{"id":26,"date":"2002-09-24T11:31:04","date_gmt":"2002-09-24T16:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=26"},"modified":"2002-09-24T11:31:04","modified_gmt":"2002-09-24T16:31:04","slug":"the-ornament-of-the-world-how-muslims-jews-and-christians-created-a-culture-of-tolerance-in-medieval-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ornament of the World<\/a>, by Maria Menocal, is a fascinating but
\nflawed book about Muslim culture in medieval Spain. The exciting parts of
\nthe book are the stories of cultural influence among Muslims, Jews, and
\nChristians. These cultural influences shed light on some fundamental
\nchapters in history that are told often but explained poorly.
\n* You may have learned in European history class that medieval Arab
\nculture preserved Greco-Roman classical knowledge during the Europe’s
\ndark ages. Menocal’s book tells the story how classical works of science
\nand philosophy, preserved in Arabic, were transmitted to Christian
\nEurope. In the 8th-10th centuries, most of the Iberian peninsula was
\nruled by the Umayyad dynasty, with Cordoba as its capital. The Umayyad
\nrulers, in competition with the Abbassid Caliphate based in Baghdad,
\nestablished Cordoba as a center of higher learning, building an
\nextensive library and funding leading scholars.
\nIn the 11th century, the Umayyad government fell, the Iberian peninsula
\nbecame divided into dozens of warring city-states, and Christian rulers
\nfrom the North of Spain gradually increased their domains. The
\nChristian-controlled areas continued to be heavily influence by Muslim
\nculture. Alfonso IV of Castile, ruler of the Taifa of Toledo, wanted to
\npublicize this learning within Christian Europe, and funded the
\ntranslation process. Jewish and Arab scholars read texts in Arabic, and
\nrecited them out loud in Castilian. Christian scholars listened to the
\nspoken Castilian and wrote in Latin.
\n* If you studied European literature, you probably have some
\nrecollection of the troubadours of Provence, who pioneered the poetry of
\ncourtly romance. In the 11th to13 centuries, a seemingly remote region
\nin the south of today’s France, heretofore known for bloody turf wars
\nbetween rival Frankish feudal lords, suddenly produced a flowering
\nmusical and literary culture. Where did this surge of civilization come
\nfrom?
\nThe region of Provence is located on the Northeast side of the
\nPyrenees. The constant warfare among the citystates of the Iberian
\npeninsula offered attractive opportunities for free-lance Frankish
\nknights, who crossed the mountains to seek their fortune, and helped to
\nconquer Muslim cities. These knights were captivated by the music and
\npoetry of Andalusian culture, and returned to Provence, bringing with
\nthem groups of professional singers of Arabic songs, traditions of
\nstylized lyric poetry, and romantic conceptions of love.
\n* If you have a basic background in Jewish history and philosophy, you
\nmay recall the Kuzari, medieval work by Judah Halevi. The frame-story
\nof the Kuzari is the correspondence between a Jewish scholar and the
\nKing of a central Asian tribe called the Khazars, who requested an
\nexplanation of various beliefs and philosophies; in order to introduce
\nthe best tradition to his people. The Kuzari includes logical “proofs”
\nof the existence of God, and arguments for the superiority of revealed
\nreligions truth to philosophies based on reason.
\nMenocal tells more of the story. The correspondence with the Khazars
\nwas conducted several generations earlier, in the 10th century, by
\nHasdai ibn Shaprut, the foreign minister to the Umayyad caliph Abd
\nal-Rachman III. That correspondence compared Judaism with Christianity
\nand Islam. Halevi lived and worked two hundred years later, and was a
\nstudent of Moses Ibn Eza, philologist, poet, and fan of the Andalusian
\nculture, in a time when all three monotheistic faiths struggled with the
\nimplications of Greek philosophy. Halevi spent most of his career as a
\nperipatic scholar and poet in Jewish intellectual circle. Later in his
\nlife, he had a change of heart, and advocated a return to Judaism cleansed of the corruptions of
\nsecular life and philosophical influences. He wrote the Kuzari arguing
\nthat philosophy is incompatible with faith, wrote beautiful poems about Israel in exile, yearning for God, and he died on a pilgrimage to crusader-controled Jerusalem.
\nMenocal writes in a romantic and nostalgic style that derives in part
\nfrom her subjects own elegaic esthetic, and from her own nostalgia for
\nthe world of Andalusia. Sometimes the style works, especially when
\ndescribing works of architecture built as monuments and memorials. She
\ndescribes the initial design of the Alhambra palace gardens: “The first
\ngardens built on the red hill by those exiles from Cordoba were, like
\nAbd al-Rahman’s palm tree, the echoes and reconstructed memories of a
\nmourned homeland.”
\nSometimes the romantic language is overwrought and awkward, as in these
\ndescription of the writing of Shmuel Hanagid, the vizier of Grenada,
\nmilitary general, Jewish communal leader and Hebrew poet. “The third
\npoem, to praise the third victory, had flowed most easily of all, and he
\ncould now more effortly flex those new muscles that sang of arms and men
\nand God… In that loving and revolutionary embrace by a powerful and
\nsupremely self-assured man, Heberew was redefined, and cultivated as a
\nlanguage that could transcend the devotional and theological uses to
\nwhich it had lately been limited.”
\nParticularly irritating is the use of purple prose to cover the lack of
\ninformation. For example, the author describes the libraries of Cordoba
\nas follows: “The rich web of attitudes about culture, and the
\nintellectual opulence that it signified, is perhaps only suggested by
\nthe caliphal library of, by one count, some four hundred thousand
\nvolumes, and this at a time when the largest library in Christian Europe
\nprobably held no more than 400 manuscripts.”
\nAn impressive collection of books, to be sure. But who read those books?
\nWhat classes of society were literate? What role did higher education
\nplay in society? What was a typical curriculum? Were the books mostly
\ncopies of classical manuscripts, or did they include new scholarship?
\nNo answers, just vague sentences such as: “Just as essential to the
\nsocial and cultural project embedded in those libraries was a series of
\nattitudes about learning of every sort, about the duty to transmit
\nknowledge from one generation to another, about the interplay between
\nthe very modes of learning that were known to exist…”
\nThe book provides context for a better understanding of the history of
\nChristian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures, sheds light on a fascinating
\nhistorical period, and whets ones appetite for more information. It is
\ndefinitely worth reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ornament of the World, by Maria Menocal, is a fascinating but flawed book about Muslim culture in medieval Spain. The exciting parts of the book are the stories of cultural influence among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. These cultural influences shed light on some fundamental chapters in history that are told often but explained poorly. … Continue reading “The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}