Culture in the Time of Tolerance:AL-ANDALUS

Gymnasophyst · September 19, 2002, 4:36pm

http://www.law.yale.edu/outside/html/Publications/pub-menocal.htm

Culture in the Time of Tolerance:
Al-Andalus as a Model for Our Own Time

María Rosa Menocal

María Rosa Menocal is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. This is the text of a lecture given at the closing dinner of the Middle East Legal Studies Seminar (MELSS), Istanbul, Turkey, May 9, 2000. These remarks are all adapted from material in the author’s forthcoming book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain to be published by Little, Brown and Company in the spring of 2002.
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…ranada, must have been reassured as they sailed into Istanbul, into the extraordinary port that is visible from here, across the water, to see that the old first-rate God lived here, that His Church had been made over not too many years before with lovely, paper-thin minarets. Hagia Sophia, the heart of Eastern Christianity, was transformed in 1453 into a mosque, and an iconic mosque at that. The Ottomans also made a new home for the Jews, who arrived with their Haggadahs (one of which was recently re-rescued from the barbaric shelling of the Oriental Institute of Sarajevo) and their fifteenth-century Spanish, which their children speak to this day; and many of the Andalusian values in Islam found refuge and appreciation here too, including the extraordinary boatload of love poetry in Arabic that had for so long been the pride and joy of so many Spaniards–Andalusians, Sephardim, whatever we call them–for whom the language of the poetry you recited, and the name of God in your prayers, and the clothes you wore, and the science you believed in did not have to “harmonize” with each other and could even argue with each other and violently disagree and still be loved and authentic. Maimonides was a Jew and a “Greek”–the second Moses and a rational philosopher–both with equal love and authenticity, and he wrote “The Guide for the Perplexed” in Arabic.

But why should I say these things when there was an Andalusian who said them much better? Ibn 'Arabi, still revered today among Muslims as the greatest of Sufis, was a twelfth-century Sevillian who was a slightly younger contemporary of the Córdobans Maimonides and Ibn Rushd. The philosophers will, I hope, forgive my giving the last word to the poet, and to one of his loveliest love poems, a poem where the line between erotic and spiritual love is not at all clear, and whose final verses embody so much of this Andalusian ethos.

A white-blazed gazelle
Is an amazing sight,
Red-dye signaling,
Eyelids hinting,

Pasture between breastbones
And innards.
Marvel,
A garden among the flames!

My heart can take on
Any form:
Gazelles in a meadow,
A cloister for monks,

For the idols, sacred ground,
Kaaba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Qur’an

I profess the religion of love;
Wherever its caravan turns
Along the way, that is the belief,
The faith I keep.

Like Bishr,
Hind and her sister,
Love-mad Qays and the lost Layla,
Mayya and her lover Ghaylan.

–Translation by Michael A. Sells, available in Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn `Arabi and New Poems (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2000).

Yale Law School Occasional Papers, Second Series, Number 6

Yale Law School Occasional Papers are published for friends and graduates of the school. The series disseminates some of the many distinguished lectures emanating from the Yale Law School community.

Milton’s Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment
Vincent Blasi, Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties,
Columbia University. 1995.
Human Sacrifice and Human Experimentation: Reflections at Nuremberg
Jay Katz, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor Emeritus of Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry and Harvey L. Karp Professiorial Lecturer in Law and Psychoanalysis, Yale University. 1997.
The Rise of World Constitutionalism
Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University. 1997.
Globalization and the Rule of Law
Jeffrey Sachs, Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade,
Harvard University, 1998
The Physics of Persuasion: Arguing the New Deal
Seth P. Waxman, Solicitor General of the United States, 2000

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