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Menocal's emphasis on Islam's peaceful side and on mutual toleration between Christians and Muslims complements the more critical views of scholars like Bernard Lewis. The same political backdrop, however, has encouraged some readers to oversimplify this book's message. Many early reviewers claimed to see in it a compelling moral for our times: Spanish Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted so peacefully for eight centuries that we should be ashamed of ourselves for failing to follow their example. Such a reading does gross injustice to the complexity and cruelty of this era.

To a degree, Menocal's own rhetoric invites such distortion—she does indeed call the Middle Ages "a golden age" and "a culture of tolerance"—but despite her obvious nostalgia for these times, her fond portrait still reveals plenty of warts. The exemplary Umayyad caliphate lasted less than two centuries. It was brought down shortly after 1000 by fanatical Muslim invaders from North Africa, the Almoravids and the Almohads, who persecuted and expelled Jews and Christians, burned the books of more tolerant Muslims, and helped to inflame a new anti-Islamic militancy in the Christian north. Menocal describes all of this, if not in great detail. Thereafter politics fragmented, and tolerance, like much else, varied from kingdom to kingdom.

Even at the best times and in the best places, the terms of toleration in Christian and in Muslim lands were distinctly un-modern. Religious minorities could not worship in public; marriage across faiths was forbidden (unless the minority bride converted, which was indeed one of the most frequent conversion patterns); and conversion to a minority religion was normally a capital offense. Particularly numerous among the minority populations throughout medieval Iberia were slaves, scarcely mentioned here among the largely aristocratic cast of characters.

In calling medieval Spain a "golden age," Menocal does not mean an age of multicultural bliss, still less one of social equality. Her main point is essentially a philosophical one: at their best, the intellectual elites of this era eschewed fundamentalism and showed surprising sensitivity in the business of reconciling competing truths. Menocal's tolerant heroes were not skeptics, agnostics, or universalists, but thoughtful believers "willing to live with contradictions." We tend to think of this as a postmodern value, but Menocal shows that it was also a pre-Enlightenment one.

As the book's lucid forays into philosophy and theology emphasize, this was not just a matter of tolerating irreconcilable theological differences; for philosophers like the Christian Peter Abelard and the Muslim Averroes, it meant acknowledging the simultaneous truth of reason and revelation, although their respective findings might seem incompatible.

Historically, this way of thinking has found greater acceptance in modern Christianity and Judaism than in modern Islam, but one of the many merits of The Ornament of the World is to show how erudite members of all three faiths wrestled with such questions a millennium ago.

Kate Elliot van Liere is associate professor of history at Calvin College.

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Looking for the 'I' | What happens to the self when the brain is injured or malformed? (August 8, 2003)

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47