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

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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

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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

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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

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 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

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 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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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).

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4 Lowney, A Vanished World, 14.