Our near-month in Spain confounded me with how little I knew of Catholic Spain’s history, and with how totally ignorant I was of the “Moorish” period in Iberia. Seven hundred and eighty years -- that's how long the so-called “Moors” resided in what today we call Spain and Portugal, their al-Andalus (hence today's Andalucia.) Consider: we’ve been a republic for less than 250 years; the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620 -- not four hundred years ago; Spain founded St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, almost 450 years ago. The so-called "Moors" were there in Europe for 780 years! 
Well, not all true and even more curious. The Alcazars were built in Arabic style by admiring Christian kings who took Seville and Toledo from the Muslims – and they had the walls inscribed with the Quran quote “There is no conqueror but Allah.” Ferdinand III, the Catholic re-conqueror of Toledo, had his tomb inscribed in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Mozarabic, the mother-tongue vernacular of al-Andalus. I came away in mystery, what was this all about…?Since returning two weeks ago, I have been studying to fill my history gap, to learn more about who these "Moors" really were and what they truly left behind in Europe. (A great source: The Ornament of the World, by Maria Menocal, from which I poached my title.)
What I find, what they left behind -- their legacy to us -- was The Renaissance.
Let me to try to encapsulate 700 years in a few paragraphs. As you know, Islam was a tidal wave out of Medina and Mecca that swept across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic in less than 60 years.
From the start, Islam was riven by sectarian in-fighting, as it still is today among Shiites, Sunnis, Sufis, Allewites and all the rest. Barely a hundred years after the death of Mohammed, the Damascus-based caliphate of the Umayyads was overthrown, slaughtered in 750 by another Muslim clan.
The one surviving prince of the Umayyads fled west, made it to Morroco and crossed the straits of Gibraltar into Al-Andalus in 755. Abd al-Rahman's mother was a harem girl, a Berber from the mountains of Morroco; his grand-father, the assassinated Umayyad Caliph. Abd al-Rahman, whose name is a name of God, the Compassionate One, was half-Berber, half-Arab.
It was Berber troops under the generalship of Syrian Arabs who had invaded Iberia forty years earlier, overwhelming the Christian Visigoths, and establishing their Capitol in Cordoba. So both the Berbers and their Syrian Arab leaders welcomed Abd al-Rahman as Prince, as Emir.
This remarkable twenty-something then set out to re-create in al-Andalus the Umayyad society that was being erased in Damascus. It took root as a distance outpost of the new Caliphate, but soon became a culture of its own. For nearly 500 years, until 1236, Abd al-Rahman's successors devoted themselves to learning, to the arts of poetry and song, to irrigation and agriculture, to the graces of cooling architecture, gardens and running water that desert folk so fully appreciate.
This Cordoban culture flourished on two ideals:
1. That knowledge was to be pursued and shared.
2. That diversity was to be embraced.
And so it was that in Cordoba there were established translation factories, where ancient manuscripts were collected from Damascus, Bahgdad, Alexandria and Greece; where then, working in teams, Arab, Jewish and Christian scholars translated the documents into Arabic, Latin, Hebrew and the Mozarabic vernacular. Next, cadres of educated women made hundreds of copies of the translations for distribution throughout the land. Cordobans learned paper making from China, by way of Baghdad, and built Europe's first paper mills.
And so the works of Aristotle, of Heroditus, of Euclid, Plato and all the others, the mainly Greek philosophers, dramatists, and historians, and the mainly Arabic mathematicians, alchemists and astronomers came alive again in Europe. Latin translations were taken to Italy and France in the 1300's to lift the curtain on the dark ages of Northern Europe. Arabic poetry and song became available north of the Pyranees; Hebrew poetry had a rebirth, and Jewish Mysticism grew out of al-Andalus.
This vibrant center of learning and trade attracted people from throughout Europe and the Middle East. It had declared itself the new Caliphate (an unwise presumption, as it turned out, in the eyes of less liberal Muslims in Africa.) By 1,000, Cordoba was the largest city in Europe with a population of over 900,000. Its main library held more than 400,000 books and manuscripts. By comparison, a well stocked monastery north of the Pyranees might have had some 200 to 300 manuscripts. There were more than 70 public libraries in the city, along with multiple mosques, synagogues, and churches.
And that was the second value: not just a tolerance of but an embrace of diversity. It was a society of yes and no, not either yes or no. It was a society that respected the stranger and sought to understand.
My title, "The Ornament of the World", is what Dame Hroswitha, a 10th century Saxon nun, a dramatist and essayist (she'd have been a blogger today) called Cordoba – “The Ornament of the World.” She based that on the description given her by the Caliph's main ambassador to the German court of the Holy Roman Empire. That Ambassador was the bishop of Elvira, the Metropolitan See of al-Andalus -- a Catholic the Caliph’s ambassador, a Jew a later Emir’s foreign minister! Cordoban Emirs' cabinets of ministers regularly included Muslims, Jews and Christians -- anyone of talent.
Despite the Caliphate of Cordoba’s hold on al-Andalus being broken in the 11thC by Berber resentment of their Arab superiors, the culture of learning and diversity continued to thrive in the various Muslim city-states for another 200 years. So integrated was the social order of al-Andalus that Arabic was widely spoken along with Latin-laced Mozarabic, from which has descended Castillian Spanish. In fact, by the 12thC, Catholic Masses in Cordoba and Toledo and Seville were being performed in Mozarabic, much to the disgust of later re-conquering Roman Catholics from the North who represented a very Disapproving Pope.
Concurrently arriving in Al-Andalus from the south, at the invitation of the hard-pressed Emirs of the remaining Muslim city-states, were more of those Berber mountain fighters from Africa, men of little learning hewing to an ideal of purity, of fundamental Islam. And soon enough, they and the Catholic fundamentalists took over.
Between these two disapproving, yes or no, either with us or against us peoples, the Berber Muslims and the Roman Catholics, this magically tolerant Cordoban culture, the Ornament of the World, was torn asunder. By the mid-12th century it was over.
Homogeneity through forced conversions were now being imposed by both new Muslim and new Catholic rulers in their respective city-states. Unorthodoxy was unwelcome. Genius philosophers, physicians, and lawyers like the Jew Maimonides and the Arab Averroes were soon to be exiled, their books banned. By the 15th century, such books -- and such people -- were being burned. It was all over.
The Ornament of the World for nearly 500 years: seeking and sharing learning, embracing diversity, respecting and welcoming the stranger.
Today, fundamentalism grows all about -- both here and abroad. Does not the world need to counter that by again ornamenting ourselves with those core "Moorish" values of the Umayyads of Cordoba? No, not hereditary authoritarianism, nor slavery, nor putting women in harems or accepting polygamy. Set those aside. Is it not time for a re-start, right here in America, to be the new “Moors”; welcoming the stranger; pursuing and sharing learning; embracing diversity of ideas, faiths, and peoples; eschewing “yes or no, you’re either for me or against me”?
P.S. It wasn’t just in al-Andalus. At the same time that Abd al-Rahman was establishing his Umayyad values in Cordoba, the Buddhist scholar Sent-ts’an wrote, in China
If you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between “for” and “against” is
the mind’s worst disease.
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