A Distant Mirror. - The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain - book review

National Review, June 17, 2002 by Stephen Schwartz

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by Maria Rosa Menocal (Little, Brown, 315 pp., $26.95)

This book will provide scant comfort to two loud and voluble constituencies in the contemporary world: Islamophobes and Wahhabis. By the former, I refer to those shallow types who use the horrors of Islamic extremism as a pretext to attack all of Islam and the civilization it has fostered. The latter denotes Muslims -- including many in the U.S. -- who justify terrorism on the basis of the fundamentalist death cult that rules Saudi Arabia. Both Islamophobes and Wahhabis seek to erase from history the evidence of centuries of pluralism within Islam -- and of coexistence between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

This study of medieval Spain, written for a nonacademic audience, shows that a powerful Islamic society and its committed Christian opponents were once capable of contending in arms, for mastery of a rich territory, without losing their sense of mutual respect. Al-Andalus, the southern Iberian province in which Arab governance was consolidated, produced some of the greatest cultural achievements of Islamic civilization; architecture and philosophy are the best known. The very same region -- and its fabled cities, Cordoba, Granada, and Sevilla -- also nurtured the Jewish intellect, and provided a prosperous home for Christians.

Cohabitation of the three Abrahamic faiths was found throughout the Iberian peninsula during the 782 years of Muslim-Christian rivalry on its soil. Although the Christian waged a military struggle -- the Reconquista -- to regain control, Muslims continued for generations to reside in areas the Christians retook; Christians lived largely unmolested in the shrinking Muslim zone; and Jews flourished on both sides of the divide.

This was because, contrary to the legends maintained by Islamophobes and Wahhabis alike, neither the Muslim nor the Christian rulers of Spain originally saw their conflict as a religious one, and few among them practiced forcible conversion of the other. Their campaigns were wars over land, not faith, and both sides applied the principle enunciated in the Koran: There must be no compulsion in religion, and conversions should be left to the individual conscience, as expressions of God's will.

Muslim rule in Europe began in the year 711, when Berbers from North Africa, led by Syrian Arabs, crossed the strait named thereafter for their commander, Tarik. (Gibraltar is derived from "Jebel al-Tarik," the rock of Tarik.) The Christian rulers of Hispania -- descendants of the Visigoths - - were decadent and narrow in their outlook, and were supplanted by the new force of Islam. The great phase of Islamic al-Andalus began in 755, when a young Syrian noble, Abd al-Rahman, arrived in the land. Abd al- Rahman was the only survivor of the Umayyads, a Damascus-based dynasty that had ruled the global Islamic community for the previous hundred years. In 750, the Umayyads were overthrown and their ruling family slaughtered by the Abbasids, who moved the center of the House of Islam to a city they founded, Baghdad. Abd al-Rahman established a new Umayyad lineage in Cordoba, an old Roman town.

A long interfaith and intercultural dialogue ensued, until 1492, when the Catholic rulers, Ferdinand and Isabel, conquered Granada. The Muslims were granted the right to maintain their religion as a condition of their surrender of the city. But one of the first decrees of the Catholic rulers, issued only months after Granada's capitulation, ordered the expulsion of Jews unwilling to convert to Christianity. The Andalusian Muslims inevitably shared the same fate. Most of the Jews left for the Ottoman Empire, where they again flourished, while the Muslims resettled in Morocco.

Both communities of the expelled preserved deep cultural memories of their time in the Iberian sun. The Jews and their descendants, known as the Sephardim, have kept the use of the Spanish language up to the present day; I have heard it spoken and sung in Sarajevo. The Arabs of North Africa still love the music and other customs they call Andalusian. And Islam left a deep impress on Spanish Catholic culture: Flamenco music, and a form of improvised religious verse known as saetas, perpetuate Arab styles of melody and lyric.

Maria Rosa Menocal, who teaches at Yale, has chosen to tell this story through a series of vignettes describing outstanding individuals and events. The personalities evoked here include, among others, Abd al- Rahman; the Jewish diplomat and poet Samuel ha-Nagid, governor of the Hebrew community of Granada; Petrus Alfonsi, a Jewish convert to Christianity who traveled to England in the 12th century; the poet and chronicler Judah Halevi; the Arab philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba; and his fellow Cordoban, the Jewish jurist Maimonides. The emphasis on prominent Jews might be interpreted as a subtextual cry of pain and protest against the fear and hatred separating, today, the offspring of Abraham's two sons -- Ishmael, ancestor of the Arabs and Muslims, and Isaac, progenitor of the Jews.