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May 30, 2002, 9:20 a.m. Progress and Islam The mini-enlightenment that was Andalusia. By Scott Galupo

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal (Little, Brown, 272 pp., $26.95)

magine this: a plush region on Spain's Mediterranean coast with a vibrant economy and an adventurous intellectual community, ruled by a benign Islamic monarch whose Jewish right-hand man helps bring about a mutually beneficial relationship with Orthodox Christians. Compare that to the thuggish, backward, resentful Arab enclaves of today, aligned against embattled Jews in Israel and Americans everywhere.

In ways she probably didn't intend when she wrote The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, María Rosa Menocal's informative new book about Andalusia between the years of 750 and 1492 is a painful reminder of how far the Arab world, dominated by reactionary Islamists, has fallen. The once pluralist and enquiring culture of Islam, Menocal reminds us, gave the world Arabic translations of Plato and Aristotle and other classical Greek works long before the Renaissance. While the Latin language was dying, both Muslims and Christians were writing love poems in Arabic, inspiring Samuel the Nagid to employ the Hebrew language — like Latin, "frozen in liturgy" — in radically new ways. The caliphal library boasted "some four hundred thousand volumes, at a time when the largest library in Christian Europe probably held no more than four hundred manuscripts."

And in the scenario described above, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jew, represented the Andalusian caliphate in Constantinople, seat of the Byzantine empire, to forge an alliance against the Western Church (whose Crusades, to be sure, were essentially defensive). In 955, Constantine VII, head of the Byzantines, gave the Andalusians a Greek medical encyclopedia, Dioscorides's On Medicine. Hasdai, himself a physician, helped translate the volume into Arabic, when most of Europe had no Greek readers. This, during what Menocal says are the unfairly maligned Middle Ages.

The golden age of Andalusia began with the arrival in 755 of the exiled prince Abd al-Rahman, the last of the Umayyad dynasty overthrown by the Abbasid caliphate. Menocal gives us a straightforward explanation of that period of infighting, when the locus of Islamic influence moved from Arabia to Syria, and later to modern-day Iraq. In Andalusia, Abd al-Rahman established a rival caliphate — an office that, in theory, derives its mandate from a connection to Muhammad or his family — to Baghdad, then (if you can believe it) a thriving metropolis. Abd al-Rahman, accepted as a leader by the recently converted Berber tribesmen, helped reinvigorate the Spanish region he found in tatters, thanks to the immiserating management of Germanic Visigoths.

What made Andalusia possible, Menocal says, is the ability to live with contradictions, the indispensable ingredient of a "first-rate" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition. "[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence," Menocal quotes from Fitzgerald, "is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." This is a far cry from what passes for "multiculturalism" today. As Harold Bloom observes in his foreword to the book, "Our current multiculturalism, the blight of our universities and our media, is a parody of the culture of Cordoba and Granada in their lost prime." Multiculturalism, a modern fetish, is not the same thing as tolerance. (Against the tide of polite continental opinion, the recently murdered Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn made this distinction perfectly clear: What happens to tolerance when an intolerant culture, such as radical Islam, is in control?)

Medieval Andalusia was by no means perfect; Menocal is careful not to gloss over the uneasiness of the Islamic dominion over Andalusia. There was no freedom of religion as we know it today. But there was tolerance, albeit limited, and for Christians and Jews there was upward mobility. As the spiritual offspring of Abraham, Christians and Jews — "Peoples of the Book" — were protected while pagans and unbelievers were not. Menocal notes that Jews identified with the presiding culture — they "understood themselves to be Andalusians and Cordobans" — as did later Jewish exile communities in 19th-century Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, and in 20th-century America.

For roughly 300 years after Abd al-Rahman's death, Andalusia was stable and prosperous. Menocal writes, "There was a vast economic revival: the population increased, not just in the invigorated and ever more cosmopolitan cities, but even in the once decimated countryside, where the introduction of new crops and new techniques, including irrigation, made agriculture a prosperous concern; and the pan-Mediterranean trade and travel routes that had helped maintain Roman prosperity, and which were vital for cultural contacts and continuities, were reconfigured and expanded." Eventually, this multiethnic culture and robust commercial progress collapsed into antagonism and civil strife and unproductive militarism — a funk that continues in Arab countries to this day.

In 1066, about 150 Jewish families were massacred by Muslims in Granada, the beginning of the end of Andalusia's golden age. Jews were expelled from Spain altogether by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, the same year Columbus set sail, under Catholic aegis, for the New World. The irony is obvious: As Catholic monarchs decisively brought an end to a fruitful period of pluralism and progress in Spain, they unwittingly imported the seed of a new Andalusia, one that still endures today — America.

The book concludes with a postscript about September 11. If her history of medieval Spain is "tinged with irony" in light of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, she writes, "so be it." By coincidence, I finished Ornament of the World after reading in the January 2002 issue of National Geographic that Islam — 1.3 billion strong currently, a fifth of humanity — is the fastest-growing religion on the globe today, with scores of conversions and high birthrates. Am I wrong to think that's an ominous statistic? "There are no Muslim Andalusians visible anywhere in the world today," Bloom laments in his foreword. What should we expect from the coming generation of Muslims? Can we hope for another Andalusia? Or will we get more suicide murderers?

— Scott Galupo is a writer living in Alexandria, Va.