Godfrey Wettinger's piece (The Sunday Times, March 21), shorn of its frills, makes one objection to the thesis in Trista ex Melitogaudo; namely, that the dhimma-pact put forward in the book is unacceptable because the pact in question was something else.
In his opinion, this referred to the deal made between the free Muslims occupying Malta in 1048-53 and their slaves (għabida) when confronted by a Byzantine attack. But Prof. Wettinger is contradicting himself, unless he has changed his mind since 1989.
The pact mentioned in the book, abrogated in 1127, was a pact between Christians in Gozo and the Muslims. Twenty years ago Prof. Wettinger wrote (The Sunday Times, November 19, 1989): "The slaves were undoubtedly Muslims, seeing that they were told by the free that they could expect only death at the hands of the invaders had the latter been successful."
Further on, he posits that "in view of all this, it is probable that the għabida of 1048 mentioned by al-Qazwini in his well-known passage actually refers to the descendants of the survivors of the original Christian inhabitants of Malta who presumably earned, in the eyes of the Muslim conquerors, either by their stalwart resistance or the suspicion that they were in concert with the Byzantine force trying to recover the island, the harsh treatment meted out to them.
By 1048, still retaining their humiliating status of għabida, they had, not surprisingly, become completely assimilated in culture, language and religion to their conquerors."
But, as noted by Anthony Luttrell (The Making of Christian Malta, 2002), had the slaves of 1053 been descendants of the pre-870 inhabitants, they would probably have remained on the island with their women so that the men would have had no pressing need to marry the free Muslims' daughters.
The logical conclusion is that the pact, "between Christians and Muslims", abrogated in 1127, could not have been the deal "between free Muslims and Muslim slaves" drawn up in 1053.
But let us consider what the abrogation, in 1127, of the deal of 1053 could have meant. The latter concerned giving the slaves of that year freedom, equality with their masters, and women, which they would have enjoyed for a full 74 years.
Now, in 1127, their descendants, three generations later, would be saying "chuck the deal". What precisely would they be renouncing?
The deal was actually something of the distant past and would not concern the Muslim ex-slaves in the least. I honestly do not see anything "falling into place" in all this theorising.
Coming next to the other relevant point raised in Prof. Wettinger's letter relating to the antiquity of "the pact of old" broken in 1127, the Christian community that was still bound by it, including their priests who "had departed from the pact of old (anô)", could not have been one implanted by the Normans on Gozo after 1091.
Such a community would have been free and in no need to strike any deal with the Muslims, only suffered by the Normans to remain on the island on tolerance.
If it pre-dated 1091, then the Christian community bound by this pact would have been a non-servile group under the Muslims, which would then clash with what was said above and with the information in Malaterra concerning all Christian slaves on Malta being foreigners.
This would be contradictory, that is, unless Malta and Gozo were treated differently, which is not as Prof. Wettinger would have it now but which was something that he vaguely contemplated in 1989.
Then he wrote: "One is faced by the difficulty of explaining how this could have happened. Were some indigenous inhabitants considered to be less blameworthy than the others by the Muslim conquerors, earning for themselves the mildly inferior status of dhimmi rather than that of actual servitude or għabida?"
The book gives a concrete proposal of how this could have come about, as well recognised by Ugo Mifsud Bonnici in his review (March 14) regarding the much more historically convincing way of explaining the continuity of Christianity in these islands during the Arab occupation.