Product Description

María Rosa Menocal's wafting, ineffably sad The Ornament of the World tells of a time and place--from 786 to 1492, in Andalucía, Spain--that is largely and unjustly overshadowed in most historical chronicles. It was a time when three cultures--Judaic, Islamic, and Christian--forged a relatively stable (though occasionally contentious) coexistence. Such was this period that there remains in Toledo a church with an "homage to Arabic writing on its walls [and] a sumptuous 14th-century synagogue built to look like Granada's Alhambra." Long gone, however, is the Córdoba library--a thousand times larger than any other in Christian Europe. Menocal's history is one of palatine cities, of philosophers, of poets whose work inspired Chaucer and Boccaccio, of weeping fountains, breezy courtyards, and a long-running tolerance "profoundly rooted in the cultivation of the complexities, charms and challenges of contradictions," which ended with the repression of Judaism and Islam the same year Columbus sailed to the New World. --H. O'Billovich

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Product Details

Publisher	Back Bay Books
ISBN	0316168718
Features	ISBN13: 9780316168717 Condition: New Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Format	Paperback
Author	Maria Rosa Menocal
EAN	9780316168717
Label	Back Bay Books
Dewey Decimal Number	946.01
Studio	Back Bay Books
Number Of Pages	352
Title	The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
Publication Date	2003-04
Manufacturer	Back Bay Books

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Customer Reviews

better than the average text book

Review by L. White, 2010-06-04

If not for a university class, I probably wouldn't have bought this book. Be that as it may, it remains in my library and not as a used book on the shelf in the bookstore via their buy back program. It is a worthy introduction to the subject of how three monotheistic religions managed to coexist in Medieval Spain. An introduction. My main complaint is that it leaps back and forth in a confusing manner, dropping the story line only to pick it up again in a concluding remark at the end of the chapter. Much is left unsaid, leaving me curious and thinking of further study, which may be the point after all.

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A highwayscribery "Book Report"

Review by Stephen Siciliano, 2009-05-23

"Ornament of the World," asserts that the history of modern life passed through medieval Andalusia and does a good job of making the case.

The subtitle to Maria Rosa Menocal's engaging volume is "How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain," but that doesn't say the half of it.

Which is fine, because the subtitle that can do justice to this alternately sweeping and efficient book probably doesn't exist.

In fact, the featured period of tri-partite harmony is but a brief one in the book, shattered by the kinds of antagonisms that sustain our state of violent tension today.

In those days of European ignorance and atavism, Menocal writes that, "Arabic beckoned with its vigorous love of all the things men need to say and write and read that not only lie outside faith but may even contradict it -- from philosophy to erotic love poetry and a hundred other things in between."

Menocal explains how the prophet Muhammad would not perform miracles, given that the Quran, the book off God's revelations, was the true miracle.

Latent in the Arab's linguistic passion was a respect for the Christian and Hebrew reliance on scriptures.

Pagans subjected to the Arabic invasions covered in this book were required to convert, while the two "Peoples of the Book," were granted religious freedom under a covenant known as the "dhimma".

Under the prescriptions of the visionary Abd al-Rahman, founder of Al-Andalus (Arab moniker for the region of southern Spain),"the Muslims did not remain a ruling people apart. Rather, their cultural openness and ethnic egalitarianism were vital parts of a general social and political ethos within which the dhimmi could and did thrive."

If it doesn't sound much like the Afghani Taliban you know only too well, that's because there are Muslims, and then there are Muslims.

The good ones were the Umayyad.

How they became the faction they did (descendants of Muhammad's brother-in-law's sister's mother or something) is not so important as the fact another faction, the Almoravids, did them in on behalf of an Islamic intepretation more in-line with that which mystifies today.

The authoress maps out the rising tide and recession of ambulant Islam, the countercharge of Christian warriors, the religiously confused alliances of enemies when battles of family succession and greed intervened to rent the otherwise clear lines of battle asunder.

And the point of these events, for Menocal, is how the cultures involved were affected and transformed.

"Ornament of the World" is mostly about an assortment of intellectuals, dreamers, poets, and philosophers who informed these transformations, mostly forgotten, but sometimes lionized down the years.

"Ornament" details the Jewish intellectual Hasdai's rise to the exalted position of foreign secretary in the Cordoban caliphate because he, "spoke and wrote with elegance and subtlety, and because the 'vizier' possessed a profound knowledge of everything in Islamic Andalusia culture and politics that a caliph needed in his public transactions."

Much the same happened to a wealthy merchant of Malaga now known to history as Samuel in the taifa of Granada. Another star of Arabic letters, his appointment as The Nagid established him as leader to the city's Jews.

South and West of Granada, in the hamlet of Niebla, lived Ibn Hazm, a contemporary of the Nagid, and an exile from the Almoravid sacking of Cordoba's imperial city, Madinat al-Zahra.

Ibn Hazm remained dedicated his countless writings to the tolerant glories of Umayyad Cordoba, where he had thrived in younger days.

Considered alternately by scholars as embittered or sad, "He was, in any case, an astounding intellectual, his life a fitting tribute to and a noble and melancholy end point for the caliphate he never ceased to long for and lament, as if it had been a lost lover."

That caliphate fell to a malevolent force that, Menocal writes, "was often rooted in what they considered the Andalusians inappropriate relations with the Jews and Christians."

Which is not to single out Arabs as the sole possessors of intolerant habits.

Upon the Christian conquest of Granada, the famed Ferdinand and Isabella granted dhimma-like rights to their Muslim subjects. But they turned out to be paper promises.

Unfortunately for us, hundreds of years on, the results are still being reaped.

Menocal demonstrates the cultural contortions involved in this subjugation by dissecting Miguel de Cervantes' strange set-up to "Don Quixote" as the work of an Arab historian, found in the Jewish quarter of Toledo, and translated for him by a Christian Arab.

She turns something most of us shrug and pass over into a stark political statement on Cervantes' part, and necessarily alters one's consideration of "El Quixote." It is worth the price of the book.

Cervantes' literary arrangement demonstrates how, in the end, the Catholic monarchs, "chose to go down the modern path, the one intolerant of contradiction. The watershed at hand was certainly the rise of a single-language and single-religion, a transformation that conventionally stand at the beginning of the modern period and leads quite directly to our own."

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Good for the non-initiated. All others, refrain.

Review by Hokulani Valencia, 2009-03-04

I highly recommend this book for those with little to no background in Spanish and Jewish medieval history. The author draws from other historian and critics' researches -without appropriately crediting her sources - to inspire the non-initiated to learn about this period. For this I believe Ms. Menocal is brilliant and I hope that she can attract hordes of best seller readers and encourage a few to deepen their knowledge and hopefully keep on reading about history. The author successfully caters to today's urban tastes for multicultural themes, with a penchant for reverse bias, favoring the achievements of perceived minorities. For those who need no cheers to read history, can do without over simplistic comparisons, over abundance of adjectives, and editorial comments, I recommend to go directly to historians, linguists, and other erudite and original work. For example, most of the basis for this book can be found in Ramon Menendez Pidal book España, eslabón entre la cristiandad y el islam.

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too much anecdote for a very big claim

Review by frumiousb, 2008-08-24

My oh my, reading some of the extremely negative reviews of this book and seeing the obvious bias of some of the reviewers makes me wish that I could come out swinging in Menocal's defense.

Unfortunately, I cannot. While Menocal clearly has deep affinity and love for the subject matter she fails to support her thesis as she only could have done by reaching farther than culture and poetry for reference. She makes some interesting suggestions through anecdotal evidence, but I found it extremely frustrating that she made no effort to more fully flesh out a claim that would have been very interesting, if true. Furthermore, I do not find that the book was contextualized as simply being a piece of the puzzle of Medieval Spain. I find that it made grander claims for itself. This could well be the fault of the publisher, who recognized a timely topic when he/she saw one (the book was published in 2002). But still, it hurt the overall credibility of the work not to strongly delimit in the beginning both what it is and what it is not.

I have heard much said about Menocal's writing style, both positive and negative. I will grant her a smooth hand with prose. Sadly, she does not exhibit anywhere near the same skill with structure. I found the text did not cohere well and tended to be jumpy and difficult to follow.

She clearly loves her poetry from the time, and I am looking forward to reading some of the writers that I discovered through the book. I found the "Other Readings" chapter particularly valuable. She gets an extra star for all the wonderful poetry that I'm anxious to read.

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An Introduction... to the say the least

Review by Tebes, 2008-08-06

I enjoyed this book. From my limited understanding of the time period and my inability to read history (facts after facts never interest me... the human element, devoid of many historical accounts, does...).

I have read the positive reviews and the negatives. I can understand either. I will say this book is a great introduction. It is romantic, an account of a world seen with Rosy-Tinted Scholarly eyes. Perhaps it is not going to be the greatest book for the nitpicking historians - and hey, I can see their point - but it is a good place to start, to know the names, the dates, and some of the scenery.

I wish more history books were like this. What is 'history' - a story... the word is there within the greater word most scholars will defend, arguing our need to be objective and search for the facts ('just the facts, 'mam'). But isn't that life, "stories" interweaving, facts important sidenotes to the human element. I respect this work because it has introduced me to a world I have heard about before. It will be my choice to move on further and read other works.

Those who have written their one-star reviews have their point. There is a lot missing here. I don't doubt it. But if a work of history introduces and inspires curiosity, is that a bad thing? Ideals are ideals and ideally, this isn't meant for the historian but for the layman. I am a layman, I enjoyed it. If you're looking for an introduction to a fascinating time in Spanish/Western history, this is a fine place to start. I don't know enough to squabble over details or put the author down for 'misreading' history. I'll simply say, Menocal has written a story about a time and place. Her writing is infused with melancholy and wonder, looking back to the golden aspects of a time believed to be harmonious.

If history was written from the perspective of the people, not so much the events and politics, I would read more history. But then again, I'm not a historian and this book suits me fine. I'll read further but I am thankful I had this book to open my eyes to an interesting time in human civilization.

The final word: historians, you know enough, so don't read this because you'll probably just write more negative reviews and negativity is really tiring at times. (If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it all all... I've written the odd negative review, so I'm guilty...) Layman and Laywoman, if you have a passion for a literary interpretation of history, enjoy this book. It is like wine for me. I savoured it, I took it in, I will remember and go on to the next. But I value the beginnings of what I have learned. And that's the facts, 'mam.

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