Reflections on the Fifth Anniversary of 9/11: María Rosa Menocal

Source: Menocal, María Rosa. The Ornament of the World, How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002.

Adapted from pages: 282-283

"On September 11, 2001, unimaginable violence came quite literally flying out of the blue and into the center of American life. Although a relative handful of analysts have claimed otherwise, it was soon enough clear that the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., were the fruit of the sort of uncompromising religious intolerance that most Americans, myself included, would have said played little part in their daily lives. How wrong we all were. And how irrevocably has that universe of ours been changed by the appearance at our own front door, one beautiful early fall day, of a feroscious version of Islam.

"The complex problem at the heart of the cultural history of medieval Europe was first and foremost how the great monotheistic religions of the Children of Abraham -- faiths that all have powerful strains of ferocity within them -- struggled to define what they were and what they might become.

"When they managed to find it within themselves to be truly first-rate, admirable achievements followed, and men like Samuel the Nagid rode the land and churches like San Roman were built and philosophers like Ibd Rushd were honored.

"But when, instead, the centers of such tolerance did not hold, irreparable destruction often followed, from the eleventh-century sacking of Madinat al-Zahra by fundamentalist Berber troops to the fifteenth-century tearing down of the old Almohad mosque that had served for so long as the cathedral of the Castilian monarchs in Seville.

"And after the events of September 11, it seems impossible to understand the history of what was once, indeed, an ornament of the world without seeing reflections of that history right at our own front door.

"Every reader will take away different lessons from the tales told in this book -- and there is plenty of warning and encouragement in them all -- but no one, including myself, is likely to see any of the morals as detached from us, as we might have before our own universe was devastated."

"If the stories are well told and if the morals are clear enough, then these new meanings will seem obvious to the reader. And if some of the stories are now tinged with painful irony, so be it."

Paris
November 2001

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