/Christian ensemble he assembled to construct a new set of astronomical tables to be used in international shipping. Updating the work of Muslim astronomer al Zarkali, Jewish astronomers Isaac ben Sid and Jehuda ben Moses Cohen worked alongside Italian Christian astronomer John of Cremona and Spanish Christian astronomers Juan Daspa and Garci Perez to produce a celestial map that became the standard astronomical text for the next three centuries—replaced only in the 1600s by Kepler’s development of the telescope (Lowney, 2005).
Civil documents from this same time period depict a similarly cooperative set of norms at the local level in Spain. Towns on the Spanish frontier with France had militias composed of both Muslims and Christians who defended against foreign interlopers—whether the invaders were Muslim or Christian. Lowney (2005: 202), for instance, reports, “When French [Christian] armies attacked Gerona in the late 1280s, hundreds of Muslim archers and lancers from nearby towns hurried to assist the city’s besieged Christian and Muslim defenders.” What these behaviors indicate is that nationality had come to dominate religious identity in the minds of Spanish citizens.
This same pattern held during peaceful times, as well. In Valencia, for example, shared bread bake ovens were used by members of all three faiths. These same interfaith partnerships helped pay for night watchmen to guard community crops during harvesting time, for grist mills to grind the gathered grain, for water wheels and irrigation sluices to distribute water among the villages’ fields, and even for bath houses shared by the community members (Menocal, 2002). Perhaps most remarkably, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim merchants, traders, and shopkeepers would form business partnerships under which the Sabbaths of each member would be ‘covered’ by one of the other members, permitting commercial activities to continue throughout the week.
Conclusions
It is remarkable that marketers in a medieval country could find ways to use creatively their religious differences to enhance their offerings to the community and to the world, whereas we seem to be still struggling with these same issues in the present day (see e.g. Alserhan, 2010; Mahajan, 2012; Sandikci, 2011; Sandikci and Ger, 2007; Tarlo, 2010; Temporal, 2011; Varul, 2008; Wong, 2007). Books are written to “guide” western marketers in the intricacies of Islamic thought and practice, as if all Muslims were a unified bloc of consumers (see e.g. Alserhan, 2010; Rudnycky, 2009: Schielke, 2010; Temporal, 2011). Books are written which make Muslims seem irretrievably foreign and oppositional to western capitalism. Articles are written, which make the western world seem cravenly materialistic and absent a soul (Imran Khan, “Why the West craves Materialism and the East seeks Religion”). Muslim Spain—and later Christian Spain with Muslim inhabitants—stands as models that “we can all get along” to paraphrase Rodney King. All that is required is the cultural commitment to permit individuals, whatever be their religious orientation, to live their lives—and spend their incomes—as they desire. Marketers who approach Muslim consumers with this attitude in mind will flourish, just as they did in Medieval Spain.
Finally, I want to thank the editors for giving me an opportunity to put forward my opinions on this topic. I hope my ancestors are happy that their commitment to cooperation and toleration has been carried forward over time.