The Ornament of the World

In the mid-eighth century, a young Umayyad prince named Abd al-Rahman I fled Damascus after the rival Abbasid dynasty massacred his family. He crossed North Africa and the Strait of Gibraltar, arriving in the Iberian Peninsula, where Muslim settlers had been expanding since 711. In 756, he defeated the local governor and established a new Umayyad polity in Cordoba. María Rosa Menocal uses this founding act of exile and reinvention as the starting point for a thematic history of how Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medieval Iberia cultivated a culture that thrived on holding contradictory ideas simultaneously. Organized as a series of chronological vignettes spanning roughly 750 years, the book traces the rise, flourishing, and eventual destruction of this culture of tolerance, drawing on F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time" (10–11) as a governing metaphor.

Menocal begins with a compressed historical survey. After the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, contested succession produced the fundamental divisions within Islam. The Umayyad dynasty ruled from Damascus beginning in 661, presiding over an expanding empire that absorbed elements of older cultures. When the Abbasids overthrew them in 750, Abd al-Rahman I escaped westward. In al-Andalus (the Arabic name for Islamic Iberia), his descendants built an ethnically mixed society in which the Arabic language spread beyond the Muslim community. The Umayyads interpreted the dhimma, the Quranic covenant protecting Jews and Christians as "Peoples of the Book," with unusual generosity. Jews, who had lived under severe restrictions imposed by the Visigoths (the Germanic tribe that ruled Iberia before the Muslim arrival), rose to positions of prominence.

Near the end of his life, Abd al-Rahman I built the Great Mosque of Cordoba, purchasing a Visigothic church that sat on Roman ruins. The mosque's horseshoe arches with alternating red-and-white stonework drew on indigenous building traditions, embodying the Umayyad aesthetic of absorbing and reshaping local forms. He also wrote a poem to a palm tree at his garden estate, mourning his exile from Syria. Menocal uses this poem to illustrate a foundational paradox: pre-Islamic pagan poetry was preserved and canonized within Islam as an interpretive key to the Quran despite contradicting Islamic belief. This acceptance of contradiction became a hallmark of Andalusian culture. By the mid-ninth century, Arabic had so thoroughly permeated Iberian society that the Christian layman Paul Alvarus of Cordoba lamented that young Christians had abandoned Latin to write Arabic love poetry.

In 929, Abd al-Rahman III formally proclaimed himself caliph, asserting authority over all Muslims. His foreign secretary, the Jewish scholar Hasdai ibn Shaprut, exemplified the thoroughly assimilated Andalusian Jew: educated in Hebrew, rabbinical traditions, Arabic philosophy, and medicine, Hasdai also led diplomatic negotiations with Byzantium. Cordoba at its height boasted libraries containing hundreds of thousands of volumes, at a time when the largest Christian European library likely held no more than 400 manuscripts. The caliphate collapsed after the usurping chamberlain al-Mansur seized power in 976, importing Berber mercenaries and staging fanatical raids against Christian territories. Internal chaos led to the sack of Cordoba in 1013, and the caliphate was formally dissolved in 1031.

From these ruins rose the taifas, dozens of independent city-states that competed fiercely for cultural prestige. Samuel ibn Nagrila, a Jewish émigré from Cordoba, became vizier of the taifa of Granada and the first nagid (head) of its Jewish community. Leading Muslim armies into battle and composing victory poems in a revolutionary Hebrew that used Arabic prosody, Samuel inaugurated the Golden Age of Hebrew verse. Meanwhile, the polymath and lifelong Umayyad partisan Ibn Hazm wrote The Neck-Ring of the Dove, a treatise codifying the courtly conventions of romantic love. That same period, Norman and Aquitainian forces captured the Aragonese town of Barbastro and carried home hundreds of Andalusian singing women. William IX of Aquitaine, son of the expedition's leader, grew up surrounded by these performers and became the first troubadour whose poetry survives, representing the broader European revolt of vernacular languages against Latin.

A pivotal turning point came in 1085 when Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo without bloodshed. He kept it as the multicultural city he had known during an earlier exile there, and under his successors Toledo became Europe's intellectual capital, home to the "School of Translators" through which Latin Christendom gained access to the philosophical and scientific corpus that had been translated from Greek into Arabic centuries earlier. Yet fundamentalist Berber dynasties from Morocco, first the Almoravids and then the Almohads, invaded al-Andalus and imposed regimes hostile to its tolerant traditions, expelling Jews from many cities. Paradoxically, these expulsions enriched Christian cities like Toledo with Arabized Jewish refugees who became vital links to Andalusian learning.

Menocal traces this transmission through several figures: Petrus Alfonsi, a converted Jew who emigrated to England, where his Priestly Tales introduced the Arabic framed-tale tradition into Latin Europe; Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, who commissioned the first Latin translation of the Quran as an argument for reasoned dialogue over crusading violence; and Frederick II of Sicily, the Arabized Holy Roman Emperor who disseminated Latin translations of the Cordoban philosophers Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Maimonides (Musa ibn Maymun). Both had defended the compatibility of faith and reason, and both died in exile under Almohad pressure. Their works revolutionized the curriculum at the University of Paris and inspired Thomas Aquinas's great Aristotelian synthesis, the Summa theologica.

In Christian Spain, Alfonso X ("the Learned") transformed Castilian into a written literary language, commissioning translations directly from Arabic. Moses of Leon, a Castilian Jew who died in 1305, produced The Zohar (The Book of Splendor), the central text of the Kabbalah and the only post-Talmudic work to achieve canonical status in Judaism. In 1364, the Muslim diplomat and future historian Ibn Khaldun visited the court of Peter of Castile in Seville, where the king's newly built Alcazar, constructed by craftsmen from Nasrid Granada (the Nasrids being the last Muslim dynasty on the peninsula, builders of the Alhambra), echoed the Alhambra's arabesques. In Toledo, Peter's Jewish treasurer Samuel Halevi Abulafia built a synagogue inscribed in both Hebrew and Arabic. These were among the last monuments of interfaith culture.

The end came in 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella, dressed in Moorish garb, entered the Alhambra after the last Nasrid ruler, Boabdil, surrendered. The Agreements of Capitulation guaranteed Muslims religious freedom, but these guarantees were soon abrogated. Muslims were forced to convert, becoming Moriscos; Arabic books were burned. On March 31, the Edict of Expulsion ordered Jews to convert or leave Spain, ending the Jewish presence in Sefarad, the Hebrew name for their Iberian homeland.

Menocal reads Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) as the last memorial to this destroyed culture. In a pivotal scene, the narrator wanders Toledo's desolate former Jewish quarter and finds Arabic manuscripts about to be pulped. He hires a Morisco, a forcibly converted Muslim who still reads Arabic script, to translate them. The manuscript turns out to be the "History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, Arabic historian" (256). Between the novel's two parts, Spain expelled the Moriscos entirely, making the translator a ghost from a vanished world. Menocal argues that the modern novel is forged in Inquisitorial fires, using fiction as both refuge and resistance.

In the epilogue, Menocal connects this history to the present, noting the 1992 destruction of Sarajevo's National Library and the rescue of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Sephardic (Spanish Jewish) illuminated prayer book saved from the Nazis by a Muslim librarian who also hid Jewish families. In a postscript written after September 11, 2001, Menocal trusts the stories of tolerance and intolerance to speak for themselves, noting that the deep divisions within each faith matter as much as those between them.