HUIBSLOG

(Jan. 6, 2008). Review by ERIC ORMSBY in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (Islam Update 4/1/08):

GOD’S CRUCIBLE - Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215. By David Levering Lewis. Illustrated. 473 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95.

The mosque of Córdoba, Spain.                      Credits: NYT Book Review - Matias Costa

Ormsby:

"David Levering Lewis, the author of a much-acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, provides a fascinating account of “this hunted survivor of an illustrious dynasty,” as he aptly puts it; and yet, he may read too much into the man. [Abd al-Rahman I, the first Umayyad ruler of Andalus, 755-787, HR]"

 For, as Ormsby puts it, the refined culture of Abd al-Rahman and his successors, may well hide the repressive character of their rule:

"[..] civic harmony in Umayyad Spain was more the result of shrewd statecraft and common sense than of some vague and anachronistic ideal of “tolerance.” In a highly stratified society, composed of unruly and often incompatible elements, religious and ethnic — not only Muslims, Christians and Jews but Arabs, Berbers and Slavs, as well as quarrelsome tribal factions — the assignment of strictly defined roles, with their attendant rights and responsibilities, was essential."

However, modern (Spanish, French and American) historical research finds many instances of Jews and Christians who play a great role in Spain's governments, science and philosophy from the 6th far into the 11th century. There was much cross-fertilization, between the Jews and the Muslims: Philosophy, Science (medical) and linguistic. The Christians learned from it first. Later on, they started to participate in the exceptional philosophic climate that reigned (intermittently, all right) in (Southern Spain.

Maybe, Lewis, who is not student of Islam in particular, has neglected the extraordinary multiculturally inspired impulses that have come to the later Mediaeval Europe (and, also to Egypt and the Middle East) from the Andalus. Later on, the Moors and the Jews who fled before the Christian Reconquista, transmitted that heritage to Morocco and Algeria. After 1492, many Spanish Jews (Ladinos) found refuge with the Ottoman Turks (Salonica, for instance!), in London under Elizabeth I and in Holland (Spinoza, 17th century). This is, why I think, that Ormsby is both right and wrong, when he concludes:

"Since Lewis wishes to show that medieval Muslim culture was overwhelmingly superior to its contemporary European counterpart — and certainly it was — a more scrupulous attention to the details of that culture would have strengthened his case."

It all depends upon your definition of "culture". When you mean "civilization", then, well, the succession of a series of Muslim regimes (that awee very different from one another - we are talking about five or six centuries!) have all in common, that in government, war, justice, they were in no way liberal democracies. From that point of view, they were as good and as bad as contemporary civilizations in Europe and in the East.

But when you define "culture" as creative thinking, writing, discussing and implementing knowledge across religious traditions, then, in my opinion, there is no doubt, that for long centuries, the Andalus society was far superior to the contemporary European ones. 

Ormsby's conclusion: 

"He describes the simmering state of tribal relations in the region as constituting “a flammable symbiosis,” but the phrase has wider scope. To judge from his account, that symbiosis was more pervasive than we usually realize, and not merely flammable, but dangerously combustible."

"Everything of Value is Fragile": Monocultural, mono-ethnic, societies may be internally more stable than multicultural and multi-ethnic ones in general. (Which, in itself, I doubt, HR). But they are so, at the price of, generally speaking again, intellectual infertility, provincialism and authoritarian rule. In the longer run, at least. And, while they may be internally more stable, they also tend (in general) to be more hostile and violent as regards their neighbours, than open societies.

When you choose, or accept, to live in an open society, you will have to accept, that your values and your traditions are regularly exposed to discussion. If you believe in your values, you shall not be afraid of that.

Maintenance of values and constant adaptation of the way you implement them, require your courage (for they are weak, fragile, the civilizatiion-steps we have made, coming from barbary), for values do not defend themselves, but they need people, individuals and civil society, to be on a constant alert.

So my conclusion is: I prefer to live in a society, where the fragility of my values is constantly exposed to the "combustibility" of "symbiosis", rather than to seek "the End of History" in an infertile, motionless society, that seeks to maintain itself by violently suppressing other systems of value.