The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

148 epilogue

work of Clifford Geertz, rejects this reductive view.^43 Geertz saw religion

as an aspect of culture, as part of the webs of significance, the wider set

of rules and norms that dynamically reflect and respond to the needs of

individuals in a community. Balancing an appreciation of discourse and

agency, he sought to find the reasons in and for religion. This pragmatic

and culturally embedded understanding of religion promises to speak of

belief as something other than blindness, as an expression of agency. To

give one concrete example: to make sense of why medieval Christians at-

tacked Jews, a cultural historian might argue that these Christians were

expressing a criticism of royal power and fiscal policy. If this kind of read-

ing offers a smart, satisfying, and coherent explanation for belief, then, as

Steven Justice has recently argued, when taken as a full and systematic

account, it offers a familiar picture of belief.^44 By reducing religion to the

play of interests, to its societal value, this approach can only understand

belief as a propositional matter. If one says that believers were aware of

these reasons, then they appear as people who never really believed at all.

If, on the other hand, one argues that they really did believe, then they ap-

pear as people who were unaware of the reasons for their beliefs. In other

words, the cultural account of religion views belief as either an ideological

mask or communal delusion.^45 Sincere belief, by extension, can only be a

form of blind adherence, an irrational commitment. This coded but per-

sistent attitude to belief helps to explain why cultural histories of religious

interaction have done little to staunch the flow of liberal and conservative

polemics. It explains why they continue to view religion with the same an-

ticipatory nostalgia. Cultural history cannot overcome these polemics be-

cause it stands upon the same horizon.

The consequences of this agreement are acutely apparent in studies of

religious interaction. Again, for the liberal neo- Kantian epigones, interac-

tion provided evidence of man’s ability to cast off the chains of religious

delusion, to act freely and independently; for Catholic conservatives, in-

teraction occurred at the expense of religion, at the expense of community;

and for contemporary cultural pragmatists, it demonstrated that religious

boundaries were permeable and flexible. At the risk of putting this too

simply, these points of view respectively conclude that interaction occurs

in resistance to, in spite of, or regardless of religion. All of these paths

arrive at the same curious conclusion: religious interaction has nothing

to do with religion. Indeed, in the century of scholarship on Muslim and

Christian mercenaries, every historian has argued that these soldiers were

driven by politics rather than religion. Why? Because if one begins with