Topic
Menocal’s article The Ornament of the World discusses the end of the convivencia policy among the different religious communities of the former al-Andalus due to the rise of religious orthodoxy and zealotry. Menocal uses various quotes to describe this broader shift and demonstrate her point of “white-washing” history in the Iberian Peninsula.
Quotes
According to Menocal (1993), “the repudiation of the agreement and the harsh persecution of the Muslims that followed meant that within a short time, the gorgeous language that covered nearly every inch of that royal house became a forbidden language – and those who could read it were decreed not real Spaniards. The Muslims were forced into conversions and called Moriscos; the reading of books in Arabic was prohibited, and many of the books themselves were burned” (p.247-248).
Furthermore, Menocal argues that “the story of sixteenth-century Spain, which is usually told as the story of its remarkable American empire, or the story of the explosion of a modern literary aesthetic in texts that rival Shakespeare’s, is no less the tragic story of the forced extinction of the two other religious cultures that had once made-up Spain. But this tragic story—the story of forgetting a past in Toledo where there is a church with an homage to Arabic writing on its walls, where there is a sumptuous fourteenth-century synagogue built to look like Granada’s Alhambra, and where Europe’s richest libraries and most industrious translators of philosophical and scientific texts once say – is inseparable from the other stories of the age that culminates with Don Quixote de la Mancha and the expulsions of the Moriscos” (p.264).
Analysis
These quotes highlight the shift from convivencia to religious intolerance, which resulted in the forced extinction of the Muslim and Jewish communities in Spain. Menocal argues that this “white-washing” of history has led to the erasure of the contributions made by these communities to the cultural and intellectual legacy of Spain. Menocal uses the famous work of Don Quixote de la Mancha to demonstrate the “white-washing” of history in Spain (Menocal, 2009).
Menocal argues that Don, which is often hailed as a masterpiece of Spanish literature, has been used to reinforce the myth of Spain as a homogeneous and purely Christian. This myth has obscured the diversity and richness of Spain’s cultural and intellectual heritage, which owes much to the contributions of its Muslim and Jewish communities.
References
Menocal, M. R. (2009). The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. United States: Little, Brown.