The Muslims of Sicily Under Christian Rule

Abstract

Who were the Sicilian Muslims?The Norman invasion of Sicily was neither an invasion, nor was the kingdom that eventually resulted from it particularly 'Norman' in character.At the height of its power in the mid-twelfth century, the kingdom of Sicily included most of the southern Italian peninsula as well as Malta, and colonies along the North African coast.However, it was the island of Sicily that was undoubtedly the gravitational centre of the kingdom's cultural and political life, and its capital of Palermo was probably Europe's wealthiest and most populous city.The island was also home to most of the kingdom's large, Arabicspeaking Muslim communities.Indeed, these formed the majority of the island's population for most of the kingdom's short, but spectacular, existence.In 1061, almost seventy years before the kingdom was proclaimed, a modest military force under the leadership of Robert Guiscard and Roger of Hauteville, but in the pay of a Sicilian amīr, Ibn al-Thumna, arrived to assist in a civil war which had already lasted a generation, and had seen the political and administrative disintegration of the island into petty principalities.The advent of these two leaders and those who were to follow them would introduce fundamental and irreversible changes to the demographic, religious and linguistic base of the island over the next 250 years.In the Islamic period, the view that the Muslims who hailed mainly from Ifrīqiya (roughly the area covered by modern Tunisia) had repopulated the island is matched by an assimilation theory that 'most of its population became Muslim'. 2 In the ninth and tenth centuries, many towns of strategic importance were indeed 1 This article was originally published in The Society of Norman Italy, ed.Graham A. Loud and Alex Metcalfe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 289-317.2 Yāqūt, BAS (Arabic), 124; translation in Amari BAS, 51.According to Johns (1995), 152, there was 'a scale of acculturation ranging from Greek Christians and Arab Muslims at the two extremes, but with most of the population of the island falling somewhere in the middle'.For general accounts of the Sicilian Muslims in the Norman period, see Amari (1939), Ahmad (1975), Johns (1983), Abulafia (1990) and Maurici (1999).repopulated after their capture, and appear to have assumed an Arab-Islamic character around the entire island.However, change in rural areas seems to have been of a much slower, assimilative type.Even in these more conservative and less carefully monitored environments, most Christian enclaves of Greek or Italo-Greek speakers that had remained are likely to have converted to Islam and/or adopted Arabic as a second language within the space of a few generations.This was probably the scenario in the south-western Val di Mazara, where Arab-Islamic influence had first been established and for most of the Val di Noto in the south-east too.However, it is fair to assume that across and around the many, ragged religious and socio-linguistic frontiers that this created, different communities experienced different degrees of acculturation at varying rates.For example, in 973, Ibn Ḥawqal, a hostile visitor to Sicily, described how large numbers in rural areas were imperfectly embracing Arab-Islamic norms.In such, communities, he claimed, 'marriage to Christians is [allowed] provided that their male child follows the father by being a bastardised Muslim (mushaʿmidh), and that a female becomes a Christian like her mother'. 3 He also added that they spoke unintelligibly, like 'deaf mutes'.Although the idea that there may have existed degrees of Christianity in Sicily makes for an intriguing, if not entirely unattractive, thesis, it also seems from Ibn Ḥawqal's description of Palermo that it had barely a remaining trace of Christian culture.Some evidence suggests remote attempts to strengthen Muslim centres and practices after the fall of Rometta in 965, the last site of Christian resistance.The Fatimid caliph, al-Muʿizz is reported to have ordered the building of mosques, strengthening of fortifications and the urbanisation of the rural population. 4However, dispersed settlement patterns from the Norman period, the lack of archaeological evidence for such construction or support from other documentary sources suggests that there may have been some distance between the aim of the order and its implementation.Nonetheless, it is likely that, by the mid-eleventh century, Sicily was mainly Muslim and almost everyone understood Arabic, particularly in the western Val di Mazara and southern Val di Noto.Only in parts of the north-eastern Val Démone, where Greek and 3 Ibn Ḥawqal, 129; translation in Kramers and Wiet (1964), 128.Omitted in both versions of Amari's BAS.4 Al-Nuwayrī, BAS (Arabic), 494-5; translation in Amari, BAS, 179.

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