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CONVIVENCIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS: INTERFAITH LIFE IN AL-ANDALUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2010

Anna Akasoy
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Extract

Historians of Europe often declare that Spain is “different.” This distinctiveness of the Iberian peninsula has many faces and is frequently seen as rooted in its Islamic past. In the field of Islamic history, too, al-Andalus is somewhat different. It has its own specialists, research traditions, controversies, and trends. One of the salient features of historical studies of al-Andalus as well as of its popular image is the great interest in its interreligious dimension. In 2002, María Rosa Menocal published The Ornament of the World, one of the rare books on Islamic history written by an academic that enjoyed and still enjoys a tremendous popularity among nonspecialist readers. The book surveys intersections of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian elite culture, mostly in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin literature and in architecture, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. Menocal presents the religious diversity commonly referred to as convivencia as one of the defining features of Andalusi intellectual and artistic productivity. She also argues that the narrow-minded forces that brought about its end were external, pointing to the Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa and Christians from north of the peninsula as responsible. The book's subtitle, How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, conjures the community of Abrahamic faiths. It reflects the optimism of those who identify in Andalusi history a model for a constructive relationship between “Islam” and “the West” that in the age of the “war on terror” many are desperate to find.

Type
Review Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , August 2010 , pp. 489 - 499
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

NOTES

1 Menocal, María Rosa, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Back Bay Books, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 For an effort to demystify such an “otherness” of Andalusi culture see Marín, Manuela, “«Hubo un ‘arte de vivir’ en al-Andalus?,” Hesperia. Cultura del Mediterráne 1 (2005): 125–33Google Scholar, and for the question of women in particular, idem, Mujeres en al-Andalus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000).

3 For a review of recent tendencies in scholarship, see also Novikoff, Alex, “Between Tolerance and Intolerance in Medieval Spain: An Historiographical Enigma,” Medieval Encounters 11 (2005): 7–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an assessment of the political interpretations of medieval Iberian history, see Aidi, Hishaam D., “The Interference of al-Andalus: Spain, Islam, and the West,” Social Text 24, no. 2 (2006): 67–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Nirenberg, David, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

5 For pragmatic reasons, I have selected only recent English publications. There are many related works of scholarship in other languages.

6 Although Castro identified the origins of Spanish culture in the dynamics of its medieval multiculturalism, Sánchez-Albornoz traced them back to pre-Roman times and denied that later conquerors had a crucial impact.

7 The extent to which feudalism existed in the medieval Iberian peninsula under Muslim and/or Christian rule has been the subject of debate. The controversy has been linked to the perceived “otherness” of Spain within Europe, its nature and its roots in Islamic rule during which “Spanish” history is seen to have followed a different course than the heartland of Europe. For an introduction see Boone, James L., Lost Civilization: The Contested Islamic Past in Spain and Portugal (London: Duckworth, 2009)Google Scholar.

8 See Cohen, Mark R., Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

9 Anidjar, “Our Place in al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).