The Ornament of the World Quotes

“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 beliefs 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?”
― Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

“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.”
― Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

“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.”
― Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

“Books, like buildings, like works of art, like songs and sometimes even like the languages of prayers, often tell stories about the complexities of tolerance and cultural identity, complexities that ideological purists deny, both as an immediate reality and as a future possibility.”
― María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

“consideravano il minuscolo angolo di mondo dal quale provenivano come un semplice punto di partenza”
― María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

“The great prize that was hauled back across the Pyrenees was a large number of qiyan: women like the ones singing for the Norman-gone-native in the earlier anecdote, women who sang for a living, young and attractive entertainers much prized in the Andalusian courts. Sources vary wildly on the numbers of women who were taken as prizes of the battle for Barbastro—500, 1,500, 5,000—but they all agree that a great many went back with the Aquitainians. In that expedition, and no doubt in others, Andalusian singers were the greatest treasure among the spoils taken back to the newly ambitious Christian courts”
― María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

“Don Quixote is thus in part a postscript to the history of a first-rate place, the most poignant lament over the loss of that universe, its last chapter, allusive, ironic, bittersweet, quixotic. It is perhaps the last, the best, the most subtle of the Spanish memory palaces. Its incomparable Castilian is the direct descendant of the Castilian first forged out of the little groups of Muslims, Christians, and Jews who worked together in Toledo to translate that magnificent Arabic library first into Latin and then into Castilian, which was the mother tongue of all of them...”
― María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain