Ornament of the World by Rosa Maria Menocal

The old Arabic word for palace, al-qasr, was what the Castilians called their splendid new royal homes. The elaborate plasterwork that decorated nearly every inch of the Alcazar's interior walls was barely dry, and the Muslim emissary from Granada found himself in rooms that in every way echoed the freshly finished palaces of this Islamic city he had just left. Peter, a son of Alfonso XI and the heir to his great-great-grandfather Alfonso X (the Learned), who had died in this city, was justifiably proud of this example of his wealth, taste, and vision. All three were on display in this Sevillian tribute to the very latest architectural style of Spain. Ibn Khaldun could hardly have avoided the realization that Peter's new palaces, with their multilobed latticework arches and their pure-white arabesque ornamentation on every spare surface, were an unstinting homage to the style of the Nasrids, whose envoy he was. There, on the open and sunny plain, sitting next to the giant old Almohad mosque in Seville--the mosque had been reconsecrated more than a hundred years before and was the cathedral of the Christian capital--was an unabashed evocation of the fortlike palaces at the top of the rocky mountain retreat of Granada, the last and lonely Islamic state on the Iberian peninsula.

I had the great fortune last week to visit two of Spain's most striking and important landmarks: the Alcazar of Spain, a royal palace that is still the sometime home of the King and his family, and the Alhambra, an enormous palace complex built by the Muslim Nasrids of Granada. The Alcazar is a Christian edifice, done in what's known as the "Mudejar" style, meaning Christian architecture with Muslim edifices. It really does look a lot like the Alhambra, and visiting the two, someone who didn't know exactly what to look for might get the impression that they were built by the same people for the same purposes. The two structures are, to author Maria Rosa Menocal, powerful symbols of one of history's true golden eras: medieval Spain, when Muslims, Christians, and Jews existed side by side in a culture of tolerance and cultural exchange. A Christian ruler might, even after the reconquest of much of the Iberian peninsula, in which Muslim rule in Spain was shrunken down to just the city-state of Granada, recognize Islamic art and culture as part of his own powerful patrimony, and built a palace worthy of such creative and intellectual forebears.

Menocal frames her book as a series of biographical sketches of figures who typified the 750-year-ish era that constituted the golden age of al-Andalus. Among them are Samuel the Nagid, an influential Jewish poet and leader who served as a general in Muslim Granada; prolific Islamic writers like Ibn Hazm and Averroes; the Christian warrior known as El Cid; even apostates who rejected the world of philosophical tolerance like Jewish thinker Judah Halevi. This format made it a little hard to grasp some of the overarching historical narratives at play, but I think I more or less got the gist: survivors of the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in Baghdad arrived in al-Andalus around 750 CE, where they created a Muslim state centered on Cordoba that incorporated Christians and Jews but also cemented Arabic as the primary language of both knowledge and art. These Umayyads were eventually conquered by a pair of strict invading Islamic states, the Almohads and Almoravids, who were supplanted by a system of individual city-states known as taifas. The taifas lasted until the reconquest, ending with the loss of Granada and the edict of Isabella and Ferdinand--a pair of history's great villains, no doubt--expelling the Jews from Spain, cementing the entire peninsula as a Christian polity.

I had a vague idea, of course, that Muslim thinkers protected and progressed the traditions of Greek philosophy during the time that much of these sources were lost to Christian Europe. What I didn't know is just how much of that happened in Spain. It was Averroes, the Latinized name of Ibn Rushd, for example, whose commentaries on Aristotle kept the Greek philosopher's legacy alive, later to be integrated into the Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Nor did I realize that Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales has its roots in the writings of Petrus Alfonsi, a Spanish convert from Judaism to Christianity, whose "Priestly Tales" held little interest for his own countrymen but which Englishmen had never seen. Nor had I ever really thought about the fact that, as must be true, even the Jewish and Christian thinkers of the time period wrote in Arabic, a language that had come to supplant Latin as a lingua franca. Even the great Jewish writer Maimonides, for example, wrote his commentaries on the Mishna in Arabic. One of the great, perhaps even tragic, turning points for Menocal, is when King Alfonso the Wise chooses to elevate the vernacular romance language of Castile to official status.

It's clear that Menocal sees the story, or perhaps stories, of medieval al-Andalus as not just history, but a model for the way society could be. A postscript notes that she finished the book shortly after 9/11, when the book's pleas for tolerance--especially in relation to the contributions of Muslim and Arabic thinkers--became especially ignored, and especially needed. As Menocal shows, much of the great philosophy, poetry, art, and architecture--the Alcazar of Seville and Alhambra of Grenada among them--were only able to exist because a culture of tolerance and free exchange allowed them to exist. 25 years later, it's hard to see that a society like this remains a probability for us, though the book shows quite effectively that such worlds are possible.