Rating: 
Summary: Superbly unclassifiable
Review: "The Ornament of the World" is an artistic and intellectual history of Islamic Spain. It's also a treatise on how a multi-cultural, tolerant society can not only flourish, but also serve as the incubator for world-wide advancement in the Arts, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Architecture. Maria Rosa Menocal's book provides a resonant political history of the region. It can serve as one the most unique travel guides to Southern Spain in the catalog. And, for better or worse, it has the now obligatory Harold Bloom Introduction. Preparatory chapters review the region's history in fairly traditional fashion. Beginning in the year 711, Islamic armies from Northern Africa began a steady conquest of Spain that eventually reached the Pyrenees. Although achieved primarily through military means, the conquest ushered in an era of remarkable open-mindedness (measured against the standards of the day) that lasted until Ferdinand & Isabella completed the Catholic Reconquista in 1492 and immediately embarked on their own perversely-reciprocal campaign of unicultural dominance. The book's core sections then deal with the intervening years, a period that the author describes as "the chapter of Europe's culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side ... and nourished a complex culture of tolerance." She tells not a political story, but instead employs a series of biographical vignettes that focus on the intellectual and cultural achievers of the era: thinkers and explorers such as Paul Alvarus (a Cordoban Christian), Ibn Khaldun (a Tunisian Muslim traveler to al-Andalus), and Maimonides (a Jewish refugee from Cordoba to Egypt). These profiles are ingeniously integrated to provide substance to Menocal's argument that this commingling of achievements reverberated far beyond medieval Iberia in space and time. Although the author certainly is most absorbed in those achievements, she also documents the injustices and displacements that flowed primarily from the cataclysmic battles for dominance among Muslim sects. A truly admirable and evocative feature of "Ornament" is Menocal's language. She manages to be clear-sighted and precise, while yet achieving a subtle lyricism that mirrors the most beautiful of the region's creations. There are three well-rendered maps, a decent although far from comprehensive bibliography, and a postscript written just after and reflecting on 9/11. The index is serviceable. I finished "Ornament of the World" shortly after the good fortune of a vacation in southern Spain. Anyone who reads this book will want to make such a trip. Read the book, rent a house in Frigiliana, and make leisurely excursions to Grenada and Cordoba. You'll regret the loss of the culture Menocal describes, but the book and a visit to its remnants will still make you feel better about the world.
Rating: 
Summary: Pleasant Tales for Little Folk
Review: A book that purports to have some scholarly support, and that fails to list every single one of the major scholarly books on Islamic Spain -- especially failing to note the vast contributions of E. Levi-Provencal, and the less vast, but still important works of C.-E. Dufourcq, cannot be taken seriously. The book begins, and ends, with romantic views which owe their origin to Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra and Chateaubriand's Les Derniers des Abencerage. The unpleasant facts about mass murders of Christians (as in Toledo) or Jews (as in Grenada) are omitted altogether; chapters are treacly divided, in this book fit for Oprah's Book Club, and the sentimental pieties of the age (yes, just why can't we all get along?). Not a hint of what it meant to be a non-Muslim under Islam. Instead, we have the same old standbys: you know, the "Abrahamic" faith we all share, and the wonders of translation that were performed (here Menocal gets confused, and wants to give Islamic Spain credit for translations performed by the conquered Christians and Jews in Baghdad, under Haroun al-Raschid, that big spender). The book as history is worse than worthless. Its popularity, however, holds a certain sociological interest: it shows the desperate desire on the part of non-Muslims to want to believe, coute que coute, in the sheer possibility of "convivencia" in a once-wonderful civilization (fictive, but calming to the Infidel nerves), where Jews, Muslims, and Christians got along so splendidly. Do yourself a favor. Learn French, and then read Levi-Provencal on Islamic Spain. Or Dufourcq. Forget about this "contribution" to scholarship by the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale -- but don't fail to ask yourself what that says about standards at Yale, and elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Politically Correct-the Reader or Menocal?
Review: A reader's own sense of polital correctness will more likely influence one's response to this book than any parochialism offered by Menocal. The first chapter gives the uninitiated reader a capsule summary of the 700-odd year history of Arabized Spain. The chapters that follow are almost historical mood pieces that focus on a particular influential person or intellectual movement or historical incident that occurred within the greater time period. We find Charlemagne in Spain allied in battle with one Muslim territory against another. We find 400,000 volumes in ONE library in Toledo at a time when the complete works of Aristotle were lost to Western Europe (including the Irish monks). Here are the Normans invading Northern Spain and arabized Sicily, and soon after occupation culturally acclimatizing to a very different and more advanced civilization than they found in England. Now the great movement of scientific, medical, philosophical, and political science into Western Europe as Catholic bishops set up translaltion centers in Spain and supply an information-starved North with the intellectual tools that fire the engine of Western Civilization just as the works of ancient Greece and Persia fired the civilization of an arabized Mediterranian basin in the years following the Arab conquests. Oh-and there is a lot of killing and backstabbing and decadence and decline at the same time there is wonderful culture and architecture. Almost all of Spain was Christian by the time the Alhambra is built-and the Granada area remained arabized until 1492 because the Muslim rulers had Christian allies until then. Of interest, only the postscript to the book was written after 9/11. In that postscript, Menocal asks the reader to take the information from her book to come to individual decisions about it's relevance to the present time-hardly the advice of someone with a biased PC ax to grind. Menocal is an expert in her field who deeply loves her subject. That love suffuses this book with a bittersweet mixture of awe, mystery, sorrow, and patience. That mood stays with me months after completing the book.
Rating:
Summary: Tolerance is what we need today
Review: A resonant and timely case study of a time when followers of the three monotheisms set aside their differences and tried to get along. Golden ages always turn out to have their rotten linings, but the centuries when a tolerant Muslim dynasty ruled over most of Spain were uncommonly free of nastiness. So writes historian Menocal (Humanities/Yale Univ.) in this unusually graceful study, a sturdy and eminently readable exploration of the "unknown depths of cultural tolerance and symbiosis in our heritage" that may help revise our view of the Middle Ages. Ruling from 756 until 1492, the Ummayads and their political descendants took a broad view of life, according equal status to their fellow "peoples of the Book," the Christians and the Jews of Spain. In time, these peoples blended and became nearly indistinguishable, a troubling matter to those powerful Christian regimes elsewhere in Europe who branded their Spanish brethren as Mozarabs, or, in Menocal's translation, "wanna-be Arabs." This equality, or dhimma, led to great things, including the flourishing of scholarship and the arts, to say nothing of "virtually unlimited opportunities in a booming commercial environment" brought on by the absence of ethnic strife. The era's monuments, the great towers and mosques of southern Spain, still endure, as does its great literary testament, Don Quixote, "a postscript to the history of a first-rate place." Alas, writes Menocal, this wonderland came crashing down with the late medieval clash of Inquisitorial Christian armies and fundamentalist Muslims, when purity of blood and of faith became the ideals of a Spain determined to root out its Islamic heritage, intolerant ideals that were soon to be transported to the New World. Contemporary Israeli poets and Arab intellectuals pine for the glories of al-Andalus, as did Federico Garcia Lorca and Antonio Machado. So, too, does Menocal.
Rating:
Summary: Reviewers wrong
Review: A very good book, well researched and interesting. Historically very accurate although some of the reviewers here, such as Raymond Toal seem to want to excuse the actions that destroyed this tolerant society and would like to paint the extremist so called "Catholic" King in a positive light. Dismissing massacres and forcible conversions as "Christian reaction" is quite shameful The forcible conversions and massacres cannot be excused.
Rating:
Summary: different planets, same world
Review: After reading Paul Fregosi's important Crusade Against Science, and Simon Willougby's Bloody Inquistion, I felt nonetheless the need to find some additional perspective in the elusive chase after the Christian enigma. This work appeared like an apparition and foots the dialectical bill. Telling the tale of the Christian Spaniards almost peaceful coexistence with Islam during the flowering of a great Islamic culture, this work shows the complexity of the Christian phenomenon, and is a reminder that we might judge Christianity not so much by modern standards, though we must, as by the standards of social chaos to which it was sometimes able, as here, to contribute some stability, advancement, and culture. Indeed, one would never anticipate from this book the bloody wave of genocide and slavery that the descendents of these peaceful Christians would one day bring to the Carribean and South America. Especially when contrasted with this age of tolerance.
Rating:
Summary: Same planet, different worlds
Review: After reading Paul Fregosi's important Jihad I felt nonetheless the need to find some additional perspective in the elusive chase after the Islamic enigma. This work appeared like an apparition and foots the dialectical bill. Telling the tale of the last successor of the Ommayeds traveling to Andalusia in the coming of the Abassids, there to initiate a period of the flowering of a great Islamic culture, this work shows the complexity of the Islamic phenomenon, and is a reminder that we might judge Islam not so much by modern standards, though we must, as by the standards of social chaos to which it was sometimes able, as here, to bring some stability, advancement, and culture. And an age of poets. The author recounts the story of the impact of Arabic and its poetic vivacity on the newly forming Romance languages in the passing away of Latin. Somewhere, just here, the troubadours emerge, and we have the lore of Provencal poetry,and the signature of the invisible stream of cultural diffusion at the deep core of European civilization. Fascinating tale, with a curious hint that we fail to see the later Inquisition as it regresses to uproot the Arabized Christians produced by this age of tolerance.
Rating:
Summary: Superb History
Review: An outstanding history of Medieval Spain when Christians, Jews and Moors lived in peace, tolerance and mutual respect. Anyone who has visted or palnning to visit Andalusia MUST read this book. It will make sight seeing in Cordoba, Seville and Granada a much richer and fullfilling adventure.
Rating:
Summary: Historical Innacuracies
Review: Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Spanish history will find some many innacuracies and basic mistakes that will leave the book after 30 pages. The worst of all mistakes, forgetting where el Cid was born: Vivar. Even small children in Spain now that the name of el Cid was "Rodrigro Diaz de Vivar".
Rating: 
Summary: Another professor publishes their lectures
Review: As a enthusiast and traveler of Spain for over 20 years, I looked forward to some unique and revealing insight in this publication. Instead what I received was more a kin to the compilation of the lectures I might get by attending Dr. Menocal's classes.
The information is relatively well known and the presentation and chronology is caotic. Dr. Menocal recounts the history and personalities of the Iberian pennisula but to no purpose other than to say that it shows that different cultures tolerated each other, which is historically obvious.
I rated it 2 stars only because it would serve as a good text book for a novice course on Spanish History.
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