THE ORNAMENT OF THE WORLD
How Muslims, Christians, and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
By Maria Rosa Menocal
Little, Brown. 298 pp. $26.95
THE CLASH OF FUNDAMENTALISMS
Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
By Tariq Ali
Verso. 342 pp. $22
Among modern-day Arabs, there exists a cult of Al-Andalus (Andalusia). That domain in the Iberian Peninsula became, over the centuries, an edifice of nostalgia: A Muslim dominion had risen in the West. In its period of splendor, it knew power and grace and was a polyglot world of mixed and fluid identities. It nurtured secular philosophy; it spawned its own poetry.
But the Muslims were overextended in Spain. They quarreled among themselves. They succumbed to fundamentalist warriors from North Africa who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to aid the Andalusians but in fact disdained their worldly ways and secular culture. Islam made a final stand in Granada. But that outpost fell to the Catholic sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492. On the final ridge overlooking his city, Boabdil, the last ruler, turned back, the storytellers say, for a glance at his realm and sighed in sorrow. El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro, the Moor's Last Sigh, was to become that ridge's name.
Yale historian Maria Rosa Menocal has written an affecting portrait of that lost Iberian world. In her splendid account, it was effervescent but feeble, stalked by Muslim puritanism from across the Strait of Gibraltar and by Christian zealotry to the north.
Menocal didn't set out to write a book about Islamic tolerance against the background of the terror attacks of Sept. 11; she had finished her book shortly beforehand. In a brief set of remarks, she concedes the painful irony of her stories of tolerance in the aftermath of Sept. 11. In her portrait of that vanished time, zealots also make an appearance, and the timeless battle between the standard-bearers of reason and the preachers of holy vigilance plays out with fury.
The beauty of Menocal's work lies in her craftsmanship and patience, in her eye for the illuminating anecdote, for the stray life that catches a time and its wonder. For me, the redeeming gift of this book (and its unintended consoling message for the pockets of modernity in the Muslim world and their isolated, embattled standard-bearers) is the way a measure of intellectual and cultural brilliance survived the Andalusian regime's political troubles and political breakdown.
It was in Cordoba, Menocal tells us, during the terrible dark reign of the Almoravids of North Africa, that two great, towering intellects were born: Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in 1126, and Musa ibn Maymun (Maimonides) in 1135. Averroes's retrieval of and commentary on Aristotle and Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed were to prove enduring works of scholarship and imagination. Both men, according to Menocal, shared a basic vision that can be characterized as the defense of human freedom. These two men of God and philosophy were constructing heroic defenses of a worldview that they were born into and that they were educated to take for granted. Yet this dream of reason and tolerance disappeared in their lifetimes. Both died in exile: Averroes in 1198 in Marrakech, Maimonides in 1204 in Egypt. For both, the Andalusian world became, in Menocal's turn of phrase, "a memory palace."
In truth, that golden age of Al-Andalus was relatively brief -- from the early years of the 10th century to the middle years of the 11th. Islam had stayed long in the Peninsula: Nearly eight centuries separate the Muslim conquest from the fall of Granada. The Jews had partaken of it all: There were seasons of bliss and times of terror. There were benevolent, worldly Muslim rulers who raised their Jewish courtiers to great heights of power, and there were preachers and mobs who cut them down whenever they could. There was Cordoba, on the banks of the Guadilquivir, the ornament of the world, secular to the core, and there were the merciless bands of zealots, fundamentalist warriors from North Africa, who had brought with them the ways of plunder and intolerance. By the early years of the 13th century, the Andalusians had effectively lost their political freedom. Cordoba fell to Christian forces in 1236, Valencia in 1238. Two years later, it was Seville's turn.
Granada held on, sheltered by mountains, aided by a long seacoast. But it was doomed. Its surrender came on Jan. 2, 1492, and was witnessed and recorded by Christopher Columbus, who had come to plead for his mission to pioneer a new passage to India and convert its princes and the peoples. The new Catholic rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, foreshadowed the world of modern, exclusive nationalisms. They promised freedom of religion for the Muslims, but persecution and expulsion were to become the order of the day. They relied on Jewish courtiers and financiers to make possible their final push on Granada, only to issue an edict expelling the Jews on March 31 of the same year. Spain was finished with ambiguity. Limpieza de Sangre, purity of blood, became Castile's and Spain's way. The Moor turned into an apparition haunting the New Spain, a benign ghost.
Out of these Andalusian shards Menocal has constructed something true and pretty. In contrast with her poise there comes from Tariq Ali, a Pakistani-born writer and filmmaker who works in London, a work of singular shrillness, the work of a true believer of the left. In The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Ali mines the past, but he does so with a heavy touch. The history is tendentious in the extreme. There is no ambiguity in this man's world. And there is no restraint or discipline in this book occasioned by the terror attacks on America of Sept. 11. He gives away much of his ideology in the following remarks. "There exists no exact, incontrovertible evidence about who ordered the hits on New York and Washington or when the plan was first mooted."
Ali is apparently among the holdouts: News that Osama bin Laden has claimed these attacks hasn't yet reached Tariq Ali's "street" or his café. Our terrible ordeal, the great crime of Sept. 11, is for him an altogether different matter: "The subjects of the empire had struck back," he writes. Two fundamentalisms had crashed together on that clear Tuesday morning: religious versus imperial.
Ali belongs to the root-causes party. This is a vast political party that makes its home in countless lands, that refuses moral judgments on terror, on the grounds that terror springs from the accumulated injustices of the world. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, that party opted for a decent interval of silence, but that silence was not destined to last.
In Tariq Ali's world, we are in the land of moral equivalence: Bush is bin Laden, bin Laden is Bush. The American president ends each speech with "God bless America." Osama starts and ends each interview by praising Allah. It would be easy to write off this lamentable, shallow book. But the world is what it is, and in countries of order and plenty, people like Tariq Ali are legion. Blessed be the memories of Averroes and Maimonides: They carried with them, amid the tumult, a love of order, a restraint, a knowledge of the ease with which lands can be sacked and undone. •
Fouad Ajami is professor of Middle East studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and author of "The Vanished Imam" and other works.
