ABSTRACT
Despite the continuing vitality of christian culture, the use of Arabic and changing social customs and architecture - in Cordoba, although perhaps not in Toledo - were transforming al-Andalus into an islamic state . All the Andalusi christian texts show some awareness of the history and language of the conquerors. The eighth-century chronicles, compiled at a time when there was almost certainly little writing in Arabic in Hispania, retold news from the east to a much greater extent than earlier Hispanic chroniclers had done, and the author of the Chronicle if 741 used this material to underline the parallels between islamic defeats in the east and in Hispania.
When Arabic became the dominant literary language in the peninsula, christian texts were translated and these translations were islamicized in form and vocabulary. Greenblatt cited this type of 'reproduction of mimetic capital' as evidence of assimilation." Yet this acculturation was very superficial, because the texts translated were nearly all sacred or ecclesiastical. Even the Calendar if Cordoba, adapted from an Arabic model compiled by a muslim, could have functioned as a christian liturgical calendar. At the period when these texts were being translated, Recemund was received as a christian scholar in Gorze. Rather than making the facile connection between the use of Arabic and conversion to Islam, one should perhaps bear in mind that Arabic-speaking christian communities have survived in the Middle East to the twentieth century and conversely, that countries such as Iran and Pakistan have adopted Islam without its language. Alvarus excepted, the christians of al-Andalus may have experienced few qualms during the transition to Arabic as their principal literary medium. Change of language and form did not affect the context in which sacred texts and christian histories were used and understood.
