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Title: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal ISBN: 0-316-16871-8 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.38 (34 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Superbly unclassifiable
Comment: "The Ornament of the World" is an artistic and intellectual history of Islamic Spain. It's also a treatise on how a multi-cultural, tolerant society can not only flourish, but also serve as the incubator for world-wide advancement in the Arts, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Architecture. Maria Rosa Menocal's book provides a resonant political history of the region. It can serve as one the most unique travel guides to Southern Spain in the catalog. And, for better or worse, it has the now obligatory Harold Bloom Introduction.
Preparatory chapters review the region's history in fairly traditional fashion. Beginning in the year 711, Islamic armies from Northern Africa began a steady conquest of Spain that eventually reached the Pyrenees. Although achieved primarily through military means, the conquest ushered in an era of remarkable open-mindedness (measured against the standards of the day) that lasted until Ferdinand & Isabella completed the Catholic Reconquista in 1492 and immediately embarked on their own perversely-reciprocal campaign of unicultural dominance.
The book's core sections then deal with the intervening years, a period that the author describes as "the chapter of Europe's culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side ... and nourished a complex culture of tolerance." She tells not a political story, but instead employs a series of biographical vignettes that focus on the intellectual and cultural achievers of the era: thinkers and explorers such as Paul Alvarus (a Cordoban Christian), Ibn Khaldun (a Tunisian Muslim traveler to al-Andalus), and Maimonides (a Jewish refugee from Cordoba to Egypt). These profiles are ingeniously integrated to provide substance to Menocal's argument that this commingling of achievements reverberated far beyond medieval Iberia in space and time. Although the author certainly is most absorbed in those achievements, she also documents the injustices and displacements that flowed primarily from the cataclysmic battles for dominance among Muslim sects.
A truly admirable and evocative feature of "Ornament" is Menocal's language. She manages to be clear-sighted and precise, while yet achieving a subtle lyricism that mirrors the most beautiful of the region's creations.
There are three well-rendered maps, a decent although far from comprehensive bibliography, and a postscript written just after and reflecting on 9/11. The index is serviceable.
I finished "Ornament of the World" shortly after the good fortune of a vacation in southern Spain. Anyone who reads this book will want to make such a trip. Read the book, rent a house in Frigiliana, and make leisurely excursions to Grenada and Cordoba. You'll regret the loss of the culture Menocal describes, but the book and a visit to its remnants will still make you feel better about the world.
Rating: 2
Summary: This 'Ornament' More Romantic Than True; Better Alternatives
Comment: My wife and I have a home in Andalusia. We also are enthusiastic but 'minor' league students of Moorish & Jewish history in Spain. So I bought this book as a easy-to-please, generalist and wanna-be fan.
Unfortunately, this book comes up light on two levels. It provides few new relevations about the role of Moors and Jews in Medieval Spain. It also lacks good story telling on the major figures and thought leaders of this 700-year period. I found Menocal's analysis sharp and able, but sometimes overdone. And like too many academics, Menocal is neither a good storyteller nor writer. In summary, the lack of new insights and sharp writing spoils the book for me.
More broadly, the fundamental premise of the book: That Arabs, Jews and Christians lived peacefully under Moorish rule, is more romantic than true. Except for a very brief period of 50 or so years around 900 AD, there was more persecution than tolerance over the 700 year Moorish period. Ask the Jews of Granada that were slaughered in 1066, or the thousands of Christians who were deported by the Almoravid dynasty to Morocco as slaves in 1126. During the same period, it is well known the Berbers of Northern Africa would frequently pillage Spain, robbing Andalusian Arabs and Christians alike. Later, of course, a united Christian Spain would deport the heavily taxed and persecuted Moors in 1492; some authorities report Muslims were forced to leave their children behind as slaves for the Christian Monarchs to work in various trades.
I believe the book's only bright light is an interesting and original tale about how the enlightened Arabs and Jews of the period translated and preserved some of the world's best literature and science thought lost after the fall of Rome and Greece. The works of Aristotle, for example, were translated from Greek to Arab, then several hundred years later by the Christian clergy from Arab to Latin and other romance languages.
An alternative book about Islamic and Jewish influences in Andalusia is Richard Fletcher's "Moorish Spain." Fletcher is considered by some authorities to be the Bernard Lewis of Islamic Spain and his well-written 1990 book remains the one of best efforts covering that period. Another well-written book, but more detailed effort, is L.P. Harvey's "Islamic Spain 1250-1500." A third book, a superior piece of modern travel writing, rich in Moorish and Jewish history, is Gees Nooteboom's "Roads to Santiago."
All three of books are widely available, offer an unvarnished overview of Moorish & Sefardic Spain, and are worth consideration for people seeking a non-academic overview of this classic period.
Good luck and good reading!
Rating: 1
Summary: Pleasant Tales for Little Folk
Comment: A book that purports to have some scholarly support, and that fails to list every single one of the major scholarly books on Islamic Spain -- especially failing to note the vast contributions of E. Levi-Provencal, and the less vast, but still important works of C.-E. Dufourcq, cannot be taken seriously.
The book begins, and ends, with romantic views which owe their origin to Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra and Chateaubriand's Les Derniers des Abencerage. The unpleasant facts about mass murders of Christians (as in Toledo) or Jews (as in Grenada) are omitted altogether; chapters are treacly divided, in this book fit for Oprah's Book Club, and the sentimental pieties of the age (yes, just why can't we all get along?). Not a hint of what it meant to be a non-Muslim under Islam. Instead, we have the same old standbys: you know, the "Abrahamic" faith we all share, and the wonders of translation that were performed (here Menocal gets confused, and wants to give Islamic Spain credit for translations performed by the conquered Christians and Jews in Baghdad, under Haroun al-Raschid, that big spender).
The book as history is worse than worthless. Its popularity, however, holds a certain sociological interest: it shows the desperate desire on the part of non-Muslims to want to believe, coute que coute, in the sheer possibility of "convivencia" in a once-wonderful civilization (fictive, but calming to the Infidel nerves), where Jews, Muslims, and Christians got along so splendidly.
Do yourself a favor. Learn French, and then read Levi-Provencal on Islamic Spain. Or Dufourcq. Forget about this "contribution" to scholarship by the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale -- but don't fail to ask yourself what that says about standards at Yale, and elsewhere.
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Title: Moorish Spain by Richard Fletcher ISBN: 0520084969 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1993 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain by Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, Jerrilynn Denise Dodds ISBN: 0807612863 Publisher: George Braziller Pub. Date: 01 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Poems of Arab Andalusia by Cola Franzen ISBN: 0872862429 Publisher: City Lights Publishers Pub. Date: 01 March, 1990 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric by Maria Rosa Menocal ISBN: 0822314193 Publisher: Duke University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1994 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (The Middle Ages Series) by Olivia Remie Constable ISBN: 0812215699 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $28.50 |
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