Chivalry, Love and Romance, Speculations on Origins – First Stab

By Kemal,

Our favorite Desi FUPA, Ms. Treta Yuga, made an interesting point about the possibility of Indian Tantric ideas underlying the Western Tradition of Chivalric Romantic love, through a Muslim Sufi influence. (On the side most of this reflects the Treta Yuga more than the Satya Yuga, in that these matters concern a dim reflection of a past heroic age)

Anyway, doubtlessly there is an Indian influence in what became European Courtly Romantic Love. The chief agent of this is Muslim Love poetry in Spain, and to a lesser degree Sicily, which reflected a synthesis of Islamic ideas and Indian ideas gained through intercourse and commerce with Hindus. Maybe this idea can be dangerous to narrowly Occidentalphile types, when it suggests that much of European culture is a synthesis of elements from it’s most hated and derided others.

However feeling threatened here is to divorce yourself from what made Western Civilization strong to begin with, the ability to promiscuously borrow from any and everyone. To absorb and digest such influences. All young civilizations have this quality, and they lose it as they become moribund – like the increasingly stagnate modern West.

What’s the harm in admitting influences?
All civilization is derivative, when you really look at history. Sure, everyone wants to feel like they are a special wonder-child, to point proudly to the self ans say “I/we did this” (and in reality it’s always someone else, other compatriots, doing the actual work that I/we feel proud of). No one wants to admit the truth, that just about everyone was once a savage uncouth barbarian who was civilized, sometimes at sword’s point, and sometimes by word’s point – in the influence of a Holy Book or Epic Poem.

Much of the strength of Western Christian and Post-Christian civilization lay in it’s adaptability in absorbing alien influences.
This was also much of the strength of High Islamic Civilization, East and West, which it lost, leading to the stagnation of the Muslim mind. Indian civilization lost this quality too, some would argue, then growing stagnate. Some would argue that Chinese civilization previously lost this quality – much of the Chinese awakening lies in the Pacific rim’s return to a youthful attitude towards borrowing and cultural innovation. The long term success of that innovation remains to be seen..

So that said, what’s Chivalry ? It’s is a matter of two phenomena; a martial one, and a amorous one. Chivalry is about war and love.

Martial Chivalry:Part of Chivalry explicitly was about combat, not love. Chivalry was a set of attitudes for a warrior elite, to some degree the martial ideas of chivalry and knighthood were a synthesis of old the Roman equestrian warrior ethos, and an old Germanic idea of sacred warfare (see the Bzerker cults).

Both of these were a shadow of, and attenuated survival of, older Indo-Aryan warrior traditions that originated among the ancestors of the Iranians and Hindus, and the Islamic futuwwah chivalry of horse mounted knights. Among Asians the Scythian, Pashtun, Rajisthani Kshatrya, Kurds, and Persians kept these ideas in their more original sacred forms.

The Teutonic peoples had a warrior spirituality that reflected the older Eastern Aryan ideas, I believe the Celts possessed this to a more vital degree, before they settled and adopted Roman ways. The Roman Patricians kept the idea until the early Empire period, after which it too grew attenuated and decayed. Pre-Chivalric feudal elites inherited the rough and tumble warrior spirituality of the Germanic Mannerbund with a specifically Catholic re-orientation, which reflected Old High Roman ideas.

None of these influences combined and emerged into the specific synthesis of Chivalry and the Chivalric ideal, until the coming of Muslims to Sicily and Spain, followed by Frankish encounters with Muslim knights in the Holy Lands during the crusades.

Islamic futuwwah, chivalry, is an indigenous development of Greater Arabia. It is the way and ideal of the pre-Islamic Fat’a, a chivalric young man. In his teenage years the Prophet Muhammad al-Mubashir was a Fat’a himself, a founding member of a league of Fityan called Hilf al-Fudul, a sort of Arabian Mannerbund consisting of idealistic youth devoted to righting wrongs and assisting the oppressed.

In this, the specifically Islamic was married to a purified rendering of a pre-Islamic idea, and further refined in the ideas of the Sufis, who displayed an active spirituality based on a total consecration of the being, a devotion to contemplation (in the spirit of the Prophetic saying that a minute’s contemplation is superior to 70 years of worship), invocation (dhikr, the repetition of sacred names), and an active Warrior Spirituality in a devotion to manning the frontier Garrisons (Ribats).

The young Fat’a was thus a warrior knight, as well as a Monastic contemplative. A later influence, of the Persian nobility’s warrior ethos, itself a direct survival of the original Indo-Aryan idea, further conditioned the ideal of the fat’a, and combined it with the concept of the Indo-Persian champion Pahlavan. A further influence lay in the traditions of Turkic mounted horsemen, who brought their Turk-Mongol traditions into the Civilization of High Islam. All of this produced a synthesis, in the ideal of a polished, educated, devout, and contemplative man of action – a warrior scholar. Influenced by Sufism, and perhaps bound to a Sufi lodge or brotherhood, but not a pure retiree from the world in the sense that many Sufis practiced. The Fat’a was an intermediate type of being and became the idea man known as the Murabit, the one who mans the frontier posts.

Ultimately the European Christian Paladin (whose name reflects the Indo-Persian Pahlavan) was a synthesis of these elements. A being based on what survived of the indigenous Germanic and Celtic war band’s spirituality, initially almost quashed by Christianity, but then given a new focus by the Church in the Invasions of England, Ireland, and then the Middle East – whereupon meeting the Muslim Pahlavan and Faris, brought a synthesis back home. Some of this synthesis happened in Sicily, Italy, and Spain much earlier because of the diversity and open intercourse, in both war and peace, trade and friendship as well as enmity, of the Italians and Iberians with North African Muslims

This is Martial Chivalry. The Amorous reflection, in Courtly love, let’s poke a stick at next.