By PHK
A Book Review Essay
Rosa Maria Menocal’s The Ornament of the World is history I missed in high school and college. Maybe the curriculum is different nowadays – but I’m skeptical – at least from what I’m told by my students – and from the mostly blank looks on faces of all but the most avid history buffs when I mention Al Andalus. This was the incredible Islamic civilization that flourished in south Spain when the rest of the Europeans shivered in drafty castles, stone hovels and log cabins while self-serving popes dispatched armies of crusaders to the Holy Lands to expel the Muslim Infidel.
Those Middle Eastern Crusades ended, with the exception of Sicily, unsuccessfully. But Europe’s borders were porous and what transpired profoundly influenced European civilization as much, if not more than it did the Muslim world itself. Without the Arab centers of learning that began with the Abbasids in 8th century Baghdad and included Spain’s Cordoba and Toledo where ancient Greek classics were not only preserved, but also translated into Arabic, and the scientific, technological and mathematical knowledge of Chinese and Hindu scholars incorporated into the expanding Arabic knowledge-base, the western world might still live in those dank, cold dwelling places and the history of the New World would have taken a different course.
Menocal’s enchanting book is written not for the scholar but the educated layman. It is a finely polished gem. Hers is a complex story every bit as intricate as those swirling arabesques that grace the ceilings of mosques turned churches and palaces cum museums of Andalusian Spain. 
She tells us of a highly advanced civilization based in the Spanish caliphate of Cordoba (929-1031) – a city on a bank of the Guadalaquivir River – which was once the Muslim world’s fourth most important and holiest city.
This city on the river bank some 80 miles or so from the Atlantic even today draws millions of tourists to its powerful Mezquita, a gargantuan building with its forest of red and white horseshoe arches
and an incongruous cathedral dome protruding through the roof.
Cordoba was once the spiritual home of West Europe’s only Muslim caliphate when the Islamic political and religious ruler was one. And where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together peacefully – all reading the same works in Arabic and influencing each other in this polyglot, multiethnic city which housed – and still houses – Spain’s oldest still operational Jewish synagogue just inside the old city walls and only a five minute walk from the Mezquita through twisted, narrow, shaded streets of Arabic design to shelter the passer-by from the intense Mediterranean summer sun. 
Balancing the “Yes” and the “No”
As Menocal tells us, above all Al Andalus represented a society which balanced the “yes and the no” the contradictions between faith and philosophy or science. And it was this contradiction, this balancing act that produced a wealthy, educated and creative society. Al Andalus became the transmitter of revolutionary ideas and latest technology that ultimately wriggled into places like the newly founded University of Paris and into the minds of its professors – themselves high ranking members of the Roman Catholic clergy.
Perhaps the most fundamental concepts Menocal posits are the complexities of the politics and allegiances of the time – and the fact that the Songs of Roland and The Cid, two of the most important stories tinged with anti-Islamic sentiment that still float around European classrooms and swim in the minds of Europeans as facts are, at best, gross distortions of the historical record.
They are as twisted as the many paintings of “holy” battles that depict Christians on one side and Muslims on the other. It didn’t happen that way – except once. Otherwise, Muslims and Christians fought other Muslims and Christians in seemingly eternal wars of territorial one-upmanship.
Ultimately, two tribes of Islamic fundamentalist Berbers, the Almoravids in the eleventh century and the far worse Almohads in the twelfth were imported to Spain from North Africa by Muslim kings to aid them in their innumerable battles. The Almohads took less than sixty years to wreck the rich and tolerant Andalus society and replace it with strict Islamic fundamentalism which sent Jews, Muslims and Christians packing – to Granada and the then more receptive Christian cities in the north - thereby destroying Europe’s most advanced multi-ethnic and multi-religious civilization.
So the Roman Catholics were not the first to chase out the scientists, engineers, philosophers and poets who themselves practiced a polyglot of religions and professions in the Arabic language. The vibrant civilization of Al Andalus began to fade when fundamentalist North African zealots refused to go home.
Other waves of intolerance, however, followed. They were perpetrated by Christian monarchs. These kings – with Andalusian Muslim help - drove out the zealots. But then the Roman Catholic Church sealed the fate of both Muslim and Jewish populations in Spain and their invaluable contributions to Spain’s rich economic and intellectual life.
The fairytale city of Granada with its glorious Alhambra 
perched on a bluff overlooking the town hung on for another 250 years, but it ultimately succumbed to the combined armies of Ferdinand and Isabella just at the time they signed the agreement with Christopher Columbus (his third try to interest them in a plan to circumnavigate the globe) in 1492 in the small village of Santa Fe outside Granada that changed the course of history and only months before the royal duo launched the brutal anti-Jewish Inquisition that expelled over 150,000 Spanish Jews from the newly unified soon-to- become mono-religious Spain.
Ironically, without the mathematical data, the astronomical charts and equipment like the astrolabe invented by the Arabs – often based on ancient Greek research and translated by Jewish, Muslim and Arabized-Christian scholars – Columbus would have remained a bit-part sailor plying the Mediterranean’s many ports.
The question as to why the Spanish Christian kings turned on the Jews and then later Muslims once the Catholic monarchy gained the upper hand remains speculation in Menocal’s book. I’ve read various reasons, but none satisfying, elsewhere.
But the result devastated a region that has only begun to recover centuries later.
Even those Jews and Muslims who agreed to convert were expelled or killed before the beginning of the 16th century by Christian zealots as every bit as murderous and narrow minded as the North Africans. This, the century, when the rest of Europe finally awakened from its intellectual slumber thanks in part to the very texts that had been housed in Cordoba and translated in Toledo that turned European civilization on its head. Meanwhile in Spain, the Roman Catholic rulers were burning those same books and priceless manuscripts, expelling the scholars and destroying the libraries that housed them.
And what of the Jews and Muslims who left? We know that the Ottoman Empire 
welcomed the Sephardic, or Spanish Jews who enriched that empire monetarily and intellectually particularly through their trading colonies in the then Ottoman cities of Istanbul, Thessaloniki and along the Eastern Aegean. We also know that many Muslims settled along the North African coast just across the Mediterranean Sea from their ancestral home.
But Menocal implies that Spanish colonies in the New World may also have been a destination for some of the Muslim Moriscos and Jewish Conversos who had become Christians under duress in 15th and 16th century Spain. Why? Because most New World colonists, she tells us, came from Al Andalus. She offers no data, but her speculation may be right.
Recent studies in New Mexico reveal the existence of descendants of Jewish “conversos” who were among the first settlers to come up the Rio Grande River from Mexico at the end of the 16th century. But what about Moriscos? Might some of their descendants be here too - or elsewhere in the New World or even the Philippines –Spain’s Asian colony? Has anyone looked?
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and
Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, Boston and New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002.
Photos by PH Kushlis