Menocal - Ornament of the World

In the closing chapter of Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002), author Maria Rosa Menocal commented, "Andalusian stories allow us to glimpse one long and extraordinary chapter of our history in which the three major monotheistic faiths struggled, successfully and unsuccessfully, with the question of tolerance of one another" (epilogue). Indeed, the middle of the 8th century until approximately 300 years later was a brilliant moment in time when Jews, Christians, and Muslims mingled faith with art of various sorts and created a degree of shared prosperity that was unusual for the time and even today.

Committed to asserting control of the "House of Islam," the Abbasids murdered all but one of the Umayyad ruling family in Damascus in the year 750. The lone survivor, Abd al-Rahman, fled Syria, traveling through northern Africa, and landing in southern Spain. Exiled from his home and all that he knew, al-Rahman assembled loyalists to Islam and took Cordoba by force in 756. He then rapidly transformed Cordoba into a flourishing economy with diverse cultures and religions, embracing and benefiting all. By the 10th century, following a succession of the al-Rahman heirs, Cordoba was recognized as "the ornament of the world," from which the title of Menocal's book is taken.

The Umayyad view of Islam embraced the dhimmi, believers in one God and adherents of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prophetic teaching. The view mandated the protection of Jews and Christians, even though conversion to Islam was also seen as possible and desirable. In fact, the term "Mozarab" was adopted as the term for converts who embraced Islam and Arab ways of living. The Mozarab dressed like Arabs and even adopted Arabic as their language, joining in the polity of "people of the book." The Umayyad were committed to transmitting essential knowledge from generation to generation and did so by translating essential historical texts and amassing impressive libraries. Jews were employed as viziers and intellectuals, creating greater prosperity than Jews in Europe had ever achieved, largely because they embraced their Umayyad sponsors and enthusiastically embraced cultural assimilation and Arabization.

Some of the internal chapters of Ornament of the World are primarily focused on literature and poetry. In these chapters, Menocal described the fluidity and fusion of languages across cultural groups with Jews and Christians speaking and writing in Arabic or dialects combining their cultural languages with Arabic and Spanish. One of the most profound examples of this fusion was for Jews whose native language expanded to transcend its previous use in religious observance, giving rise to a new period of literary and poetic expression in Hebrew.

Even after the height of Islamic influence in Spain, Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun's prolific writing in mid-14th century was heavily influenced by the legacy of al-Andalus. Fleeing politically stifling Fez (Morocco), Ibn Khaldun first settled in Granada and then Seville, immediately recognized as a renowned scholar in both. His Maqaddimah, or "Introduction to History," contributed to a new view of history that recorded the rise, decline, and fall of great societies, a pattern that was so evident in al-Andalus. As an example, he would have seen that even the architecture of the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, built on the foundation of the former Great Mosque of Seville, was adorned with Arabic language and profuse arabesques. Observing the influence of Islamic and Arab culture must have seemed ironic as well as tragic, something historians now view as cultural appropriation of a past great Islamic society overcome by Christian domination. This domination eventually led to the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, when Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity or leave the place where they had previously tolerated each others' religions as they contributed to a golden age of knowledge and art.

Menocal lauded Cervantes' story of Don Quixote, first published in 1605 but based on stories from the golden age of al-Andalus, as a masterpiece reflecting the tragedy of cultural decline. Book burning and vilification of others were symbolized in the windmills of Don Quixote's mind, depicting a time when reality could no longer be discerned from the conflagration of disinformation. The story of Man of la Mancha reflected the loss of an age of possibility with the Alhambra in Granada as its iconic representation, a palace so splendid, so unique in its "Stylistic openness, the capacity to look around, assimilate, and reshape promiscuously,... as a key part of the Umayyad aesthetic" (locator 3883).

Why did this golden age of tolerance and creativity end so quickly? One explanation that historians have opined is that the Black Death (bubonic plague) of the Middle Ages, killing 20% of the total population, drove cultural and religious groups away from each other. Driven by fear, and the crumbling infrastructure of social mores and shared humanity, groups that had found common cause disintegrated into warring factions. Scapegoating of the "other" was central to destroying the bond of humanity and tolerance itself was characterized as traitorous. What remained after the Black Death was a hollowed-out system void of religious tolerance and compassion. Whether the result of the Black Death or a slide toward Christian orthodoxy and accompanying persecution of other faiths, Spain in the post-Moor era failed to accept the more difficult  path of cultivating the uneasy embrace of contradiction and difference. In essence, the Spanish Inquisition became the instrument of purifying a culture from 500 years of nurturing tolerance and co-existence.

The question lingering in my mind is if Ibn Khaldun's depiction of decline and fall of great societies is underway in the present day? And the pivotal leadership question is if leaders will take the creative path of fostering tolerance across difference or will they choose the easier, and profoundly destructive, path of denying diverse human experience and culture in the pursuit of cultural purification and domination?