Ornament of the World, The

Religious Education, Winter 2003 by Patel, Eboo

THE ORNAMENT OF THE WORLD. By Maria Rosa Menocal. New York:

Little Brown and Co., 2002. 315 pp.

Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World is an elegant and erudite evocation of an era. Her central theme is the cultural encounters that took place among Christians, Muslims, and Jews during and after the Muslim Umayyad Dynasty in southern Spain. This dynamic led to a golden age within all three religious communities, and its artifacts continue to have a profound impact on our world. Menocal is, above all, interested in the spirit of medieval Spain, and she finds this in stories. Her beautifully crafted vignettes about gardens, poetry, architecture, and philosophy, reminiscent of Annie Dillard's writing on mid-twentieth century America, feel more like a love-song for an age than its history. Early in the book is the story of Hasdai, a tenth century Cordoban Jew who was both the prince of his religious community and the chief advisor to the Muslim caliph, Abd al-Rahman III. Menocal describes tenth century Cordoba as "a world brightly lit for Jews" (p. 84). Hasdai acquired a Jewish religious education while also being thoroughly acculturated into Islamo-Arabic society and played a leading role in both his own community and the broader society. Menocal writes: "It may seem astonishing that one of the most public faces of this Islamic polity, at its peak of power and achievement, should be a devout Jewish scholar, famously devoted to finding and aiding other Jewish communities" (p. 80).

Menocal provides about twenty more equally astonishing tales, among them these two stories: The venerable Peter, Abbot of Cluny, seeks a translation of the Qur'an to indicate to his crusader-supporting rival Bernard of the Cistercians that knowledge was more important than arms. Averroes, a significant Moslem scholar, and his commentaries on Aristotle, despite being banned, helped Paris become the center of intellectual Europe in the mid-thirteenth century.

This is a hopeful book, and Menocal takes care to point out that, even in history's most divisive moments, a lining of harmony existed but was not fulfilled. Ferdinand and Isabella occupied Spain's last Muslim stronghold, the Alhambra in Granada, dressed in their finest clothes-Arab styles. Luis de Toerres, a Jew expelled by the Catholic monarchs with the rest of his people, accompanied Christopher Columbus in 1492 because of his fluency in Arabic, which Columbus expected to be the lingua franca of the Indies, as it was in the rest of what he knew as the civilized world. Tragically ironic as these scenes might be, Menocal points out that they indicate the power of the cultural intermingling of the previous centuries and remind us that the possibility always existed for that tradition to be continued: "The fact that Ferdinand and Isabella did not choose the path of tolerance is seen as an example of the intractability and inevitability of intolerance . . . But their action may be far better understood as the failure to make the more difficult decision, to have the courage to cultivate a society that can live with its own flagrant contradiction" (271).

Medieval Spain has abundant lessons for our own time and place, and it is a credit to Menocal that she restrains herself from being pedantic about them. Rather, she occasionally shifts our gaze to the poetry that first-rate place has left us-reminders that, for example, the synagogues on New York City's Upper West Side bear a resemblance to old-world mosques and that Cervantes' (fictional) narrator in Don Quixote had the tale translated from Arabic on the streets of Toledo. The point is clear: Creativity is fueled by encounters among differences. A society that considers itself civilized must allow diversity, even contradiction, to flourish. In her subtle approach, Menocal issues a challenge to those who wish posterity to look back on twentyfirst century America as being not just an empire of the world, but an ornament of it.

My only quarrel with The Ornament of the World is on a matter of labeling. While Menocal is justifiably enchanted by the Umayyad Caliphate in Cordoba and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, she dismisses the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo as "pretenders." The Fatimid's (who I should disclose were the Caliphate of the Muslim community that I belong to) were very much the equals of the other Muslim dynasties of the time. Among their achievements are building the city of Cairo, the university of al-Azhar (both, needless to stay, still thriving), impressive libraries, and creating a culture of tolerance where minority communities played important roles in public life. Perhaps Menocal relied on sources hostile to Shia Islam, the theological strain the Fatimids adhered to, for her descriptions. Whatever the reason, in a second edition of the book, Menocal should represent the Fatimids more faithfully.

Eboo Patel

Interfaith Youth Core