Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal & Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (New Haven & Lndon: Yale U. Press, 2008) ("This book is about the lost memory of Castile, about the history that created churches like San Jorge Martir and made them the products of Castilian culture. Because this memory goes counter to so many received truths, it is also an attempt to restore to the general image of Castilian culture some of its disorder, to recognize its changing and evolving meaning." Id. at 2.
"The continued presence in the peninsula of both Muslim populations within Castile and Islamic kingdoms of the various sorts provided an ongoing source of vital political, and thus cultural, engagement. What lies behind 1492 is not so much the history on an implacable opposition but rather a tense shuffle of convenient alliances and warfare, of alternating compliance and confrontation, in which the players became known to each other, at times despite themselves. The culmination of the Christian-Muslim competition for territory and political control vividly evoked by 1492 is thus the end not only of the struggle but also of centuries of ongoing renovation of often intimate ties to the rich world of Islamic and Arabic intellectual and artistic practices. The monuments of medieval Castilian culture inherited by the Catholic kings--from the very language of the Castilian empire, created by Alfonso X and his translators out of Arabic itself, to the palaces of Seville, with their Arabic writing in praise of the Christian monarch--speak loudly to an identity forged out of cultural praxis rather than ideological purity." Id at 266.).
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987) (Why "did I encounter [a] situtation, one in which belief in the 'Arabist theory' (a nebulous term that covers any number of different and often conflicting theories) was considered at best idiosyncratic?" Id. at xii. "The number of books and articles on some aspect or other of the Arabist question is much greater than most Romance scholars might assume. [] But as I began to read in this extensive body of scholarship, I noticed that most works have several things in common. The first is that almost all begin or end with the observation that acceptance of the apparent facts or tendered theories they present is difficult, that Westerners--Europeans--have great difficulty in considering the possibility that they are in some way seriously indebted to the Arab world, or that the Arabs were central to the making of medieval Europe. A second shared feature of such studies is that they do not explore such observations further and go forward with the explicit or implicit assumption that whatever the nature of those blinders or the cause of the neurosis, the weight of the truth, reasonable argument, or unarguable fact that they proceed to disclose will win out." "But the third feature they have in common is that fate and reception of Europeanists have proven this assumption to be illusory: The powers of 'reason' and 'fact' in this sphere (as least as they have seemed to many) have not succeeded in altering the assumptions that shape the view of the Middle Ages held by most medievalists. The power of the general view remains considerably stronger. It rarely allows for the acceptance of specific studies, the canonization of specific texts, or the integration of specific bits of knowledge into our working body of information about the period. I became increasingly convinced that those scholars who pointed out the blinders of the West in this regard were no less blocked from the field or vision of most of their colleagues for having done so." "The present study is thus based on the premise, and derived from the conviction, that no specific study of any of the theories called 'Arabist' can be successful so long as the most general views we have of the medieval period are as hostile to the notions of such influence and interaction as they currently are." Id. at xii-xiii. Query: Menocal was writing in 1987. Are Westerners, especially Americans, any less hostile and more open to the notion of Arab influence on thinking and literature in the past or presently? Given the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim "tone" in much of American politics, I think the answer is no. Our chauvinism, which we call "patriotism" blinds us to the many influences others, including Arabs, have had on Medieval Europe and, consequently, on America, American history, American thought, etc.).
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, with a foreword by Harold Bloom (New York: Little, Brown, 2002) (From Bloom's "Foreword": "I come away from a reading of Menocal's book with a sense of loss, another tribute to her evocative power. Our current multiculturalism, the blight of our universities and of our media, is a parody of the culture of Cordoba and Granada in their lost prime. All the cultural achievements so passionately described by Menocal, from the Alhambra to the poetry of Judah Halevl, were aesthetic triumphs, strong in conception, exquisite in execution. As a contribution to cultural memory, in its best aspects, The Ornament of the World is an authentic and heartening gesture of the spirit." Id. at xv-xvi. From the book jacket: "The story begins as a young prince in exile--the last heir to a glorious Islamic dynasty---flees the massacre of his family and found a new kingdom on the Iberian peninsula a;-Andalus. Combining the best of what Muslims, Jews, and Christians had to offer, al-Andalus and its successors influenced the rest of Europe in dramatic ways, giving it the first translations of Plato and Aristotle, the tradition of love songs and secular poetry, advances in mathematics, and outstanding feats of architecture and technology." "In a series of captivating vignettes, Menocal travels through time and space to reveal the often paradoxical events that shaped the Andalusian world and continue to affect our own. Along the way, we meet a host of intriguing characters, the brilliant and dedicated Jewish vizier of a powerful Muslim city-state, the Christian abbot who commissions the first translation of the Quran, the converted Jew who, under a Christian name, brings a first taste of Arabic scholarship and storytelling to northern Europe." "This rich and complex culture shared by the three faiths thrived, sometimes in the face of enmity and bigotry, for nearly seven hundred years. Ironically, it was on the eve of the Renaissance that puritanical forces finally triumphed over Spain's long-standing traditions of tolerance. ushering in a period of religious repression. In the centuries since, even the memory of the vital and sophisticated culture in which Muslims, Jews and Christians once lived and worked side by side has largely been overlooked or obscured." From the text: "On August 25, 1992, the Serbian army began shelling the National Library in Sarajevo. On purpose. Over a million books and more than a hundred thousand manuscripts were deliberately destroyed. Three months earlier, the same army had attacked the Oriental Institute in that city, with its magnificent collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, and over five thousand of these were burned. Why? Since when are libraries strategic military targets? But wars are, of course, fought on many fronts, and the attack on those Sarajevan palaces of memory took place for reasons not unlike those that led to the burning of so many books in sixteenth-century Spain, and to the destruction or mutilation of any number of the memory palaces of al-Andalus. Books, like building, like works of art, like songs and sometimes even like languages of prayers, often tell stories about the complexities of tolerance and cultural identity, complexities that ideological purists deny, both as an immediate reality and as a future possibility. Books--and the kindred fruits of the human imagination--often reveal that beneath the facades of even the most strident official tyranny, social and cultural intercourse will surely try to carry on. The artifacts, the books and the buildings that manage to survive, are themselves the acts of tolerance and resistance, or at least their best concrete measure." Id. at 278.).
Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham & London: Duke U. Press, 1994) ("We love being modern, and we love being the present-day descendants of the Greeks, but since it is harder to publicly and professionally delight in the other side of that particular coin, it is elided and ignored. After 1492 we forgot that in 1225 or 1230 to sit at Frederick II's dinner table in Palermo it was de rigeur to have intimate knowledge of Plato and Aristotle, of Maimonides and Ibn Rushd, as well as to be able to tap one;s feet to the rhythm of the latest muwahshaja brought from al-Andalus. Instead, we remember, and claim as out ancestor, poor Petrarch, first Renaissance man, heroic for living much of his life with a barely literate Calabrian Greek, in the apparently vain effort tolerant a smattering of the new holy language of the newly 'discovered; ancestors. Except among the intellectual descendants of Don America, whose work it has been to restore those particular memories, these odd juxtapositions are largely set aside. Within this minoritarian construct, the other version of 1492 is a memorialistic one, an act of recuperation, but also one of profoundly sad, melancholic closure, perhaps uncannily like Petrarch's when he thought of what he had lost as e sat contemplating the ruins of Rome. Id at 20. "It turns out, then, that, in crucial ways, the medieval world I see resonating in 1492 and its children in the New World is a virtual opposite of what our thesauruses suggest, of what the grand recit has needed. Here, mosques are around every corner, and the Other lives next door, and all manner of unwritten languages are head in the marketplace in the early morning. Here, literature struggles and dances around with allayer of cultural alternatives, sometimes, in difficult conduct." Id. at 45.).
