AP Success - AP English Language: Medieval Spain in the Contemporary Mind

If you have read anything about medieval Spain, then you probably know about convivencia—the peaceful “coexistence” of Muslims, Christians, and Jews for nearly eight hundred years on the Iberian peninsula. The story is invariably told in the same way: “once upon a time,”1 after the Muslim invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 711, a “culture of tolerance”2 was created among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Tolerant adherents of these three Abrahamic faiths shared philosophical and scientific learning, translating previously unknown sources (especially the works of Aristotle) for the rest of Europe. “But,” the author or narrator intones in his gravest voice, “this world too quickly vanished. Greed, fear, and intolerance swept it away. Puritanical judgments and absolutism snuffed out the light of learning.” Then the author or narrator laments the loss of this vanished world: “it was truly a bright light in what was largely a dark and ignorant medieval landscape. Its loss is one of the great tragedies in history.”3 This is almost always followed by a didactic—and dramatic—moral about the relevance of medieval Spain for contemporary problems: “Humanity has never completely found the way back. Medieval Spain might help point the way.”4 This is a fairy tale for adults who, like children, know nothing about the actual (medieval) world it attempts to describe. The story of convivencia fulfills the requirements of the genre, replete as it is with exotic journeys in faraway lands and epic battles between noble heroes and depraved villains. And like all fairy tales, this story of convivencia tells us much more about the world of storytelling in which it was created than about the historical past or objective reality, on which it is only loosely based. While some of the recent books on convivencia have gestured in the direction of scholarly discourse, more often than not, they cannot resist the temptation to indulge our basest tendencies to Orientalism and exoticism. In nearly every popular recounting of convivencia, images of an Islamic locus amoenus abound: we hear of gardens, bath-houses, exotic fruits, and enchanting mosques. Chris Lowney, in A Vanished World, emphasized that “daily life was transformed as exotic new species like cotton, figs, spinach, and watermelon burgeoned in fields nourished by new irrigation techniques.” The “luxury and sophistication” of the Islamic city of Cordoba “undoubtedly surpassed anything found elsewhere in Europe.” Maria Rosa Menocal’s syrupy confection, The Ornament of the World, simmers under a thick layer of Orientalized cheese. Some of her chapter titles themselves suffice to prove the point, “The Palaces of Memory,” “The Mosque and the Palm Tree,” “A Grand Vizier, A Grand City,” “The Gardens of Memory,” and “Sailing Away, Riding Away.” And when these authors describe Islam, it is with the wonderment and delight of a tourist. We, their audience, are supposed to share in their surprise—and in the delicious irony—that Islam was a peaceful, tolerant religion, while Christianity was persecutory, cruel, and violent. 1 Maria Rosa Menocal, Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Christians, and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, 2002), 5. 2 The subtitle of Menocal’s Ornament of the World. 3 Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 4 Lowney, A Vanished World, 14.