"Don Quijote" and 9-11: The Clash of Civilizations and the Birth of the Modern Novel

Abstract

The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's of aptly describes current world events as well as aspects of Don Quijote. In many ways, the conflict between Christianity and Islam defines Spanish history and One can look at the world during Cervantes's lifetime and see how a Muslim presence affected politics, society, and literature. Cervantes's military service, including his participation at Lepanto, and his captivity in Algiers naturally inform his writings. The Argel plays and Don Quijote?most notably, the captive's tale and the figure of Ricote? represent the clash of cultures. As always, Cervantes uses and revises history, so that his vision is both illuminating and distinct. It may sound odd to connect a novel from the seventeenth century with an event that some say marks the beginning of the wars of the twenty-first.1 Yet at least two episodes in Cervantes's Don Quijote and the attacks of 9-11 have in common that they are products of a clash of civilizations, and the 1996 book by that name by Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington offers us the opportunity to search for new meanings in the first modern novel. The thought of finding clues for modern problems in Cervantes's masterpiece is not new, but it has taken a new urgency because of recent developments in European society. Don Quijote takes place in a country that was almost overrun by Muslim armies in 711, but which managed to reverse the results ofthat invasion by 1492. By that time, the three cultures inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula?Christian, Muslim, and Jewish?had become enmeshed in one another, and the rela tionship among the three religions, all peoples of the book, gave Spain historical experiences that were unique among major Western European countries. Recent migration from Muslim countries has created in the continent the kind of situation that Spain faced for most of its medieval and early modern history (Huntington 198-260). It is not surprising, then, to find Europeans turning to Spain's greatest writer for some sort of reference on these matters. In 1994, in Berlin, a collo quium organized by the city's Technical University had as its topic as a cultural melting pot: the encounter of Islam, Judaism and Christianity in the works of Miguel de Cervantes Saa vedra. There were presentations by scholars from France, Spain, Turkey by way of Canada, and Germany. For the organizers of the event, the symposium is a sign of the importance of the ideas and perspectives contained in Cervantes's works in conflictive situations in today's culture. The editors of the proceedings find that Cervantes's thoroughly conscientious and competent handling of the mentality, the moral values, and the forms of representation by non Christian religions, contrasts markedly with the historical ineptitude in present-day Europe in its encounter with differences and cultural otherness (Schmauser 7). The words of the editors would place a heavy burden on any work of fiction, particularly one that is considered the first in the genre. But Don Quijote is no ordinary book. Its context has uncanny similarities to our current situation, as the German editors noticed, and the book itself is a critique of reading, which activity some contend may be the source of the tribulations in which we find ourselves since the wars of religion (as Andrew Sullivan would define them) in which we