The Ornament of the World

"This had a huge influence on me when I was researching my latest book. I think the biggest threat to the values of pluralist democracy in present day Europe is Islamophobia. There is a very serious danger that this will be to the 21st century what anti-semitism was to the last century. I don’t think it has done so yet, but it could. I found the Rosa Menocal book quite inspiring because of what it showed about the possibility of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish civilisations living together. They managed to co-exist peacefully and to learn from each other in the period that we think of as the Middle Ages or even the Dark Ages. That’s right. And in a brilliant way because it showed, among other things, that this notion about how the West is infinitely superior to the East is misplaced. You could argue Spain was Eastern or Western in terms of culture rather than geography. I think it was a number of things. The myth goes back to ancient Greece, but it was taken over by the Romans and then by the Christian church. Then it takes a slightly different form. It is not that the West is necessarily more technologically advanced than the East, but that the West is saved in religious terms while the East is full of enemies of Christ. I think it was different. I don’t think the Chinese ever wanted to go on crusades against the West. They just thought they were superior to everyone else. Oh yes. Human beings aren’t always very nice people."

"Yes, so the next book I’ve chosen is The Ornament of The World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain . It’s by Maria Rosa Menocal, who was a cultural historian. This book is about the period called the ‘Convivencia’ in Spanish – the coexistence or living together – a period when Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live together in relative, but not total harmony in the south of Spain under a period of Muslim rule. It lasted roughly from the ninth to the 14th and even the 15th centuries in some places in southern Spain. What’s so interesting about this book is that it so clearly speaks to today. The story it’s trying to tell is one of relative coexistence of three very different cultures. It’s an antidote to the ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative, which is still very much around today, and the idea that we are under threat from immigrants at the gate. How are we all going to live together in a world where one in 10 people by 2050 might be migrants of some kind due to climate change and other issues forcing people to leave their homelands? What this book shows is that there are ways that people with very different cultures and religious backgrounds, have managed to get along. One of the reasons I really like this book and the topic is because it’s really complicated. There’s a counter-school of thought that thinks the Convivencia, this idea of Muslims, Christians and Jews all getting on well together, is a bit of a sham, almost an invention of the Spanish tourist board, and overly romanticized. But the vast evidence about daily life suggests differently. For example, in the 11th century, Córdoba, in the south of Spain, was a city of half a million people. It was a much bigger city than London or Paris at the time. There were everyday frictions and occasional outbreaks of violence, but by and large, Christians, Muslims and Jews managed to get on. They got on because they were mixing in the marketplaces and going to the same public baths together. They might play chess or music together. It’s one of those examples that so clearly speaks to today but what’s so interesting is that she does not explicitly make that connection, or at least it’s not central to the narrative of the book. It’s almost up to us as a reader to do that. I like that challenge. She’s not trying to be too didactic about it. Menocal homes in on three factors. One is the shared language, the lingua franca, of Arabic. You can find synagogues built in Spain, even in the 13th century, which have Arabic script carved on them alongside the Hebrew. The second thing is the religious tolerance under Islamic law. Christians and Jews were able to worship their own gods, as long as they paid a tax for it. The third and most fundamental thing was the mixing together of people in cities. It’s about how urban life brought people together and created relative tolerance because of the relationships of mutual dependence – the way that a Muslim shoemaker might need leather from a Christian tanner, for example. So I think those are the things that helped forge it. Many Jews migrated to Al-Andalus because they saw that they could live a reasonable life in its cities and not be persecuted. What happened in Spain after this period was the systematic massacres of Jews by Christians, such as in 1391, and there are many other examples as well. This was happening across Europe, including in England, starting from about the 12th century."