Islamic Roots of ‘Don Quixote’¹?

Edward Rothstein

New York Times News Service

Reproduced from Chicago Times, Tempo- page7B, June 30, 2005

“Just consider Cervantes’² playful account of book’s origins. One day in the Toledo marketplace, he writes, a young boy was trying to sell old notebooks and worn scraps of paper covered with Arabic script. Cervantes recounts how he acquired a book and then looked around for a Moor³ to translate it.”

The Arabic manuscript, the Moor tells him, is the “History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide⁴ Hamete⁵ Benengeli, an Arab historian.”

L. P. Harvey’s important new book, “Muslims in Spain: 1500 to 1614” (University of Chicago Press), soberly recounts the ways in which Muslim culture and religion, which had been part of Spanish life for eight centuries, was forcibly suppressed, until Muslims were completely expelled from Spain, between 1609 and 1614. There was much trauma and bloodshed, much secrecy and much dissimulation.

^1. Name of a famous novel in Spanish: The Adventures of Don Quixote

^2. Who published the novel in his name after getting it translated from Arabic manuscript

^3. A person of Moorish origin- meaning a Muslim of Spain

^4. Syed in Arabic

^5. Hamid in Arabic