The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

by María Rosa Menocal

Undoing the familiar notion of the Middle Ages as a period of religious persecution and intellectual stagnation, María Menocal now brings us a portrait of a medieval culture where literature, science, and tolerance flourished for 500 years.The story begins as a young prince in exile—the last heir to an Islamic dynasty—founds a new kingdom on the Iberian peninsula: al-Andalus. Combining the best of what Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures had to offer, al-Andalus and its successors influenced the rest of Europe in dramatic ways, from the death of liturgical Latin and the spread of secular poetry, to remarkable feats in architecture, science, and technology. The glory of the Andalusian kingdoms endured until the Renaissance, when Christian monarchs forcibly converted, executed, or expelled non-Catholics from Spain. In this wonderful book, we can finally explore the lost history whose legacy is still with us in countless ways.

Author Biography: María Rosa Menocal is R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and head of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She lives in New Haven, CT.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Spain, Religion, Islam, Medieval, Middle East

315 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2002

About the author

María Rosa Menocal is a scholar of medieval culture and history. Menocal earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Yale University faculty in 1986, she taught Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2002, Menocal wrote the book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which has been translated into many languages, and includes an introduction by fellow Yale Sterling Professor in the Humanities Harold Bloom. The book focuses on tolerance in Medieval Spain within the Muslim and Christian kingdoms through political examples as well as cultural examples.

Menocal also is the author of The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987), as well as Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth from Borges to Boccacio (1991) and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994).

Born in Cuba and raised in Philadelphia, Menocal is currently director of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center and the co-editor of The Literature of Al-Andalus in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series.

Reviews

[Kalliope · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is all about fragmentation. Fragmented are the arguments, fragmented are the contents, fragmented was the society Menocal strives to explore, and fragmented was also the tolerance that the author believes existed in Medieval Spain.

Fragmented remains then my Like/Dislike of the book.

It does not help that in this mosaic of unequal elements the glue that is supposed to bind them together, Menocal’s language, did not seem to coalesce her pieces. Reading her prose, although it is very clear and flowing, I could not help but quiver in my seat at times. The terms and turns of phrases she uses are too modern. One cannot speak of ‘avant-garde’, or ‘revolution’ or ‘bestsellers’ or ‘going native’ or ‘radical chic’ when dealing with the culture formed in the Iberian Peninsula during the 8th- 15th centuries. No, this language, does not bind tightly her thesis.

Fragmented are the arguments. Her aim is to prove that tolerance existed amongst the Muslims, the Christians and the Jews over a long span of time--around seven centuries--, and that it was precisely this tolerance that created a fertile ground in which various cultural activities, mostly literary and architectural, grew and flourished. She detects this tolerance first in the early period of the Muslim side, when the Umayyads controlled most of the peninsula and established their Caliphate in Cordoba. The existence of the shimmies, or communities of non-Muslims with a protected status, is the corner stone of her argument. During this period of great prosperity, the sciences and arts experienced a glorious development that would gradually spread to the rest of Europe.

This Caliphate however did not last very long -- around one hundred years. And its last ruler—Al-Mansur, the Vizier who acted as Caliph--, turned out to be a very violent man with a penchant towards tyrannical practices. Even before him there had been some tension amongst the Muslim people: those of Arabic descent were a minority who occupied the upper échelons of the society while the greater numbers of Berbers (North African origin), and the Mozárabes (Christian Iberians and Visigoths) were kept in the lower levels with fewer privileges The colonization of the Northern parts of the peninsula, when the Arabs rapidly conquered them, was undertaken by relocating the Berbers; but these people found the cold and wet weather inimical to their preferences and did not stay there long. Their gradual moving back south to sunny Andalucia made the reconquering by the Northern Christians a lot easier. A rebellion ensued and the Caliphate fragmented in various kingdoms—the Taifas.



Menocal finds that during this second Muslim period, that of the First Taifas--which lasted almost another hundred years--tolerance continued to exist. Jewish and Christian communities continued to live in their dhimmis and the strong culture that had developed under the Umayyads lingered on. But the Taifas were not left in peace. Neither by the Christians who interfered, nor by the Muslims from North Africa. Invasions ensued. First the Almoravids and then Almohads. Menocal acknowledges that these newer invasions brought greater dogmatism and fanaticism. The Kings of the Taifas felt threatened and entered into agreements with the also fragmented and pugnacious Christian kingdoms (Navarra, Castile, León, Aragon, Portugal). One of such deal resulted in the creation of the Nasrin Kingdom of Granada. The Castilian King Fernando III (1199—1252) granted the lands to the first Nasrid Sultan Mohammed I ibn Nasr (1194-1273) for his help in expelling the Almohads, but Granada would remain in vassal terms to Castile. What prompted the invasion of the Granada kingdom in the late 15th century was when the last but one Sultan refused to pay vassalage.



We see then that the golden age of tolerance in the Muslim territories lasted around two centuries out of the seven. But I wonder whether we can really understand even this period as tolerant. There are a few oddities. Menocal tells us that in 855 a group of about fifty Christians who had vilified the Prophet were slaughtered publicly. Nor was the period so placid culturally as the greatest destruction of Muslim architecture, the palatial complex of Madinat Al-Zahra that must have been of an excruciating beauty and richness, was utterly wrecked by the Berbers during the civil war that brought down the Caliphate.





Menocal then examines the tolerance on the Christian side, focusing mostly on the town of Toledo once it became the new capital of Castile & León after it was conquered back in 1085. This city had already been the capital of the Visigoths before the Muslim invasion. Indeed, one can visit today a couple of Synagogues which generously and beautifully incorporate Muslim architectural decoration.



And in the church of Saint Román we find horseshoe arches with the characteristic red and white voussoirs, and, more interestingly, writing on the walls that looks Arabic but which is not. Many elements of the Muslim culture were then kept. Even King Alfonso VI (1047-1109) made his heir the son he had with a Muslim. But I doubt whether, once Toledo was taken over it would not have been rapidly and strongly Christianized. The town had carried a considerable symbolic weight since the Visigoths and was very quickly made into the main See for the Christian Church of the peninsula. Such a choice and the implementation had to be traumatic for the inhabitants. Some aspects of the other cultures would be allowed to survive, but most of their practices must have been violently repressed. And so King Alfonso sent his half-Moorish, and deeply loved, teenager son to fight against the Almoravids. In the battle of Uclés he lost him.



It is harder to evaluate the tolerance as exercised by the third vertex of the triangle. The Jewish people had to be accommodating; they could not choose whether to be tolerant or not. They just strove to be. Often they managed to hold fragmented pockets of economic power and would steer into one or another area depending on the constantly varying circumstances. Sometimes they succeeded in gaining political weight and influence as well. For example, Samuel the Nagid became a Vizier in the Taifa of Granada in the early 11th century. But other times, particularly under the Almoravids and the Almohads, they had to leave the land. Occasionally they had to survive through some nasty anti-Jewish riots, such as those in Granada in 1066. No, it was not always easy for them.

My impression then is that the society was much more fragmented, agitated and restless than Menocal is willing to admit, and that fragments her main argument.

Fragmented are the contents too. After giving an overall historical view of the times, she then explores vignettes that function as proofs of her argument. She follows a chronological order, but there is no unifying thread from episode to episode. She focuses mostly on a series of individuals, such as Petrous Alfonsi, a Jewish Andalusian who moved to London; or Judah Halevi, another Jewish writer who moved to Egypt; or Michael Scot, who having trained his languages in Toledo, moved to the Imperial court in Sicily—to name just a few. Apart from people, she also includes things as proofs. The Astrolabe and the way it travelled to the rest of Europe, in particular the French circles around Cluny--with Peter the Venerable, Bernard de Clairvaux and Peter Abelard--is brought in as a testimony of these fruitful times. All these vignettes are fascinating in themselves, but appear somewhat disorderly and disjointedly in an overall diffuse picture. It is a heterogeneous mosaic composed of brilliant separate pieces, many with a rosy tint.



But don’t misunderstand me. All in all, this is a recommended read. There is much one can learn from Menocal about this difficult period. And may be part of the shortcomings of the book are explained because any account in cultural history is fraught with difficulties. We are still looking for models that help to explain how specific political, economic, social and religious structures relate to the culture produced in any given time and place. This is aggravated by the idiosyncrasy of this particular period that requires the scholar to be both an Arabist and a Latinist.

To me the main attraction of these times is precisely this fragmentation, and that may be the key for the bouts of cultural richness.

I am then trying to keep track of the way the various Christian units linked with the Muslim ones in opposition to their brethren. There were very many instances. For example, when Fernando I (1015-1065) died, a civil war began as his children fought with each other over the territories. García, who had inherited Galicia, took refuge in the Taifa of Seville, while Alfonso, who got León, did the same in the Taifa of Toledo, when their elder brother, Sancho, pushed them out of their reigns This is partly the story in the film El Cid with Charlton Heston. Similarly, and as said above, the Nasrid Kingdom got their Granada, where they built their beautiful palace complex of the Alhambra, as their compensation prize for helping the Christians push out the Muslim invasion from North Africa.

I am also very interested in learning more about how the rich Muslim culture— a great part of it originated in the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad when they engaged in the systematic translation into Arabic of the (by then forgotten) Greek thought propagated in the rest of Europe. This was a crucial phenomenon with wide repercussions. For example, just recently I have encountered in other reads more references to some of the vignettes expanded by Menocal, as in Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral. In this cultural dissemination the role of the Sicilian court under the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) and its associations with the Toledo court under Alfonso X the Wise (1221-1284) are fascinating. Sicily was the root for the literary ramifications in South of France with the Provençal lyric and the Still nuovo in Tuscany (think of Dante). Menocal broaches on this with her vignettes, but I wish she had explored the links between these two centres a bit more. For example, she forgot to mention that Alfonso was the son Elisabeth of Swabia--a cousin of the Emperor and who had grown in his court.



I enjoyed reading several of the literary issues that Menocal discusses, such as the aljamias , or texts in Romance languages written using the Arabic alphabet. These and the jarchas —poems that combine Arabic verses with a refrain in a Romance language-- testify to the survival of some sort of corrupted Latin and its gradual transformation into various forms of languages out of which Castilian, Leonese, Galician, Portuguese, Aranese, Valencian, Aragonese and Catalan would form. The last group formed a continuum with those spoken in the South of France, the family of the Langue d’Oc (Provençal and Lusitain amongst others), and further on with those other dialects like Piemontese in the North of Italy. This continuum coexisted with Arabic to a greater or lesser degree and during a longer or shorter time, depending on the area.



Also fascinating for my current reading programme was Menocal’s discussion of the Chansons de Geste, with the Chanson de Roland and the Cantar de Mio Cid, that sing a couple of the episodes in the history discussed in this book. Menocal expands on the difference between them: the Chanson – written about 250 after the Roncesvalles event— keeps a much more fantastic tone while the Cantar--composed only about 50 years after El Cid died—maintains the veracity tone of a Chronicle. The tension between the two, history and fiction, would maintain the tradition alive and would develop into the Chivalry Novels, with Amadís de Gaula I and the two Orlandos, Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso until Cervantes would mock and thereby conclude them (and thereby beginning a new genre).

Menocal remains for me a literary professor and my next read by her is The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, while for the historical aspects I now plan to read The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, some words of warning: do not approach this particular book as a historical documentation of a period, lest you be very frustrated within a few chapters. The Decline and Fall: The Moorish Way this is not. While Menocal does provide an outline of the events, rulers, and major actors of the era in the first chapter, it is nothing more than a quick sketch, intended to explain the backdrop of what she really wishes to talk about. Elsewhere, the historical information is presented in a very short, incoherent, incomplete, and confusing way- for example- she often chooses to get halfway through a story before she explains why it is significant, where it fits and the reasons behind it. She deals with tiny aspects of larger stories, which often makes it appear as if she is either a) withholding information that would be useful to us to judge her arguement or b) has forgotten that the majority of people reading this book do not have her extensive background in Moorish history. It does at times necessitate re-readings and references back to the opening chapter in order to provide something solid to hold on to.

The better way to approach this book, which I discovered about halfway through when futzing and slurring my way through a passage that seemed to be suspended in mid-air, is as a recounting of precious cultural gems from a fascinating period of history. It is Menocal's loving elegy for a dead empire, her passionate conjuring of the "memory palaces" (a term she is fond of using throughout) that helped to construct Western society in ways many of us were not aware of, her indignant correction of the idea that the Middle Ages were universally a time of darkness and intolerance. If it is evident that she is biased towards the enlightened, civilized Muslims and the Arabized Jews and Christians that lived within their empire, and inclined to romanticize the Umyyadd lineage's rule in Andalusia, it is often hard to blame her, given the comparison to the surrounding areas. (I will say that her writing style at times is ass-kissing and extreme enough that I wonder why exactly she is playing courtier to the ghosts of dead kings.) However, a number of points made are entirely valid and important to remember:

- We owe a good deal of our knowledge to this lost empire, and the Arabic translations of Greek philosophers, as well as technological advantages, mathematical works, and learned religious and philsophical commentaries. Some of the most important commentaries on Aristotle, for instance, were written in Arabic by Muslims. The vast libraries of Toledo could not have been translated without the work of Arabic speakers. We also owe a good deal to Muslim style architecture, which still survives in Spain today. Modern Western culture would have been entirely different were it not for the presence of this empire in Spain. I don't think that's an overestimation. And what's interesting is that the greater Muslim world apparently treats this era as nothing more than a failure for its eventual military defeat.

- Andalusian Muslims were, for their time, remarkably tolerant of other religions, and those who lived there at the time did often voluntarily convert to Islam. Arabic was the language of civilized people, and everyone spoke it. To the point that Christians used it in their services, and felt that they were protecting an older tradition when the Church tried to push the Roman Latin on them. The extremist Muslims who helped bring dowm the empire came from elsewhere, invited to stave off the advancing, often intolerant Christians. And by the by, the Andalusian Muslims eventually asked for help from Christians in driving out the extremist elements. Religion was really not always a primary concern in who you worked with on the Peninsula, at least until 1492.

- Many of the legends passed down got it completely wrong, in terms of all the battles being Muslim v. Christian, etc: For instance,
1)The Song of Roland records the retreat of Charlemagne's troops across the mountains after their defeated seige of Saragossa, a Muslim city. Supposedly, they were ambushed from the rear by Muslims during their retreat and slaughtered wholesale. A) Muslims invited Charlemagne to come in the first place, upset with the rule of the new Umyyadd rulers, and so Christians and Muslims worked together on that particular seige and B) the attackers were actually the Basques, who even back there were really touchy about uninvited outsiders in their terrirtory. Muslims had nothing to do with it.
2) The Cid, the famous Spanish hero, was not at all loyal to his Christian patron. "Cid," in fact, is an Arabic word meaning "lord." He fought with Alfonso constantly, the Christian monarch he had lead armies for for a time, and eventually left him to lead Muslim armies against both Christians (including Alfonso) and other Muslims. One of the cities he served in, by the by, was Saragossa.
3) There are countless instances of Christian and Muslim kings working together, and of culture being absorbed one way and the other. ie, the Normans invaded a Muslim city and ended up going native enough to speak Arabic and convert to Islam.

- There's a good long middle section that deals with a lot of linguistics, and the importance of a language that is both the everyday language and the holy language, and how Arabic helped advance Hebrew poets, how the use of the vernacular as a written language came about, and the real importance of the melding of languages that took place. Some of the commentary on poetry and translation can get a bit dull, but you do see the endless cultural exchange that was taking place very clearly. We see the many literary, kingly, courtly, and military heroes of this period who take advantage of the diverse culture available to become incredibly learned men and advance their religious subculture within the larger Andalusian society.

Right, so, anyway, I'll stop now. But do approach it as a cultural exploration, where you're likely to come away with a renewed appreciation for cultural diversity, some good facts to pull out at dorky cocktail parties, and some corrected misconceptions on the origin of modern culture. Its also a taste, that at least for me, made me that much more interested in learning the actual history of this "first rate place." All in all, then, it did its job.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

.”The ornament of the world” is the famous description of Cordoba given to her readers by the tenth-century Saxon writer Hroswitha, who from her far-off convent at Gandersheim perceived the exceptional qualities and the centrality of the Cordoban caliphate.




María Rosa Menocal (1953-2012)

Cuban-born scholar of medieval culture and history and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University … degrees from the University of Pennsylvania ... taught Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania … director of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center for several years … co-editor of The Literature of Al-Andalus in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series … elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2011 and inducted into the Fellows of the Medieval Academy in March 2012. (Wiki)


The book – Forward & first chapter

The book was published in 2002, with the subtitle How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain. Ironic, in light of the happenings of the previous September - to say nothing of the religious hatred and intolerance in the Middle East over the past many decades.

Harold Bloom, in the Forward, describes the book as “a love song addressed to the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian (mostly troubadour) poets of what once we called the High Middle Ages. He continues:

I hesitate to nominate a single hero of the book (Menocal’s heart seems to belong to the warrior-poet Samuel the Nagid, who reinvented Hebrew poetry), but I would vote for Ibn Hazm, also a warrior-poet, but in Arabic, whose The Neck-Ring of the Dove, a handbook on romantic love, is also a monument to devastated Cordoba, its great era forever past. Menocal presents Ibn Hazm as a Don Quixote, holding on to an aesthetics, an erotics, and a cultural tradition unrecoverable but unforgettable.

Here I will try to summarize, largely in Menocal’s words, the first chapter of the book, in which she lays out her thesis of the significance of the Iberian peninsula to the history of Europe.


”Beginnings”

Menocal begins her tale, “Once upon a time in the mid-eighth century, an intrepid young man named Abd al-Rahman abandoned his home in Damascus, the Near Eastern heartland of Islam, and set out across the North African desert in search of a place of refuge.”

Five years later Abd al-Rahman reached today's Morocco, the Maghrib to the Muslims, from whence Abd’s mother had been brought east. There he found that his Berber kinsmen had pushed to the west and then the north, across the Straights of Gibraltar into Iberia. To there al-Rahman followed.

Who was al-Rahman, and why did he leave Damascus? He was a prince of the Umayyad branch of the Muslim religion, the Umayyads who had first led the Muslims out of the desert of Arabia into the Fertile Crescent, and who were the direct descendants of the Prophet. In that mid-eighth century, in 750 exactly, the Umayyads had been massacred in Syria by the rival Abbasid branch of the religion, who had thus seized control of the empire called “the House of Islam”. Abd al-Rahman was essentially the sole survivor.

When the surviving prince of the Umayyads reached Iberia five years later, he found “a thriving and expansive Islamic settlement” on the banks of the “Big Wadi”, the river now known as the Guadalquivir. The capital of the settlement was the old Roman city of Corduba, renamed by its more recent conquerers, the Visigoths, “Khordoba”. These Arabic settlers were calling the land al-Andalus.

Menocal relates how the arrival of this assumed-dead Umayyad prince in the western settlement suddenly threw the politics of the region into turmoil. The local emir offered al-Rahman permanent refuge and his daughter’s hand in marriage, but al-Rahman, “the successor to the Prophet and the supreme temporal and spiritual leader of the Islamic world, could not be so easily bought off.” He assembled forces loyal to him, both Syrians and Berbers of these western lands, and defeated his would-be father-in-law outside the walls of Cordoba in May 756, thus becoming the new governor of the westernmost province of the Islamic world.

Menocal, in the book, tells the story “of how this remarkable turn of events … powerfully affected the course of European history and civilization.”

Many aspects of the story are largely unknown, and the extent of their continuing effects on the world around us is scarcely understood, for numerous and complex reasons …
If we retell this story beginning with the narrative of that intrepid young man who miraculously evaded the annihilation of his line and migrated from Damascus to Cordoba, which he then made over into his new homeland, we end up with an altogether different vision of the fundamental parameters of Europe during the Middle Ages. … (The story) is about a genuine foundational European cultural moment that qualifies as “first rate”, in the sense of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wonderful formula (from his essay “The Crack-Up”) – namely, that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” … Much that was characteristic of medieval culture was profoundly rooted in the cultivation of complexities, charms, and challenges of contradictions –of the “yes and no”, as it was put by Peter Abelard, the infamous twelfth-century Parisian intellectual and Christian theologian.

Finally, her method of telling this story, she says, will not be a “retelling of the history of the Middle Ages, or even that of medieval Spain”. Instead, the book consists of “miniature portraits, that range widely in time and place, and that are focused on cultural rather than political events … they will, it is hoped, lay bare the vast distance between what the conventional histories and other general prejudices would have us expect (that, for example, Christians saw the Muslim infidels as their mortal enemy and spent seven hundred years trying to drive them from Spain) … they highlight stories that point to some of the unknown depths of cultural tolerance and symbiosis in our heritage, and they may begin to suggest a very different overall portrait of this “middle” age.


The rest of the book

Following “Beginnings” is a chapter called “A Brief History of a First-Rate Place”. This is the longest chapter in the book, and is basically an introductory essay on the history of medieval Spain, which serves as a background upon which Menocal hangs her portraits. The chapter begins with the events that followed upon the death of Muhammad in 632; describes the expansion of Islam across North Africa and, via converted Berbers of Morocco, into Europe (Spain) in 711; and ends with the events of 1492 (see portrait In the Alhambra).

Then come Menocal’s portraits, ranging in length from nine to eighteen pages. This main section of the book has been given the title THE PALACES OF MEMORY

Each portrait has a name, and below that on the first page, a general setting (place, year). Three of the portraits have more than a single section, in which case each section has its own place setting (but always a common year). The portraits are all listed below, along with a brief description of what’s in them. I’m doing this because I think there are many people I know on Goodreads who might have specific interests in some of these portraits, to say nothing of the entire book. Also, for a couple portraits I’ve added a few personal comments.

The Mosque and the Palm Tree Cordoba, 786

Summary of the achievements of Abd al-Rahman … the relationship between the Franks and Islam in these early years … alliances and fraternization between Muslims and Christians … the building and expansion of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, which continued until nearly the year 1000 … several pages on poetry and the use of the Arabic language by Islam.

Mother Tongues Cordoba, 855

One of the main characters of the portrait is Paul Alvarus, “outspoken and widely respected Christian luminary of Cordoba” … topics include the use of Arabic and Latin at this time … the Arabization of Christians … the many languages used in Cordoba, including both the Romance languages and the development of vernacular (“mother tongue”) languages … and the tale of the fifty so-called “Mozarab martyrs”, who protested the gradual and peaceful conversion of their Christian and Latin world by blaspheming the Prophet, the one thing forbidden by the Islamic ruler - thus losing their heads, and serving the purposes of generations of Christian chroniclers in future centuries.

A Grand Vizier, a Grand City Cordoba, 949

The story of the caliph Abd al-Rahman III, the descendant of the original al-Rahman … during his reign (912-961) “the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba made the sweeping and plausible claim to absolute primacy within the House of Islam” … during his reign, a man promoted higher and higher, eventually to the prestigious and powerful office of foreign secretary to the calaiph, a man who identified himself as “Hasdai, the son of Isaac, the son of Ezra, from the sons of the Jerusalem exile who now live in Sefarid” – a man who was the nasi, the prince, of his own Jewish religious community.

The Gardens of Memory Madinat al-Zahra, South of Cordoba, 1009

Madinat al-Zahra, the wonder-city of the Umayyad caliphs, built by Abd al-Rahman III as part of his declaration of the caliphate … destroyed in 1009 by Berber mercenaries who resented the claims of the Umayyads. “As a ruin it served for centuries as a romantic and complex touchstone, an image of a once-glorious Umayyad past.”

Victorious in Exile The battlefield of Argona, between Cordoba and Granada, 1041

The ascendency of Granada over Cordoba, under the warrior-poet Samuel - Ishmael in Arabic, his native tongue; Shmuel in Hebrew, the language in which he spoke to God – known as Samuel the Najid. … the flight of the Jews of Cordoba, many prosperous, well-educated, from the highest classes of government and scholarship, eventually settling in Granada … Hebrew poetry

Love and Its Songs

Just West of Seville, on the Road to Huelva August 1064
Ibn Hazm, “an outstanding intellect in Andalusioian history, one of the keenest minds the caliphate had ever produced” … dying in the backwater of Niebla, after a lifetime spent defending the hopeless Umayyad cause … of his four hundred books, few remain … his masterpiece love poem The Neck-Ring of the Dove

Barbastro, in the Foothills of the Pyrenees, on the Road to Saragosa August 1064
Norman invasions of that same summer … siege of Barbastro … beginning of the period in which peoples on both sides of the Pyrenees had much more contact, usually of a military nature … vernacular language, singing, Andalusian invention of “ring songs”

The Church At the Top of the Hill Toledo, 1085

The Christian Reconquest of Toledo … the church redesigned to commemorate the reconquest pays tribute through its architecture to the supplanted Islamic culture … Toledo becomes the capital of the kingdom of Castile …Ferdinand I … Alfonso VI … the fundamentalist Berber Almoravid dynasty invades the peninsula to aid their Muslim brethren … Toledo “the radiant intellectual capital of Europe, a Christian city where Arabic remained a language of culture and learning”

An Andalusian in London Huesca, 1106

Huesca, in Aragon, the foothills of the Pyrenees … Petrus Alfonsi, an Arabized Jewish convert to Christianity, becomes widely known for his book Disciplina clericalis (loosely, Priestly Tales) - the predecessor, in his “framed tale” format, to both Chaucer and Boccaccio … likewise his Dialogue Against the Jews becomes the standard form “for laying out the cases of the competing religions of medieval Europe”.

Sailing Away, Riding Away Alexandria, 1140

Judah Halevi, “the revered pillar of the Andalusian Jewish community, and the most celebrated poet of his age” arrives in Alexandria, having chosen to exile himself from al-Andalus … the last of the Golden Age of Andalusian poets, who had redeemed Hebrew from its profound exile, locked inside temples, never speaking about life itself … some of the great works by Halevi - Bookof the Khazars, and his over eight hundred poems, among which “his gorgeous love songs to Jerusalem and Zion”, and his rousing Song of the Cid about Rodrigo Diaz, as he prepares to ride into exile from the court of Alfonso VI.

The Abbot and the Quran Cluny, 1142

Cluny, France, its famous abbey dating from the tenth century, in 1142 one of the centers of the Latin Christian world, with the largest church in Christendom … the head abbot Peter the Venerable, and the enfant terrible of the day Peter Abelard … the Abbot’s journey into Iberian Christian territories to find translators to work on the sacred book of the Muslims, the first systematic Christian project to study Islam, and the first translation of the Quran into Latin … Robert of Ketton, Englishman living in Toledo, turned out to be the man he was looking for.

Gifts a triple-decker: Sicily, Cordoba, Granada – all in 1236

Frederick II, emperor of Sicily and one of his favorites, Michael Scot, physician, astrologer, necromancer, translator of Arabic and Hebrew texts … translation into Latin from Arabic in Cordoba … (Saint) Ferdinand III, king of Castile strikes a bargain with Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr – Nasr and his people (250 years’ worth of his descendants) get Granada, Ferdinand gets Cordoba.

Banned in Paris Paris, 1277

Paris the intellectual center of Europe in the thirteenth century … the story of the commentaries written by the Cordoban Averroes exploding on Europe, banned in Paris in 1210 … but this genie was out of the bottle … the “old” Aristotle, nothing but a few books of the Organon translated by Boethius, challenged by the arrival of the Arabic Aristotle, from Cordoba, where it had arrived many generations previously from Baghdad … and the “detailed, line-by-line, book-by-book, limitless universe of the new Arabic Aristotle” being taught in Paris increasingly as the century wears on, despite prohibitions …

I found this portrait to be the most interesting in the book. I had known something about Averroes and his contributions to the European understanding of Aristotle, but to nowhere near the depth that Menocal gives, even in these few (fifteen) pages.

Although it is little remembered, and its cultural setting little understood, this moment of intellectual crisis in Paris was a watershed in Western cultural life. At its heart lay the lifework of an Andalusian thinker, Averroes, as well as the whole intellectual and cultural complex of Islamic Spain. Ironically, by 1277, there was very little left of anything one could properly call “Islamic Spain” – only the embattled corner that was Granada. Yet its intellectual and cultural impact on the rest of Europe was in some ways reaching its peak – perhaps nowhere more than in the rooms where Parisian philosophers and theologians talked about what men thought and how men understood, about what was truth and what was revelation.
… the entire thrust of Averroes’ efforts – and this was likewise the core of the work of his countryman and contemporary, Maimonides – was to establish a model for the relationship between philosophy, which meant not just speculative thought, on the one hand, and theology, or faith-bound thought, which accepted the teachings of Scripture and its official interpreters, on the other.

By the way, the portrait includes several pages on Maimonides (Musa ibn Maymun).

Visions of Other Worlds Avila, 1305

Moses of Leon and his almost mythical manuscript Zohar, “the very heart and soul of the Jewish mystical tradition called Kabbalah” … Alfonso X ("the learned") abandons Latin as the language into which the Arabic scientific and philosophical corpus is being translated, in favor of the vernacular Castilian language.

Foreign Dignitaries at the Courts of Castile Seville & Toledo, 1364

Ibn Khaldun, the most influential philosopher of history to have written in Arabic … his masterpiece Muqaddimah (Introduction to History) now read alongside writers such as Vico and Gibbon … Islamic architecture … the use of the Great Mosque of Seville as a cathedral, preserving most of it … architecture of the Great Mosque, and the “new vogue” in architecture, arabesques … the extravagantly ornamented buildings of the Alhambra … Arabic writing as ornament and decoration … Jewish as well as Christian incorporation of Islamic architecture and decorative Arabic writing.

In the Alhambra Granada 1492

The Agreements of Capitulation secretly arranged between the last of the Granadan Nasrids and the Christian monarchs Ferdinand V and Isabella, king and queen of Castile in the fall of 1491, turning over Granada to the Castilian Christians … within a fairly short time the triumphant monarchs abrogated their pledge to allow Muslims to openly practice their faith … this followed in short order by the edict expelling all Jews from Christian Spain.

This portrait, a recounting of what probably every Spanish school child knows, or should know – is I believe known by few people in the U.S. I cannot say that I knew about the suppression and expulsion of both Muslims and Jews from Spain in 1492 … or, at any rate, gave them a choice of leaving, or converting to Christianity. In the U.S. 1492 is, of course, looked on as a landmark year because Columbus discovered the Americas in that year.

Columbus sailed the ocean blue,
in fourteen hundred ninety-two …

Just another example of the shallowness which limits an understanding of history. To think instead how 1492 was, from the point of view of those then inhabiting the Americas, pretty much a disaster – the title of the 1992 film, “1492: Conquest of Paradise” pretty well nails it – but, to think further how masses of people were expelled from Spain because of their religion …………………… well, not a proud moment for Spain, though I suppose many Spanish, for a great number of generations, believed it to be. I have no idea what the view would be in Spain today.

Somewhere in La Mancha 1605

Jews and Judaism in Toledo … Cervantes & Don Quixote de la Mancha … libraries, book-burnings … the Muslim “Moriscos” and their Jewish counterparts, the “Conversos” … Cervantes’ masterpiece as it relates to this lamentable end to the Ornament of the World.

Last Words

Other stuff in the book; a Postscript concerning 9/11; 9 pages of suggestions for further reading; a very useful Index; three full page maps; & 8 pages of black and white photographs.

I reread parts of the book to construct the review, and find that now I really wish to read again the entire book.


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[Roy Lotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idealism—what we call quixotic idealism, so vividly is it depicted by Cervantes—is an act of the imagination, and perhaps a doomed one, and the question on the table becomes whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

This is a book about nostalgia, and nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It’s one of the tricks of our memory to filter the past through a sentimental lens, forgetting all the bad and magnifying the good. And when thinking about a time before we lived, we run the risk not only of twisting the truth but of inventing it.

Ostensibly the book is about Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain—from 711 to 1492—and specifically about the culture of tolerance that flourished during this period. Menocal takes her title from a remark of Hroswitha, the German canoness, who called Córdoba the “Ornament of the World” after meeting with an ambassador. Menocal does not, however, write a conventional, chronological history, but instead a series of vignettes from the time-period. Indeed, her approach is much closer to that of a journalist than a historian, picking out the most captivating personalities and focusing exclusively on them. And even though these vignettes often contain lots of interesting information, their primary aim is not to inform, but to evoke.

Menocal writes in a dreamy, wistful tone, a style that is often seductive enough to deactivate the reader’s critical facility. The land and the people she describes sound so fantastic that you want to believe her. And this, as well as the lack of almost any scholarly apparatus, makes me very suspicious.

It is hard to believe the book was written by a professor at Yale, for it is quite explicitly propagandistic, trying to counter the conventional view of the Middle Ages as backward and intolerant with a vivid portrait of an advanced, integrated civilization. Personally, I agree with both her ideals of tolerance and her desire to acknowledge the accomplishments of Muslim Spain; but this does not excuse a professor from the commitment to scholarship. All the repression and barbarism that existed during the time period is waved away by Menocal’s insistence that it was the work of foreigners, either Berbers from the south or Christians from the north; and everything positive is credited to Andalusian culture. It would be hard to be more partisan.

In short, I have many reservations about recommending this book, because I believe it wasn’t written in good faith, with scrupulous attention to facts, but rather in the effort to influence the public’s perception of Al-Andalus through storytelling. True, all scholarship is somewhat biased; but to paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould, using this fact to excuse extreme bias is like saying that, since a perfectly antiseptic operating room is impossible, we should just perform surgeries in the sewer.

Keeping the bias in mind, however, this book can be profitably read. There is a lot of fascinating information in these pages. Indeed, I recently revisited Toledo to see some of the things Menocal mentioned, such as Santa Maria la Blanca, a beautiful synagogue built in a Moorish style. And I do think that the story of syncretism, tolerance, and collaboration in Muslim Spain should be told, especially during this era of Islamophobia. It is too easy to forget how crucial the history of Islam is to the history of the “West,” if the two histories can indeed be separated at all. Menocal’s emphasis on the architecture, the poetry, and especially the translations of the Greek philosophers by Muslim and Jewish scholars, counters the common stereotypes of the Muslims as intolerant destroyers. What's more, I fully understand how Menocal could be swept away in nostalgic awe after seeing the Mezquita in Córdoba or the Alhambra in Granada; that the people who made those amazing structures could disappear is hard to fathom.

Still, even though I agree with Menocal’s goals, I don’t agree with her means. The bright, rosy structure is built on too flimsy a foundation. Propaganda is a bad long-term strategy, because when people realize they are being manipulated they grow resentful. Much better would have been a balanced, sourced, and footnoted book, acknowledging both the good and the bad. The society Menocal so effusively praised was undeniably great; the best way to praise is simply to describe it. The worst aspect of Menocal’s approach is that it didn’t allow her to say anything insightful about how tolerance arose. And this is important to know, since creating a tolerant society is one of the omnipresent challenges of the modern world.

[Dan | The Ancient Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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, especially in the premodern era. But their actions 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 contradictions. They chose instead to go down the modern path, the one defined by an ethic of unity and harmony, and which is largely intolerant of contradiction."

Although specifically related to the act that was the final nail in the coffin of a culture of tolerance that had existed to greater or lesser degrees for hundreds of years on the Iberian peninsula, this passage from the epilogue is an excellent summary of Menocal's book as well as of the place and period which are its subject matter. This book should be required reading for leaders at all levels in every organization and for anyone naive enough to demand tolerance of others or to believe that worldwide tolerance can be achieved by the unilateral desires of individuals. While this is a well-researched and well-written history, the underlying theme is that a culture of tolerance requires that individuals and institutions of all types embrace contradiction and the "yes and no" worldview rather than the "yes or no" that so limit science, philosophy, and fundamentalist religions of all types. Menocal puts it best when she asks in another passage from the epilogue, "Does poetry - or language or philosophy or music or architecture, even that of our temples - really need to dance to the same tune as our political befiefs or our religious convictions? Is the strict harmony of our cultural identities a virtue to be valued above others that may come from the accommodation of contradictions?"

[Quo · Rating 5 out of 5]

María Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews & Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain is an extraordinary work that combines personal aspiration with serious scholarship, held together via a series of linked essays or history-laden segments that resemble pieces of a puzzle, or perhaps better-put, a colorful, cross-cultural mosaic.

The rather glowing foreword to Menocal's book was written by the late Harold Bloom, like Menocal, a professor at Yale University. It should be mentioned that I have been reading the component parts of this book over a period of years, some sections more than once but just finished reading it from cover to cover.


Ornament of the World seems a work that takes on aspects of a reference book while at the same time being a rather fascinating cultural & literary narrative. After walking a pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, NW Spain, I made a different kind of pilgrimage, visiting Toledo, site of some of story detailed in Prof. Menocal's book.

Having taken an excellent Western Civilization ages ago & having traveled within Spain, most of what I read represented an exploration into new realms & some of the material was initially well beyond my imagination, in part due to the frequent overlapping of cultures, hence the need to reread some chapters.

The Ornament of the World is in fact a series of vignettes illuminating the manner in which ideas, language and culture were influenced through contact with those who had a different religion, philosophy & set of cultural traditions. It presents a portrait of approximately 800 years of history that began in Baghdad, moved to Damascus, both centers of learning at the time and traveled via Morocco to an extended exile in the Andalusian area of medieval Spain.

All of this begins in 750 when an Umayyad Muslim prince in Damascus, Abd al-Rahman, fleeing the slaughter of his family by opposing Abbasid forces, eventually alights on southern Spain, bringing with him books that hearken back to Greco-Roman times. Andalusia thus became a medieval center of learning, with books in Arabic as the vehicle, with contrasting ideas merging over many centuries & almost constantly creating regional ferment along the way.


And just by way of a caveat, the author does make clear that purist (fundamentalist) Almoravid Muslims from Morocco at various times took issue with the tolerance & amity among the various cultural & religious groups resident in Andalusian Spain. There is no case made by the author of either an implied or a fully-articulated "perpetual paradise" during the long period of time when Jews & Christians were forced to live under Islamic rule in Spain.

Rather, these three Abrahamic religious traditions did for extended periods of time somehow adapt to & even substantially influence each other. Menocal does illustrate how there was a fusion of language, architecture & cultural traditions in places like Cordoba, Toledo & Seville, a multi-ethnic & religiously pluralistic sharing of ideas.

The 12th century was the beginning of the end of hundreds of years of open Islamic & Jewish participation in medieval European culture. At times, books were burned, including “a classic work by al-Ghazali, a legendary Muslim theologian whose more humane approach to Islamic orthodoxy was considered too liberal for the fanatical Almoravids”.

Although intolerance became heightened at such points, a cross-fertilization continued to occur nonetheless as people protested against harsh rule. Eventually, there also was a rebellion against the prescribed use of Latin within Christianity, according to Prof. Menocal eventually “leading to new vernacular languages, which led by many twists & turns to Dante & Cervantes & Shakespeare.”


Menocal pays particular attention to literary traditions that benefited from cross-fertilization as various Muslim regimes replaced territory that had previously been held by Visigoths. The fact that the Qur'an is very often poetically recited, influenced the way in which Christian as well as Jewish writers expressed themselves in verse.

Thus the military exploits of Rodrigo Diaz, better known as "El Cid", were chronicled admiringly by Muslim as well as Christian writers, just as he had fought in service to both Muslim & Christian monarchs alike.

Muslim cities at times paid tribute to more powerful Christian neighbors, just as Christian kings at times found their most loyal allies among Muslim princes or emirs. Similarly, fraternal infighting within various taifa (Muslim city states) often caused Muslim leaders & their retinue to seek sanctuary in Christian-held provinces to the north.

Previously, the author comments that areas not far removed geographically might as well have been different planets but gradually "fraternizations produced familiarity" with the sounds, smells & colors of every kind of neighbor causing hybrid groups of Arabized Christians & Jews.

“The co-mingling of languages, religions & styles of every sort--food, clothes, songs, buildings--took place not only within the Iberian Peninsula, although most vigorously there, but with increasing intensity far beyond the Pyrenees.”


Just one example of the overlay of cultures, languages & traditions occurred as the Christians became increasingly victorious in the reconquest of Andalusian Spain when,

like dominoes, the once grand old Moorish cities fell one-by-one to the Christians: Cordoba in 1236, Valencia in 1238 & finally Seville in 1248, the lovely orange-tree-filled city the Almohads had made their capital.

When Ferdinand III, the first of many Castilian monarchs died, his son Alfonso, a great patron of translations of classic books & thus the transfer of the Arabo-Islamic fortune into the treasury of Christendom--built for his father a tomb to sit in the Great Mosque of Seville, reconsecrated as a splendid cathedral in the new Castilian capital. In the spirit of the age, Alfonso had the tomb inscribed with the 3 venerable languages of the realm--Arabic, Hebrew & Latin--as well as the upstart Castilian that only poets & other revolutionaries were writing in at that point.

Among the scholars’ names we encounter in reading Ornament of the World are: Musa ibn Maymun, best known as Maimonides; Ibn Rushd, often called by his Latin name “Averroes”, a man who wrote classic commentaries on Aristotle; Judah Halevi, author of Book of the Khazars; and Peter Abelard, author of Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew & a Christian. Each of these men sought to deal with existing orthodoxy & “to make philosophy commensurate with religion.”

One of the fundamental stories of the medieval West, one where the Latin Christian world, the Arabic Muslim & Arabic Jewish universes are felicitously intertwined, is of the noble effort to produce & maintain a 1st rate culture, one that could hold together at the same time & in the same place, the two contradictory modes of thought.

For Prof. Menocal, the Middle Ages ended with the expulsion of Jews & Muslims from Spain in 1492. At that time, Ferdinand & Isabella signed a covenant with the leader of the last remaining Muslim palace-stronghold at Alhambra in Granada guaranteeing perpetual freedom of religion for those non-Christians who remained, very soon rescinding the signed document, prior to quickly persecuting & later expelling both the Jews & the Muslims.

Nevertheless, some Jews & Muslims did choose to stay, agreeing to convert to Christianity rather than to flee, with the result that there were Moriscos, or Muslims/Moors pretending to be Christians and Conversos, Jews pretending to be Christians (often called Moranos, a vulgar word for hog), just as there had long been Mozarabs, Christians or "pretend Arabs" who professed to be Muslims under Moorish rule. All of this led to a great many pretending to be what they were not, a "world of fun-house mirrors" according to the author.

Each of these groups spoke Arabic, the definitive language in Andalusian Spain for hundreds of years, while attempting to also preserve their own language, as well as at least a semblance of their inherited religious tradition. Often this ended up by accretion becoming a hybrid language that blurred their true nature, an example being Ladino, spoken only within their homes by Jewish families & still spoken by Sephardic Jews many centuries after they fled from Spain.


My favorite chapter is quite likely the one titled "Somewhere in LaMancha", which in a way stands as a distillation of what Andalusian Spain was for so very many years, with Miguel de Cervantes encountering a man in an old, formerly Jewish quarter of a town who offered him some Arabic fragments of a book, said to have been written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, a Muslim historian.

Cervantes' interpreter translated the passages from Arabic into Castilian, including the story that would in 1605 become Don Quixote, featuring characters like Sancho Panza & Dulcinea del Tobaso, this happening just as old books written in both Arabic & Hebrew were being burned & otherwise destroyed.

It seemed a memorable case of an epic novel replicating reality, complete with Don Quixote's books being incinerated, while on the surface a novel in a manner that seemed entirely fanciful or metaphorical, or as we now put it "quixotic".

The figure of Don Quixote comes straight out of the universe that Cervantes tells us is the crux of fiction, harder to read than any fantasy-history itself. Who is that translator after all, but a crypto-Muslim beneath a Christian veneer, decipherer of a language that is crypto-Castilian underneath an Arabic veneer? Ironically, prophetically, tragically, or all of these, by the time Cervantes publishes the 2nd part of Quixote, the Moriscos with their pseudo-Arabic writings in which they wrote apocalyptic stories, survive only inside the singular work of fiction that is Cervantes novel.

In reading some of the Goodreads reviews of the The Ornament of the World, I find myself taken aback by those who quickly declare that Menocal's book does not represent "standard history", something the late author attests to in her preface.

Rather it is what professors & others who stress critical thinking often strive to do, i.e. to present a thesis and then attempt to buttress it with commentary, research, prevailing & even countering ideas, with the end result that the reader makes a determination as to how well the author's case or thesis has been presented & then defended. Again, Prof. Menocal explains her intention early on, though some seem to have failed to notice it or perhaps even chosen to disregard it.

Beyond that, Menocal's proposition, her research & her book based on it have betokened the accusation of "political correctness", as well as books that represent a kind of backlash against her work. Ornament of the World & similar books seem to have invited what should be called Islamophobic reactions by those who find the concept of tolerance among otherwise dissimilar people somehow offensive.

Curiously, by emphasizing a period of tolerance in medieval Spain, while clearly emphasizing that the periods of harmony were hardly universally observed & not always long-lasting, The Ornament of the World has seemingly encouraged the antithesis of tolerance on the part of some.

Particularly in light of our increasingly divisive, contentious world, there is an important need for global tolerance and I recommend Ornament of the World to those with the time & patience to devote to María Rosa Menocal’s very evocative book about tolerance in medieval Spain.

*In my edition of Ornament Of The World, there is a "Conversation with the Author", included as an appendix to the book. **There is an excellent PBS DVD portrayal of The Ornament of the World, dedicated to the late Prof. Maria Rosa Menocal.

***Among the photo images included within my review is one of the author, an example of Moorish architecture in Andalusian Spain, the tomb of Ferdinand III with inscriptions in 4 languages, the mosque/cathedral at Cordoba, a medieval painting illustrating scholarly dialogue in medieval Spain and the figure of Don Quixote with Sancho Panza.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say this book has awoken a thirst to learn much more Medieval history of Spain and Europe as a whole.

I enjoyed this book so much because of the history it provides and how it piqued my interest in learning more about Medieval times in Al-Andalus, Spain, as well as the rest of Europe and Middle East, the development of vernacular languages and developing literature via such authors as Dante, Boccaccio and at the end of the era, Cervantes. I also want to sample some of the books on poetry and history of the era whose titles are provided in "Suggested Reading" at the end of the book.

All in all, this has been one of the most intellectually stimulating reads I've had in quite a long time. Menocal ties together life in Al-Andalus through language. While we don't see the nitty-gritty of daily life for the average person, we do see what events and processes are taking place that will ultimately affect everyone living in the Iberian Peninsula (and eventually beyond the Pyrenees into the rest of Europe). While the ruling Muslims worked out their system which allowed Christians and Jews to remain in Spain and practice their faiths, with restrictions, major cultural changes were taking place largely due to the influx of the Arabic language and the history of translated and learned knowledge that came with it.

With it also came poetry and accessible, as opposed to ecclesiastical, music. As I read, I found myself remembering bits and pieces from college and wanting to know more.

Of course this period of relative calm and tolerance did end completely, though traces remain.

I plan to look for more information to supplement this reading.!

Addendum: Any historical errors in this review are mine, not the author's and are undoubtedly due to over-exuberance or fatigue or a combination thereof.

I definitely recommend this to those interested in history but warn you---you will want more after reading this book.

[Emma Sea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just couldn't get in to the writing style of this author:

One has to wonder which among the many fantasies-come-to-life of the palatine city of Madinat al-Zahra would have most stupified the army troops that breached its walls one day in 1009.

I felt intensely on edge all the way to page 91, where I gave up.

I think Kelly's review really nailed my frustration:

. . . do not approach this particular book as a historical documentation of a period, lest you be very frustrated within a few chapters . . . the historical information is presented in a very short, incoherent, incomplete, and confusing way- for example- she often chooses to get halfway through a story before she explains why it is significant, where it fits and the reasons behind it. She deals with tiny aspects of larger stories, which often makes it appear as if she is either a) withholding information that would be useful to us to judge her arguement or b) has forgotten that the majority of people reading this book do not have her extensive background in Moorish history.

Yup; this.

NMB.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The ornament of the world” is the famous description of Cordoba given to her readers by the tenth-century Saxon writer Hroswitha, who from her far-off convent at Gandersheim perceived the exceptional qualities and the centrality of the Cordoban caliphate.

Maria Rosa Menocal is both passionate and well informed about her chosen subject, inviting us to take a second look at one of the most unusual periods of interfaith dialogue and cultural exchange in a territory usually defined by internecine wars and religious intolerance. I find this exercise in critical thinking and cultural anthropology a welcome tool to mirror current world events that mark a resurgence in religion inspired violence, bigotry and racism.
The social, architectural and literary landscape built upon the vision of Abd al-Rahman, the exiled sole survivor of the once great Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, a golden age of Islamic syncretism to rival the splendor of the Abbasids new capital in Baghdad, will have more lasting influence over Western European history and culture than the feats of the marching armies over the Iberian peninsula.

Rather than retell the history of the Middle Ages, or even that of medieval Spain, I have strung together a series of miniature portraits that range widely in time and place, and that are focused on cultural rather than political events.

I think Menocal is too modest in this declaration about her credentials as a historian. She starts the book with a very concise yet very clear resume of the seven centuries of Islamic presence in al-Andalus, from the arrival of Abd al-Rahman in 750 to the capitulation of Boabdil in 1492 , all of the events described within the context of important world events, such as the rise of the Abbasids, the Crusades and the late Middle Ages in Europe. This timeline would prove useful as a reference for the later chapters in the book, which are episodic in nature and focused on the key individuals and events that help illustrate the author’s main argument about the dynamic exchanges between the three main monotheistic cultures in al-Andalus.

Who can tell the difference between a Jew and a Muslim and a Christian when they’re dressed the same?

The key to unlock this apparent mystery is the word dhimmi , the fact that Islam has its roots in the same fountain of wisdom as the other People of the Book, that Allah is just the translation of the word God from the Old Testament into Arabic.

In principle, all Islamic polities were (and are) required by Quranic injunction not to harm the dhimmi, to tolerate the Christians and Jews living in their midst.

The ‘dhimmi’, as these covenanted peoples were called, were granted religious freedom, not forced to convert to Islam. They could continue to be Jews and Christians, and, as it turned out, they could share in much of Muslim social and economic life.

As a native of a country that was for centuries under the influence of the Ottoman Empire, as an engineer who worked for several years in Saudi Arabia, and as a tourist who was enchanted by my own visit to present day Andaluzia, this dhimmi concept is not news to me, but I can see how it can be difficult to grasp for people who are only exposed to nationalistic histories or the modern peddlers of racial hatred.
Real historical sources document the presence of Jews and Christians in al-Andalus as a Golden Age of economical and cultural prosperity, and these are the stories Menocal has chosen as her focus:
men of unshakable faith, like Abelard and Maimonides and Averroes, saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines.

By the eleventh century, the heirs of Abd al-Rahman had declared a second caliphate in Cordoba, the equal if not the moral leader of the Islamic world ruled from Baghdad by the Abbasids. This is the culmination of the Umayyad dream, illustrated in the elegant arches of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba and the marvels of the garden palace in Madinat Al-Zahra, soon to be destroyed by internal strife and by a new wave of immigrants from North Africa, whose own interpretation of Islamic rule clashed with the tolerance and dialogue encouraged by the original Umayyads.
The once great caliphate of Cordoba devolved into a series of city-states called taifas, each with its own leadership and rivalries that made them easier to be conquered by the armies of the Castilians. Yet, some of the most amazing cultural reversals happened only when these ‘barbarian’ northerners came into contact with the richness and diversity of the taifas, many of them adopting the language, the customs, the architecture and the technology of the conquered.

... in 1095, in France, Pope Urban II summoned Western Christendom to a Crusade to win the Holy Land back from the infidel muslims; and from our perspective the times often seem stamped principally by this act of aggressive religious intolerance. Yet, these were also the times during which some of the vast holdings of Cordoba’s spectacular libraries came to be read, translated, and in effect canonized as part of the Western tradition, as often as not by men who were part of the hierarchy of the same Church promoting the Crusades.

It would have been easier for a partisan author to vilify these Crusaders as the destroyers of a flourishing culture, but Menocal doesn’t try to suppress the many sources who point out to the more radical interpretations of Islam brought by the Berber armies from North Africa who were as much a source of persecution of minorities and destroyers of libraries as the Christian kings.
Even more interesting is the way some of the most popular histories of the period, like The Song of Roland and The Song of the Cid were twisted around in later centuries in order to drive nationalist narratives regardless of historical facts, like ... the transformation which turned the slaughter of Charlemagne’s rear guard by Basques into a Christian-Muslim holy war , or the fact that Roland was a mercenary captain who often fought on the side of Muslim taifas and against his patron Ferdinand.
A particular grating and ironic twist in Menocal’s stories is the way a bunch of hot headed zealots inspired by an intransigent priest came to be known as the ‘Mozarab martyrs’ despite the fact they were in fact rising against the Mozarab adoption of Arabic language in their worship:

In 855, a small number of the most radical opponents of the conversion of their Christian and Latin world openly sought martyrdom. One by one, they indulged in conspicuous public declarations of the deceits of Islam and the perfidies of the Prophet; and although Islam was elastic in matters of doctrine, particularly when it had to do with Christians, they had zero tolerance for disparagement of their Prophet. The would-be martyrs thus knew for a certainty that they were forcing the hands of the authorities of the city by expressly choosing to vilify Muhammad.

The false assumption here was that there was forced conversion among the minorities during the Islamic rule of al-Andalus. In fact, any conversion was voluntary, driven by economic reasons, such as to avoid the special tax or to join in the administrative system. Both the Jews and the Christians found it easier to integrate and to speak Arabic, while keeping their right to pray in their own way in private.

>>><<<>>><<<

The prayers prove more satisfying, perhaps even more true, for being in the language of the love songs.
Hebrew’s redemption had come at the hands of writers who were masters of Arabic rhetoric, the Andalusian Jews, men as thoroughly and successfully a part of the cult of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and style as any of their Muslim neighbors and associates.

Maria Rosa Menocal has a Ph.D. in philology, and this major interest of her studies is illustrated by the importance she gives to language in her presentation. I believe that more than half of her ‘memory palaces’ deal with poetry, books and language. I didn’t really count them out, but I find the arguments persuasive. For both Latin and Hebrew, the contact with Arabic was a radical transformation from a dead, liturgical and formal speech into a vibrant, lyrical and malleable spoken language

Love of the language itself was certainly part of the pre-Islamic Bedouin culture that first received and shaped the new religion. These desert warriors were also poets, and great lovers of poetry of extraordinary delicacy and sentimentality.

For the first time in a thousand years, Hebrew was brought out of the confines of the synagogue and made as versatile as the Arabic that was the native language of the Andalusian Jewish community. Almost miraculously, Hebrew was once again used as the language of a vibrant, living poetry, what we call secular.

From the ninth through the eleventh centuries, the Mozarabs had preserved their own way of celebrating the Eucharist, not in Latin, the liturgical language of Western Christendom, but in Arabic.

The architectural splendors of Cordoba and Seville were equalled by the hundreds of thousands of texts in the taifas libraries, with important ancient texts imported from the translator schools in Baghdad.
One of my personal triggers is how even today most histories refuse to recognize the great schools of Baghdad, Cairo, Fez, Cordoba, Seville and Toledo as the first modern universities, under the claim that they were madrassas, or religious schools. Menocal does a great job here describing how the French monks came to Toledo and Cordoba and Sicily to learn about science and law and poetry and astronomy and mathematics and about the massive critical editions from classic Greek authors. The irony is strong regarding the founding of these famous Western universities:
... and all the teachers at all the schools and universities of Latin Christendom for many generations to come were clerics.
A special chapter is dedicated to the fascination in the West for astronomical treaties and devices such as the astrolabe, for the new ‘Arabic’ numeral system that actually originated in India:
Al-Khawarizmi’s own name became the word ‘algorithm’, from the form in which it appears in the very first line of Robert’s Latin version of that work: ‘Dixit Algoritmi ...’

I wish I could comment on each chapter dedicated to key moments in al-Andalus history, but I leave this to future readers. I will simply enumerate instead several names that struck my fancy and inspired me to read more about their lives and their period. In this sense, Menocal’s book serves as a starting point for study and not as an exhaustive and detailed commentary on the period. For architecture, I will put Toledo on the list of future holiday destinations, in particular the Church of San Roman with its mudejar arches and the synagogue of Abulafia. Then there is the poet Ibn Hazm and his ‘The Neck-Ring of the Dove’ from 1064; Ishmael ibn Nagrila who was the first Jewish vizier of a taifa; Judah Halevi; Maimonides; Averroes; Peter the Venerable; Peter Abelard; Bernard of Clairvaux; Luis de Torres ( Torres was taken along to speak the language that Columbus expected would be understood where he thought he was going surely the lingua franca of the Indies would be Arabic, as it was in the rest of the infidel but civilized world.

>>><<<>>><<<

In tracing the penetration of Arabian culture north of the Pyrenees, Menocal puts particular stress on the Provencal troubador poetic tournaments, so much like the pre-Islamic poetry contests in the Arabian peninsula; on the exile of Petrus Alphonsi, a Jewish man converted to Christianity who introduced Arabian style storytelling and academic polemics to England and France, directly influencing writers like Chaucer, Boccaccio and Cervantes; on the adoption of Arabic dress, language and customs by the Spanish kings and on the pilgrimage of abbots from Cluny and elsewhere to the translation schools in Toledo and Sicily.

The history of al-Andalus comes to an end with the fall of the last emirate of Granada, but the cultural journey of Menocal continues with the major betrayal of Ferdinand and Isabella, who broke the treaty guaranteeing religious freedom only months after the fall of the Nasrids. What follows is well knows: the concept of racial purity, the forced conversions of Muslims, Jews and Mozarabs, the persecutions and the book burnings that culminated with the institution of the Inquisition.
The survival of the Umayyad traditions after the Reconquista is illustrated by Menocal in a special chapter about Cervantes:
Cervantes’ complex fiction is that the novel is actually the work of an Arab historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, that the book that contains the true story of Don Quixote de la Mancha was written in Arabic, that it was once lost but then found in Toledo’s now bedraggled old Jewish quarter, among the piles of rags about to be recycled into new paper, and that it was then translated for him by a Morisco who happened to be wondering the streets of Toledo and could still read the old language.

The whole shebang is then brought into the third millennium with a commentary on the works of Salman Rushdie, with a beautiful conclusion about the role of books and poetry as the way to keep the ‘memory palace’ of al-Andalus alive: Salman Rushdie and Scheherazade’s plight – the tales told within them embody the hope that stories can bring, since by their very nature they resist clear-cut interpretations and are likely to reveal the different ways in which truths and realities can be perceived. In its insistence that the point of stories, of literature, is to pose difficult questions rather than to propose easy answers or facile morals, this tradition is a central part of the Andalusian legacy to subsequent European culture.

Further reading recommendations:
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
Tales of the Alhambra

[Cynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Menocal refers to her work as being "a series of miniature portraits," less political and more cultural.

Recently I read Islamic Arts from Spain where I learned that Spanish Art is Islamic Art. In this book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, I learn that Arabic Language was the Spanish Language until Alonso's reign (1252 - 1284) when several contributing elements converged, including sientists/doctors/scholars teaching themselves and their students the works of ancient masters, translating the Arabic arcana into Castillian--not Latin. The Islamic, Christians, and Jews all knew Arabic--Arabicized Christians and Arabicized Jews along with the Mediterrean Arabs (those arriving from the East and those arriving from North Africa). The generation previous to mine still used/use Arabicisms. Long Arm of Language/Culture.

Good Book for all those who have basic information and confidence who want to know how the culture exchange worked not only in physical culture, but between three main cultures if the Iberian Peninsula in the most telling way of cultural transmission--language.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a series of historical ‘portraits’ of Spanish lands in 6th to 15th century, which shows an unusual co-existence of people of different faith in the lands of the Ornament of the world, as the tenth-century Saxon (Christian!) writer Hroswitha described Muslim Cordoba of his time. I read it as a part of monthly reading for January-February 2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

This is not a history of Medieval Spain. Instead, the author takes a person (e.g. Hasdai, the nasi, or the “prince,” of his own Jewish religious community and a of the caliph Abd al-Rahman III, who ruled between 912 and 961), a building (e.g. the Church of San Roman, in Toledo, where it was built after the Reconquest of 1085 and where Christian iconography shares space with Arabic script) or a book (e.g. the commentaries on Aristotle written by the Cordoban Averroes (Ibn Rushd) that were banned an Episcopal synod in Paris in 1210).

I admit, I knew about Andalusian history only in the most general terms, and this book makes a great job in fleshing out this history by focusing on its subjects mostly in a chronological way. For example, I knew that Cordoba was a great city, with restored aqueduct and great libraries, but not that after its fall in the early 11th century to Berber troops, there was a great poetic upheaval, from making the new Hebrew poetry by Samuel the Nagid and others, which proliferated after the fall to possibly being one of the major sources of European minstrel tradition. Or that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote can be viewed as a story of Muslims and Jews, hiding their true beliefs under baptism to stay on their land.

A very interesting and unusual historical book.

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by María Rosa Menocal is a historical survey of life in Al-Andalus, Spain, during the Middle Ages. The survey begins in Damascus in 750 and concludes in Grenada in 1492 with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain.

The study opens in Damascus with Abd al-Rahman, an Ummayad, escaping the massacre of his family by their rivals, the Abbasids. Abd al-Rahman ends up in Al-Andalus in 755. From there he establishes a flourishing center for the free exchange of knowledge and culture coupled with an unprecedented tolerance for religious differences. This was a time and place when Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side, respecting each other’s differences, and borrowing freely from one another’s language, art, and architecture. Abd al-Rahman and his descendants perceived difference as an asset and contradictions as constructive and positive. This highly fertile culture led to innovations in poetry, philosophy, language, fiction, and architecture. The spirit of cooperation led to a boom in commerce and trade.

Menocal discusses the role of prominent figures who contributed to syncretism, tolerance, and the cooperative spirit that reigned in Muslim Spain during this period. She makes interesting connections and peppers her survey with engaging anecdotes. She also traces the extensive influence of the Arabic language and Islamic culture on European art, science, philosophy, literature, and architecture.

This edifice eventually collapses under the onslaught of fundamentalist factions within the religious traditions. When the concepts of purity of blood and faith fastened their grip on Europe, when scapegoating and othering became the flavor of the month, Spain proceeded to expel Muslims and Jews and eradicate signs of its Islamic heritage. Intolerance and bigotry became the norm.

The study is well-researched and extensive. Maps, black and white images of buildings, an Index, and suggestions for further reading are included. The writing is accessible and engaging. The tone throughout is one of nostalgia for a time when things were different, when tolerance, flexibility, inclusion, and cooperation were embraced in civil society, when difference was perceived as an asset. Menocal reminds us such a time existed in the past and maybe—just maybe—it can be possible in the future.

My book reviews are also available at www.tamaraaghajaffar.com

[Robert Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic book. Menocal was a specialist in Medieval history and Literature who chose to distill her deep knowledge of Muslim Spain into this book for popular audiences. She has done a great service. The book is a bit controversial.

The Muslim period in Spain, dating from the early 700s to 1492 is an incredibly diverse period, involving separate conquests, kingdoms, and the slow Spanish Christian reconquest of the peninsula. This Reconquista happened in fits and starts over 700 years. Menocal convincingly argues that while there was a good deal of religious intolerance and war in certain periods, the larger and more important story was one of tolerance and the development of an extraordinary hybrid culture that had a lot more influence on Western Culture than is commonly recognized.

She is quite clearly "in the tank" for the early Muslim leaders, and this has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Some choices she makes in the book make it easier for her largely Islamophobic critics. She starts in 750 from the start of the quasi-independent Ummayad period, which allows her to avoid the Muslim conquest itself from 711. This conquest, like any, was no doubt brutal and destructive. Leaving it out makes her argument weaker. Her characterizations of the Roman-Visigothic period that was supplanted also strike me as a bit unfair. I've been to the extraordinary Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba, where the remnants of the previous Visigothic church are preserved. Portraying this culture as being without value, which I feel she comes close to doing, is unfair.

That said, I think she wins the argument. Al-Andalus, which is the name that Muslims use for Spain to this day was truly an extraordinary culture, well worth celebrating and acknowledging. The many take-downs you can find on-line, some of which I have sampled, only make a valid point if you ignore the rest of history. They point out that the much praised practice of Dhimmitude, where Christians and Jews were allowed to exist as second class citizens, subject to taxes and restrictions, is still a form of subjection. Christians and Jews who insulted Islam in a public forum were subject to execution, and many chose martyrdom in this way. The conquest itself, which Menocal avoids, had all the brutality and waste of any other conquest. This is all true, but who did it better? The Crusaders? Christians exterminated and expelled Muslims where they found them, with the exception of the early phases of the Reconquista in Spain. Jews lived a horrific and circumscribed life throughout Christian Europe. The Jews of "Christendom" didn't reach the opportunities present for their co-religionists in Andalusia until industrialization. The Mongols took a more civilized line on religion, but they also eradicated entire cities with glee. I don't need to review the horrors of European and US imperialism here. We are animals, us human beings.

Al-Andalus really was better. The culture that was formed allowed each faith community to reach new heights. Contrary to legend, the initial phases of the Christian conquest were carried out by Christian kings that had a deep appreciation for Muslim culture, and allowed Muslims and Jews to continue to practice their religions. This initial Christian tolerance was replaced by horrific repression of Muslims, and even those who had converted but were unable to fully establish their religious bona fides. There's also that small matter of the Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

But before all this could happen, the cultural richness of Muslim Spain was handed down to European civilization more broadly and Spanish culture in particular. Even now, in Southern California, iconic buildings like the LA and San Diego city halls look to me to be strikingly like Andalusian and Moroccan mosques. Menocal convincingly argues that many of the early landmarks of Western civilization, from science, to the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks, to the structure of the tales of Bocaccio and Chaucer were drawn from Andalusia.

This book is incredibly illuminating, and everyone should read it. One more observation struck me forcefully. The historiographies of Ummayad Andalusia and Greek Constantinople are mirrors of each other. They are situated at opposite ends of the Mediterranean and they occupy very similar mental spaces in the historical imagination of their religious descendants. The Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople was an extraordinarily rich culture. It was the capital of Europe for 1,000 years while much of Northern Europe's business was still dirt farming. Al-Andalus, the subject of this book, is also remembered as a lost Muslim paradise.

In the 15th century both of these civilizations came to an end. The Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople in 1453, and the king and queen of Spain conquered the last Spanish Muslim emirate of Granada in 1492. For elements of both religions, these "falls" are seen as reasons to gripe about the other religion. "If it wasn't for those dastardly (Christians/Muslims) the glories of (Al-Andalus/Constantinople) would still be here today!" If you look at what actually happened though, that's not it at all. It was actually the choice to run with religious war and fundamentalism that killed both those societies. Christians killed the Christian Empire, and Muslims killed the Muslim one. I already knew the story with Constantinople. Menocal lays out the Andalusian story with sad clarity.

The stories are strikingly similar. The Byzantine empire in Constantinople was rapidly losing its Anatolian hinterland to Muslim Turkish tribes following the battle of Manzikert in 1071. They chose to appeal to Christian fanatics in Western Europe to save them. This was the launch of the Crusades. The Anatolia problem never got solved. Jerusalem and parts of modern Syria were held by Western Europeans for a century or so. By 1202, Constantinople still held the legacy of thousands of years of Greek culture, and was safe from Muslim invaders behind its walls, as it had been since the 600s. What killed it was a sack by the Fourth Crusade in 1203. This force of Venetians and Franks destroyed and stole the city's cultural legacy. The magnificent classical sculptures of horses that grace the Venetian Cathedral of St. Marks were stolen at this time. For over half a century, the Byzantine heartland was held by warring Western European kingdoms. The Byzantines did manage to take back the city in the 1260s, but the territory was never again unified. By the time the Ottoman Turks finally captured the city in 1453, it was a collection of fields of villages behind ancient Roman walls. The Muslims didn't kill Constantinople. Christian fanatics did.

As Menocal documents, the great caliphate of Andalusian Cordoba fell to civil war in the 1000s. The many Muslim successor "Taifa kingdoms" managed to preserve and enrich Andalusian culture for a while. But in 1086 some of them were losing ground to the Christian Aragonese and Castilian armies. One Muslim king made the fateful decision to invite the fanatical Almoravid dynasty from Morocco to "protect" him. The Almoravids defeated the Christian armies, but they imposed a rigid, xenophobic version of Islam that ended the culture of relative tolerance that made Muslim Andalusia so great. The Almoravids, and the even more fanatical Almohad dynasty that replaced them were able to hold territory for a while but they were completely defeated in 1212. The small Muslim kingdom of Granada survived for most of three more centuries. But the Al-Andalus snuffed out by Spanish Christians in 1492 was a pale shadow of what it once was. Christians didn't kill Muslim Spain. Muslim fundamentalists did.

Fascinating stuff. Read this book.

[Ayse_ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ornament of the World is a book about medieval era in Iberian peninsula. Menocal starts the time at 750, right after the Abbasid massacre of the Umayyad dynasty in Syria and ends it around 1500 after the exile of Jews, Muslims and 'convertos' from the peninsula. In the epilogue the timeline even stretches to the WWII and deliberate destruction of National Library in Sarajevo by Serbian Army.

During the 750 years of time studied, we see the linguistic and cultural development in this part of europe. As Al-Andalus became the cultural melting pot of christians, jews and muslims during the Umayyad rule starting with Abd-al-Rahman, the cultural tolerance and dialectic created the right environment for the arts and sciences and philosophy to emerge and prosper.

The writer states 'The complex problem at the heart of the cultural history of medieval Europe was first and foremost how the great monotheistic religions of the Children of Abraham—faiths that all have powerful strains of ferocity within them—struggled to define what they were and what they might become. When they managed to find it within themselves to be truly first-rate, admirable achievements followed, and men like Samuel the Nagid rode the land and churches like San Roman were built and philosophers like Ibd Rushd were honored. But when, instead, the centers of such tolerance did not hold, irreparable destruction often followed, from the eleventh-century sacking of Madinat al-Zahra by fundamentalist Berber troops to the fifteenth-century tearing down of the old Almohad mosque that had served for so long as the cathedral of the Castilian monarchs in Seville.”

What I enjoyed a lot in this book were information such as why we use OK, the reason there are so many arabic words (mostly related with sciences) in English and latin (Romance) languages; why masterpieces like the Spanish synagogue in Prague, many gothic and medieval churches and cathedrals have these horseshoe shaped structures and have an exotic air to them.. Most impressively how a functional language can shape people's lives and thinking pattern and evolution..From Ibn Hazm to Bocaccio to Cervantes...

There are so many take home messages in this book, especially the last 2 chapters and the epilogue are thought provoking..

[Halldór Thorgeirsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a pleasure reading this book. The author paints pictures of key individuals shaping this period of cross-fertilization between the three religions and their associated cultures. It is refreshing to come accross a history book that goes below the surface of events and commings and goings of rulers and provides insights into what motivated the key actors and trends. How this culture of tolerance came to an end and what followed fills one with sadness but at the same time demonstrates what is possible if only we manage to look beyond superficial differences at what unites people of different faiths.

Reading about the Umayyads feelings for the Syria they left behind I could not help thinking about the thousands that now have been uprooted from that same country for no good reason.

This book is written in a pleasant style. The author is kind to the reader and reminds him of connections to what has come before. I appreciate that. I don't have the knowledge to judge its historical accuracy or if the author is selective to make a point. If she is, i forgive her. So many books have been writted about division and strive and it it refreshing to read about something positive.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

A poorly written, dangerously biased account of a place and time in history which could very well have been fabricated by the author.

[Nurul Suhadah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buku tulisan Maria Rosa Menocal ini adalah antara buku unik dan menarik yang saya baca dalam usaha mencari gali sejarah Andalusia. Buku ini berlainan daripada genre buku yang saya baca sebelum ini tentang sejarah Andalusia yang kebanyakkannya akan menyajikan fakta-fakta berdasarkan kronologi sejak dari mula hingga ke akhir tamadun hebat ini.

Penulis buku ini yang merupakan seorang pensyarah dan pengkaji Sejarah dan Kebudayaan di Universiti Pennsylvania menggunakan pendekatan lain dalam mempersembahkan sejarah. Versi asal buku ini dalam Bahasa Inggeris bertajuk Ornament Of The World.

Buku ini menekankan tentang suasana kehidupan tiga agama Ibrahimi yang hidup secara harmonis di zaman Andalusia iaitu Muslim, Yahudi dan Kristian. Selain itu penulis juga mengambil latar tempat seperti Istana Al-Hambra, masjid dan pohon palem di Cordoba, Kota La Mancha dan lain-lain.

Selain menghuraikan tentang latarbelakang dan tempat-tempat tersebut, yang paling utama ialah penulis menceritakan tokoh-tokoh yang telah lahir di tempat tersebut. Kisah hidup dan sumbangan besar mereka kepada peradaban dunia. Kalau buku lain yang saya baca sebelum ini, mungkin kerana ditulis oleh Muslim, hanya tokoh-tokoh Muslim yang dihuraikan. Tetapi dalam buku ini, penulis banyak sekali memperkenalkan tokoh-tokoh dikalangan Yahudi dan Kristian.

Bab yang paling saya suka dalam buku ini ialah bab berkenaan dengan Ibnu Rusyd dan juga Musa bin Maimun atau Maimonides. Kedua-dua filsuf hebat mewakili agama Islam dan Yahudi ini sangat penting dan karya-karya besar mereka ditelaah dan dikaji hingga kini. Saya teruja ketika dapat jejakkan kaki ke tapak rumah Ibn Rusyd di Cordoba yang kini dijadikan restoran dan bersembahyang di Masjid kecil yang dinamakan masjid Ibn Rusyd. Tatkala orang lain mungkin melihat patung Maimonides yang ada di Cordoba dengan pandangan kosong dan hanya mahu ambil gambar, saya terlalu seronok kerana saya telah membaca tentang tokoh ini terlebih dahulu menyebabkan saya mampu memandang patung beliau dengan pandangan yang berlainan di Cordoba.

Saya juga suka sekali menelusuri kisah Ibnu Khaldun yang berkunjung ke Sevilla pada 1364 hingga 1365 yang mengikut analisis penulis telah membantu beliau membentuk kepekaan sejarah yang luar biasa sehingga beliau mampu menjadi ahli sejarah yang paling berpengaruh selepas itu.

Selain itu saya juga terpesona dengan kisah Ibn Hazm yang juga seorang pemikir besar, malah merupakan antara pemimpin besar yang terlibat secara langsung mempertahankan kepimpinan bani Umayyah di bumi Cordoba. Beliau pernah dipenjara dan juga terlibat dalam pelbagai peperangan kerana politik. Beliau juga hidup sezaman dengan perdana menteri pemerintahan taifah Granada yang terkenal iaitu Samuel Nagid. Ibn Hazm yang akhirnya meninggal dalam kondisi pengasingan dan terasing pada tahun 1064 merupakan antara intelektual yang mengagumkan yang telah dilahirkan di Andalusia.

Ada dua bab dalam buku ini di mana penulis telah menukilkan tentang Bahasa Arab dan juga Bahasa Ibrani. Dalam bab bertajuk “Bahasa Ibu”, penulis telah menghuraikan tentang kepentingan Bahasa Arab pada zaman Andalusia, kelebihan-kelebihan serta pengaruhnya yang sangat meluas. Tentang Bahasa Ibrani pula, ada penulis kemukakan kritikan Maimonides sendiri terhadap Bahasa Ibrani.

Melalui buku ini saya berkenalan dengan tokoh penyair dan intelektual Yahudi seperti Judah Halevi yang dikatakan bermusuh dengan Musa bin Ezra dan banyak lagi tokoh-tokoh Kristian dan Yahudi yang sebelum ini memang tidak pernah saya kenali.

Dalam buku ini juga saya suka bab berkenaan Toledo, yang terkenal sebagai kota tiga agama. Dalam banyak-banyak tempat yang saya jejak di sana baru-baru ini, memang Toledo adalah tempat yang paling menambat hati saya. Masjid yang kini telah digerejakan masih kukuh berada di atas bukit di kota yang dikelilingi oleh tiga sungai itu. Di Sevilla pula saya berkenalan dengan penyair Sisilia Ibn Hamdis yang pada ketika itu Sevilla masyhur dengan Akademi Penyair.

Versi terjemahan ini ada kata pengantar yang diberikan oleh Dr Haidar Baghir yang memberikan komentar menarik tentang bagaimana usaha intelektual nun jauh di Andalusia ada memberi kesan kepada kita di Nusantara. Beliau menukilkan bagaimana tokoh sufi agung Andalusia seperti Fatimah Al-Mutsanna dan muridnya Ibn ‘Arabi dan anak murid terbaik Ibn Arabi Sadr Ad-Din Qunawi dan Syaikh Iz Ahmad menyebabkan ajaran tasawuf mampu tersebar luas hingga ke Nusantara ini. Buku-buku karangan mereka banyak dikomentar atau di’syarah’ oleh para sufi selanjutnya termasuk di Nusantara ini seperti Tuhfat Al-Mursalah karya Syaikh Burhanpuri yang mendedahkan tentang Wahdat Al-Wujud Ibn Arabi yang menjadi ajaran Martabat Tujuh di Nusantara.

Sungguh, buku ini memberikan saya kepuasan yang luar biasa. Tamat yang versi terjemahan ini, saya rasa saya perlu membelek pula versi asal karya Maria Mosa Menocal ini.

[Alison FJ]

A series of largely cheerful sketches of moments, people, inventions, linguistic habits that exemplify the tolerance of medieval Iberia over roughly 700 years of Muslim rule (of nearly the entire peninsula, at the beginning of the period, but limited, by the end, to Granada). The author seems particularly interested in "memory palaces" -- especially buildings that are shared, diachronically, between different cultures and confessions. I probably would have liked it better had I read it on paper instead of selecting the audiobook, whose chipper narration added to the general impression of being happy-talked through 700 years of medieval European history.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

While reading this book, I vacillated between rating it a 3, 4, or 5. Upon finishing the book, including the last chapter and prologue, I could not rate it any less than 5. The author addresses very complex issues and history in an understandable way. I thought there was too much redundancy in the third quarter of the book, however I was brought out of that when I read the last of the book. Everything came together.
Religious and cultural tolerance and intolerance exist simultaneously among one race. Ones' beliefs become who one is and is a vital part of self- and community-identity. This is a complexity with which humans have dealt for eternity. To find one place where the essence of tolerance lived in-between eras of intolerance then expand upon its origins and demise is to the author's credit. That she is able to present it in an easy to read framework reflects her genius.
I have not yet read Decameron or Don Quixote, but will do so now with a much greater understanding of the books' contexts than if I had read them prior to reading this wonderful book.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must read for any one interested in Spanish history, and in particular the interconnections between Christian, Muslim and Jewish culture in Southern Spain.
I read it a few years ago just before we travelled to Andalucia and was profoundly influenced by it.

[Mike Histand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provided the foundation for a 3 week trip to Sicily and Andalusa (Spain) from which I have just returned. It focuses on the period 756-1492 when this part of the world contributed substantially to saving civilization. (more on that below) Furthermore it is a unique period when Jews, Christians and Arabs lived together in a mutually beneficial and reasonably harmonious relationship. It is a period that was called the dark ages when I studied western civ in college. The book and subsequent trip turned my apprehension of this period on its head! I read it three times because it is recondite, densely written and full of characters whom I have never heard of before, but primarly because it was super germane to my recent travel. It probably is not for everyone, but should be.
A most important point: if it were not for the Arab diaspora in the early 700's in Sicily, north Africa and Andalusa, most Greek (Classical) knowledge would have been lost for us. Cordoba had 400,000 volumes in its libraries when Europe had only 4000. And the al Andalusians were ardent readers as was apparent from the sizes of their libraries. We can only guess how much better off we are for the translators and translations (mostly Greek into Arabic) who made our "western" civilization what it is.

[Dion Yulianto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Setelah hampir sebulan, akhirnya selesai juga buku dengan font kecil rapat dan isinya bikin miris gimana ini.

Spanyol Andalusia di abad 10 M adalah satu dari dua puncak peradaban Islam (satunya lagi di Baghdad pada abad 8 M) yang kini hanya dapat kita kenang. Tidak banyak yg tertinggal dari bumi Andalusia selain masjid agung Cordoba yg kini ditengahnya dibangun altar, istana Alhambra yg untungnya masih terjaga di Granada, serta menara la Girda yg dulu dipakai sebagai tempat adzan dan kini jadi menara katedral. Sedih rasanya kalau mengingat masjid agung Seville yang diruntuhkan pada abad 15 M dan digantikan dengan katedral Gothik terbsar di dunia.

Peristiwa recoungista atau penaklukan kembali Spanyol oleh kaum Kristen selama ini dipandang sebagai satu satunya penyebab runtuhnya Andalusia Islam. Tetapi membaca buku ini, kita jadi tersadar bahwa sebagaimana manusia, peradaban itu tumbuh berkembang lalu runtuh sebagaimana dikatakan Ibnu Khaldun. Andalusia Islam runtuh bukan hanya karena serangan kerajaan Kristen tetapi juga serangan kerajaan Islam bangsa Berber dari Afrika Utara. Bahkan, melemahnya Andalusia juga lebih dikarenakan umat muslim yg terpecah jadi kota kota kerajaan yg saling berperang satu sama lain. Kerusakan terbesar monumen Islam,, yakni ambyarnya kompleks Madina Al Zahra tenryata dilakukan oleh suku suku Islam dari Afrika Utara. Pernah ada sebuah kekhalifahan besar di Cordoba, yang runtuh akhir abad 10 dan digantikan oleh taifa taifa kecil yang saling berseteru, padahal mereka saudara seiman. Ini membuktikan bahwa sejatinya perang antaragama itu tidak lebih dari perang politik. Dalam sejarah, tidak ada pihak yg sepenuhnya hitam dan sepenuhnya biru. Ada berbagai variabel, tokoh, kebijakan, politik, dan kepentingan dalam setiap peristiwa.

Kita mengenang Andalusia dengan peradaban tingginya. Tetapi ada satu lagi pencapaian Islam Andalusia yg terlewatkan: tenggang rasa. Era kekhalifahan Cordoba adalah masa ketika umat Islam, Kristen, dan Yahudi bisa hidup saling berdampingan bahkan bekerja sama. Seorang Yahudi bahkan pernah menjabat perdana menteri yg disegani. Di era ini pula, ketiga pemeluk agama slaing bersatu mengumpulkan ilmu, mengerjakan terjemahan, sibuk menyelamatkan bahkan mengembangkan ilmu kuno warisan Yunani. Bahkan selepas Andalusia jatuh ke tangan penguasa Kristen Kastilia, pernah ada masa ketika tenggang rasa khas Andalusia itu tetap terjaga.

Andalusia lama selayaknya menjadi cermin bagi umat Islam modern. Tidak hanya dari segi pencapaian ilmu pengetahuan, bahasa, arsitektur, dan filsafatnya; tetapi juga tentang sikap tenggang rasa dan menjunjung tinggi pluralisme antar pemeluk agama yang akhir akhir ini sering terabaikan. Dari sejarah Andalusia, kita belajar bahwa pencapaian emas tidak hanya dalam bentuk peninggalan materi, tetapi juga sikap tepo seliro marang liyan.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covers nearly a millennium of history on the Iberian Peninsula. Beginning in the 8th century, the author traces the development of a multicultural region of the medieval world. This story is one of both tolerance and intolerance, of conquest and adaptation, of rich cultural flourishing and of destruction. This is an enormous amount of history to cover in 350 pages and I often felt overwhelmed. 3.5 stars

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maria Rosa Menocal's episodic history of medieval Spain is well organized, erudite, and romantic. The book starts with a long chapter that surveys the period, roughly 780 through 1360. Shorter chapters then provide vignettes lifted out of the larger history, focusing on scenes or people whose lives illustrate the broader trends and turning points. Overall, the story consists of three periods: the initial caliphate, which brought Arab and Muslim culture to Spain; the taifa era, in which the fusion of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish cultures flourished among a bunch of city states; and a final era in which the Christian kingdom of Castile transmitted texts and culture from the fusion culture to western and northern Europe. Throughout, Menocal celebrates cultures of tolerance and blames religious conservatives - both Muslims and Christians, at different points -- for shattering the economic and political context that made the Andalusian melange possible.

Menocal's writing brings the historical figures to life, and offers plenty of jumping-off points for further reading. At the same time, while the scholarship underpinning the book is objectively of high quality, the mood is deeply personal. Menocal loves this period, and she doesn't spend much effort discussing how difficult or brutal life remained, even in the tolerant times. Consistent with her academic interests, the book emphasizes thinkers and writers; this is a history of elite culture, with occasional glimpses of popular culture and very little economic analysis. As an introduction to the period, I found it far more interesting and memorable than David Levering Lewis' 2008 book, God's Crucible.

[Marieke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a group read that I missed out on. While the group members read and discussed it, they decided to read Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf together at a later date. The later date came, and I wanted to join them. I started reading Leo Africanus and 20 pages in, decided to set it aside to read this first.

I'm glad I did, although I did feel a bit out of my depth with so much of this history unfamiliar to me. I was unable to read this book with any kind of critical eye, but it did succeed in making me want to read more about this time and place, particularly how it relates to Islamic history in general. I'm very appreciative of the author's short essay on books worth reading on this subject and I'm eager to get my hands on some of them.

In the meantime, I have taken Leo Africanus back up and I'm so glad I read this book first. Later, after I have read more about medieval Europe and inter-faith history, especially the key figures whose biographies Menocal drew heavily on, I will likely return to this book.

[Shahad Al-Khalaf · Rating 3 out of 5]

هذا الكتاب ثمين جداً، رغم انه ابتدأ قصته بنهاية حكم الأمويين في الشرق و ابتدائه في الغرب. عرضت فيه الكاتبة صوراً من تسامح الأمويين -الذين تقدرهم جداً- مع أصحاب الديانات الأخرى من يهود و نصارى، و مع اليهود بالتحديد و كيف ساهم الأمويون المسلمون في إعادة الحياة للغة العبرية الميتة! كذلك تعيين عبد الرحمن الثالث وزيراً يهودياً له في بلاطه. من هنا تبدأ قصة الكاتبة مع اليهود، لا أدري كيف وصفت كتابها ب"إسلام الحضارة" و أغلب حديثها عن اليهود، مؤلفاتهم، رحلاتهم، و معاناتهم! أشك أن الأسماء اليهودية في الكتاب أكثر من الأسماء المسلمة. ظلم الكتابُ المسلمين كثيراً بوضعهم جنباً إلى جنب مع اليهود في مواضع كثيرة، حتى كادت لا تذكر المسلمين إلا و تقرن اليهود بهم، و كأنهم هم من أسس لهذه الحضارة و ما هم في الحقيقة إلا جزء يسير منها. القارئ الجديد سيُخدع بهذه الهالة التقديسية لليهود. هذا الكتاب ظلم المسلمين جداً بإقرانهم باليهود رغم إنصافه الشديد و الدقيق بحقهم.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid history of a fascinating time and place. Of course, it’s hard to cover such a lengthy historical era with clarity and cogency, so the book can sometimes be difficult to follow. I mean, to contextualize Muslim Spain, the author needed to discuss the birth of Islam, the caliphates, the fall of Rome, the Visigoths, the Jewish diaspora, scholasticism, Aristotelianism, Jewish mysticism, the crusades, the rise of various linguistic phenomena, and a dozen other themes. But in the end, the author succeeded in communicating the essential features of Muslim Andalusia. By and large, the place was a cauldron of multicultural intellectual fermentation. Having just visited Córdoba, Sevilla, and Grenada with my Arab wife, I was especially enthralled by this tale.

[Aaron Wolfson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important and enjoyable book, it asks vexing questions of history and contemporary life. Can environments of cultural and religious tolerance obtain, or are they destined to fall apart? Is tolerance even an ideal worth striving for, or are we better to focus on merely avoiding violence and tyranny?

The experiences of the Muslims, Jews, and Christians of medieval al-Andalus provide some answers, but, inevitably, even more questions, about the struggle for tolerance and peace in our own times.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non Fiction>History>Spain post-Roman Empire 4 Stars
This is a wonderful history of the Andalusian region of Spain from the end of the 700s Umayyads to 1400s Ferdinand and Isabella (rulers of Castile and Aragon respectively, but really remembered as the King and Queen of Spain). The history of language, authorship, religious translations, secular activities, religious tolerance/intolerance, politics, and architecture are all covered. This is not a typical 'follow the lineage of kings' type of history. This is a history of the people and peoples who came to inhabit the area and how they lived with each other. The reader is reminded of the evolution that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have all been through separately and together.
Most of the discussion and information does focus on the Muslim rulers of the area, starting with the split of Umayyad from Abbasid. I googled the some of the buildings mentioned throughout and they are very beautiful. Having recently read Inferno by Dan Brown and looking up most of the buildings mentioned in there (mostly in Italy) I am really wanting to renew my passport and visit all these beautiful places in Europe! In addition to the buildings mentioned, there are several 'classic' writings that have made it to my TBR now thanks to their inclusion here by Menocal. Besides the musings of ancient but profound people, I also might soon get around to reading Don Quixote.

I read this with the Non Fiction Book Club for Jan/Feb 2022.




In that highly contested succession lie the origins of many of the major shapes and terms of Islam that are mostly unknown or puzzling to non-Muslims: Shiites and Sunnis, caliphs and emirs, Umayyads and Abbasids, all of these crucial internal divisions.
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But in 1095 at Clermont, in France, Pope Urban II summoned Western Christendom to a Crusade to win the Holy Land back from the infidel Muslims; and from our perspective the times often seem stamped principally by this act of aggressive religious intolerance. Yet, these were also the times during which some of the vast holdings of Cordoba’s spectacular libraries came to be read, translated, and in effect canonized as part of the Western tradition, as often as not by men who were part of the hierarchy of the same Church promoting the Crusades.
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The old Christians of Cordoba moved into exile in the north, to find that their coreligionists were far stranger than their old Muslim neighbors...
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The prayers prove more satisfying, perhaps even more true, for being in the language of the love songs.
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This community did not imagine it had bought its secular and cultural success by renouncing, hiding, or in any way diminishing its Jewishness. On the contrary, against Halevi were those who argued that the Andalusian Jews’ radical degree of cultural assimilation had allowed them to become more fully Hebraized than any Jewish community had been for a thousand years, and thus far more profoundly in touch with their heritage as Jews.
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Scholars are still unraveling the motivations and the conditions that led to this most creative movement of cultural transformation, but the results are clear enough, nothing less than the translation into Arabic of the universe of Greek learning.
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...and since I'm reading the Wheel of Time books right now, this quote really struck me for its use of, well, The Wheel of Time concept:

By 1075, the wheel had turned once again, and it was Alfonso who was in a position to provide al-Qadir the help asked for, at a steep price.

[Vidur Kapur · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a book that received praise from the likes of Harold Bloom (who penned the foreword) and Christopher Hitchens, this wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This book – which I read alongside Fernandez-Morera’s The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, for balance – consists of a number of small chapters, each serving as a literary or historical vignette. Despite this, it manages to cover considerable ground, and the reader comes away with an outline of the history of mediaeval Spain which one would typically search for in a popular but more traditional history.

The Ornament of the World is very well-written, and makes its central case well: that a culture of tolerance was fostered in medieval Spain, relative to the standards of its time. Contrary to the assertions of Fernandez-Morera and others, Menocal does not hesitate to point out violent episodes or events. Nor does she refrain from pointing out that some Christians – to a greater extent than members of the Jewish community – found it difficult to adjust to the new Islamic regime, which was first established around 712 CE and then built upon by the new Umayyad rulers from the 750s onward.

Indeed, the differences between Menocal and her critics are matters of emphasis, not content. They clearly work from the same source materials, but come to different conclusions. Menocal, though, is better at taking historical context into account than the likes of Fernandez-Morera. Violence at the end of the first millennium was almost ubiquitous; tolerance (however grudging or pragmatic) was not. She expertly illustrates the intellectual fruits of this tolerance by exploring the importance of Islamic Spain – and Toledo, which remained a multicultural centre of translation after it was conquered in 1085 – to the history of mathematics, science, philosophy, architecture and literature. Hitchens overstates things when he says our culture “is owed in large measure to the Andalusian enlightenment" (learning was also transmitted via Islamic-influenced Sicily and Italy, and later the Christian East), but the influence is real.

Major figures featured in each vignette range from leaders in the Emirate, the Caliphate and the taifas, to their political advisers or viziers (Hasdai ibn Shaprut, Samuel the Nagid). Also explored are the philosophers, poets and physicians (Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, Maimonides) who were born or operated under their rule, or the rule of the Almoravids, Almohads and Christian monarchs. By weaving their stories into her overall narrative, Menocal’s history captures the complexity of the period; the shifting and often cross-cultural allegiances of its major players; and the fragility yet durability of the culture of tolerance that lasted in parts of Muslim or Christian Spain until 1492.