Godfrey Wettinger's latest defence of his position on the discontinuity of Christianity in Malta (The Sunday Times, May 2) shows clearly he is at the end of his tether with no other real arguments to put forward.
Clutching at straws, he resorts to adducing as proof of the ethnic discontinuity Ibn Hauqal's description of an uninhabited island abounding in wild donkeys and wild sheep.
Far be it from me to impute anything but integrity on his part. I cannot, nonetheless, help thinking he has quite forgotten what he himself wrote 20 years ago (The Sunday Times, September 30, 1990) about Ibn Hauqal.
Summarising his argument in Anthony Luttrell's succinct exposition: "The various descriptions of an abandoned island have been explained, quite convincingly - (and here Mr Luttrell cites precisely Wettinger's ST contribution) - as a result of textual confusion with another place with a similar name of Galita."
This interpretation has until now been held by all who wrote on the matter: Brincat, Buhagiar, Dalli, Redjala, besides Mr Luttrell and, of course, Prof. Wettinger himself.
Mr Luttrell continues to expand this point in the context of Al-Himyari's 14th-century description: "It may be that Al-Himyari, faced with evidence for a total abandonment before 1053 and of a community on Malta in that year, sought to resolve the apparent contradiction by inventing a slightly earlier repopulation."
"Suddenly now, 20 years later, it has become very convenient to propose Ibn Hauqal as a deus ex machina, and so Prof. Wettinger changes tack and starts pontificating about how 'historians (have) tended to discount Ibn Hauqal ...' and so on.
On one important point, Prof. Wettinger misinterprets me when he writes "Unaccountably, he believes I think, that..." Rephrasing what I have already written, I mean that if the 'pact of old' is what Prof. Wettinger says it is - the pact between the għabida and their masters in 1050 - then the "Christians surrounding their bishop in 1127", who abrogated this pact, would indeed have to be the great-grandchildren of their emancipated forefathers.
What I never said was that they converted to Christianity after 1091. Given that the former were Muslims on Malta and the latter were Christians on Gozo, it follows logically that the abrogated pact could not have been what Prof. Wettinger claims it was.
This, of course, hinges on the radical distinction between Malta's and Gozo's vicissitudes, which both the poem and Giliberto Abate's report (which Prof. Wettinger keeps shying away from) point towards. But that pill is too bitter to swallow.
Having now heard Prof. Wettinger's round-up of his position on the whole matter, by way of concluding this exchange of views, in spite of what I am supposed to have said, I reiterate that:
• The fates of Malta and of Gozo after 870 were very different;
• The 'pact of old' abrogated by the Christian community and their bishop on Gozo (and not on Malta) in 1127 was the dhimma pact, it being clear that the other 'pact' of 1050, suggested by Prof. Wettinger, was, as has been shown, totally irrelevant to the situation there in 1127.
Nothing that has been said by Prof. Wettinger in this correspondence dents in any way this thesis which is discussed fully in my joint publication Tristia ex Melitogaudo, to which interested readers are referred for any further information about my views. This concludes my contributions to this correspondence.