Posthumous homage to Professor Miguel Cruz Hernández

Casa Árabe and eight Arab Studies professors and former students of Don Miguel Cruz Hernández, professor emeritus at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid’s Department of Arab and Islamic Studies, are paying this posthumous homage to the professor after his death on March 25, 2020 at the age of one hundred.

We would like to thank the following individuals for their participation in the homage:
Ana Ballesteros Peiró, senior associate researcher, CIDOB and OPEMAM
Miguel H. de Larramendi Martínez, professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, UCLM
Ana I. Planet Contreras, professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, UAM
Antonio Díez, interim teacher in Madrid public education system, and a writer and poet
Luz Gómez García, professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, UAM
Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán, professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, UAM
Waleed Saleh Alkhalifa, professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, UAM
Bernabé López García, Honorary holder of the Chair for the History of Contemporary Islam, UAM



Full text by Bernabé López García:

MIGUEL CRUZ HERNÁNDEZ (1920-2020), HISTORIAN OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT

For reasons hard to put into words, Professor Cruz Hernández was one of those few people who are difficult to address without using the respectful title of “Don.” “Don Miguel,” born in Malaga in 1920, had a calling for education, being a good son and grandson of teachers. He was a “son of the Republic,” in the words of Emilio de Santiago, in a lengthy interview titled “The Intellectual and His Memory,” recorded at the University of Granada in the year 2000. The Spanish Civil War caught him in a Republican zone in the province of Granada, where chance had it that he became a soldier during the last year of the war. When it all ended, he studied Philosophy and Letters in sad post-war Granada, a time in which he was subject to two influences that would mark his academic life forever:  that of Professor Enrique Gómez Arboleya, head of the Department of Philosophy and Law, who dealt with the subject of Philosophy, and Joaquina Eguaras, who was to initiate him in the study of Arabic. Melding these two influences together, he would end up becoming the specialist on Arab and Islamic thought to leave behind his mark on Spain. His university years aroused an interest in culture and theater, with a zeal for literary adventures like the journals “Vientos del Sur” and “Cuadernos de Teatro,” produced along with Antonio Gallego Morell, Andrés Soria Aedo and José Tamayo.

However, his academic life took him down other paths. As an assistant and associate, he climbed the rungs of the interim professorship ladder in Granada while completing his doctorate. His thesis about Brentano, which was directed by Arboleya, was not accepted at the Complutense, the only university to which theses could be submitted at that time. According to Cruz, this was not because it was not found unsuitable by the dominant orthodoxy of the day, but rather because he chose to make use of another arsenal from his studies in Granada, dedicating the thesis to Avicenna’s Metaphysics and defending it in 1947.

Once he earned his PhD, like many youths at the post-war university he set off on the journey in search of a full professorship with tenure. He would later be seen on the acceptance and rejection lists published in the Official Bulletin of the Spanish State, or BOE, for different professorships, that of “Fundamentals of Philosophy and History of Philosophic Systems” at the Universities of Salamanca and Granada, that of “Metaphysics (Ontology and Theodicy)” at the University of Barcelona, and that of “History of Philosophy and Philosophy of History” at the same university, competing with names which were to become more or less illustrious in the field of Philosophy with the passage of time, including Gustavo Bueno, Carlos París and Antonio Millán Puelles. After successfully competing for the first of the aforementioned, he was given the option of remaining at either the University of Granada or the University of Salamanca, but he decided who would rather take up residence in the latter of the two, where he even became the Mayor from 1958 through 1962, and as such a representative in the regional parliament from 1958 to 1961.

To justify his choice, he would admit much later, in an interview with the newspaper El Día de Salamanca: “I applied for Granada and Salamanca. I was able to choose my destination and I never hesitated. First of all, due to the University’s name, and also because I had lived a very tense life in Granada and its province, and I needed to start out all over again with a new life. I managed to do this and much more in Salamanca.”

As of 1953, he also taught the course on “Psychology” at Salamanca’s School of Medicine, a task for which he was enabled by the Ministry led by then Minister Joaquín Ruíz Giménez. This would allow him to make a railroad-related joke with the title of his professorship during the Interview held in the year 2000: “Fundamentals of Philosophy and History in philosophical systems and Psychology for Medicine and in the great European expresses.”

In 1954, he was named assistant director of the new Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura (Spanish-Arab Culture Institute, or IHAC), an appointment which surprised him, as he once mentioned, but which he explained as follows in a recent book: “Martín Artajo and Ruíz-Giménez had taken me for a disciple of García Gómez. After all, he had directed my doctoral thesis, which was bestowed with a the special prize. It is most likely that Professors Pérez Villanueva, Director General of University Education, and Tovar, then the Rector of the University of Salamanca, also held influence in my being chosen.” The position, however, without compensation other than just representation expenses, did not allow him to take up residence in Madrid.

Four years later, the mayorship also took him by surprise, as he confessed to Sara González Gómez: “I would have been less astonished if they had named me Bishop.” He attributed his naming to Manuel Fraga’s visit to the city and his politics as a National Delegate of Associations, through which he sought out new faces. This was not the only political office he would hold, being named Civil Governor of the province of Albacete from 1962 to 1968, and on the event of the democratic transition and during its initial years, he was the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Book Institute in 1974, at the Ministry of Culture run by Pío Cabanillas, and the Director General of Popular Culture until September of 1977, under Adolfo Suárez’s administration.

He had been performing his work as an Arabist since the times of his thesis, of which the journal “Al Andalus”  published several excerpts. He admitted, though, that he would devote himself more greatly to the subject in the years of the IHAC, when he worked on the subject of Islamic thought. Some of the earliest results, on Avicenna, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, Ibn Arabi and Ibn Khaldun, would be published in academic journals and eventually given form in his book Arab Philosophy, published by Revista de Occidente in 1963, a forerunner to the book that would become his main work, Historia del pensamiento en el mundo islámico (History of Thought in the Islamic World), published for the first time by Alianza in 1981, with many later editions, always expanded, in the years 1996, 2000, 2002 and 2011.

Cruz Hernández belongs to a unique branch of Spanish Arabism, the “Arabism at the fringes,” because the academic Arabic of the school of the Gayangos, the “Banu Codera” as they were christened by Emilio García Gómez, were all philologists, though they also felt passion for history, and some also for philosophy. Don Miguel, who was initiated into Arabic studies at the School of Arab Studies in Granada by chance, delved into the study of Islamic thought through philosophy, eventually becoming an authority on the subject.

It was at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid that he was able to develop his career as an educator and researcher as of the 1978-79 academic year, in the course “Islamic Thought,” recently created by Pedro Martínez Montávez in the specialty field of Arab and Islamic Studies. Once retired, he continued to teach the course years later as a professor emeritus, thanks to a resolution published in the BOE on November 19, 1987.

His publications on topics in Islamic thought as of then were quite numerous, with a focus on his previously mentioned book History of Thought in the Islamic World, which would be translated into Arabic, Italian and French. About the version in the last of these languages, Histoire de la pensée en terre d’islam, Christian Décobert wrote in the journal Archive des sciences sociales des réligions: “This impressive work of nearly one thousand pages is, let us say it right away, an amazing working tool. It is a very broad synthesis, and very well-constructed, on thought in the lands of Islam: not only Islamic thought, but also that of the countries where Islam is dominant, as a religion and as a political system. This includes thought other than that which is strictly Islamic, insofar as Jewish thought has also been expressed in these countries.”

However, the author was to come across a bias, that of excessive centrality, which Cruz Hernández gives in his work Hispanic Islam, something which is a constant in our Arabism and its affiliation with the “Banu Codera.”

One of the volumes which forms part of the History of Thought in the Islamic World, in its different versions, reaching up to the thought of today’s Islamic world, was fully devoted to thought in Al-Andalus during its golden age. As I wrote in an old review I published about the book in the year 2000, “Miguel Cruz delves into an old controversy in Spanish historiography, which sees in Islam’s acclimation on the Iberian Peninsula a sort of melting pot factor in which the old Spanish bedrock is as powerful as the contribution from outside and ends up marking both the resulting Islamic product and the later inheritance in Spain’s future with its own character. To Cruz Hernández, paraphrasing Averroes, Arab-Islamic culture on the Iberian Peninsula is seen as a work by the people of Al-Andalus, who educated the Arabs and the Berbers coming in from the opposite shore.”

Whether overfocused or not on the influence of “the Hispanic” on Islamic thought in his work, the reality is undoubtedly that History of Thought in the Islamic World is the work of a lifetime of intellectual effort by this tireless scholar, who passed away on March 25, 2020, shortly after reaching the age of one hundred.