Write an essay on the relationship between different communities in Islamic Spain. Begin by identifying these communities, and at some stage in your discussion describe the impact of Arab-Muslim culture on other cultures of al-Andalus. Be sure to analyze the role of Arabic literature in the literary growth of Hebrew and the impact of Spanish Islamic architecture on Christian and Jewish monuments.
The purpose of the Focus Study activities in this course is for you to study one particular aspect or entity of Islam by bringing it under a close examination and focusing critical attention on some of its details. This particular Focus Study concerns Spain from the beginning of the eighth century to the end of the fifteenth century. During most of this period of some 800 years, the Iberian Peninsula remained largely under Muslim rule and Arab cultural and political dominance; the last Muslim empire remaining in Granada came to a painful end in 1492.
This Islamic Spain, or al-Andalus as Muslims called it, has played a fundamentally important role in providing a rich milieu for the flowering of a magnificent Islamic culture. Yet its role in world civilization is also crucial. Al-Andalus stands as model of a diverse and pluralistic society in which Arabic culture transcended all ethnic, religious, and communal boundaries and specificities. At the same time, this part of the medieval world functioned as a conduit through which works of Greek philosophers and sages were translated from Arabic into Latin and thus preserved. But perhaps more important are the original Arabic Hellenistic works that came from Spain into the Latin West.
The Spanish Arabic culture has influenced and determined the course of European thought, science, philosophy, literature, architecture, and art. One can legitimately say that the process which culminated in the Newtonian Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century had its beginnings in the knowledge transmission activity of Islamic Spain.
Focus Study
Click here for María Rose Menocal, "Culture in the Time of Tolerance: Al-Andalus as a Model for Our Own Time," (Text of a lecture given at the closing dinner of the Middle East Legal Studies Seminar.
Then do this additional reading:
• The Oxford History of Islam, Chapter 5, "Art and Architecture," by Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, pp. 215-222
• Introduction to Islam Reader, Week 9
o Turner, Science in Medieval Islam: "Transmission" and "The New West," pages 112 to 118
o Blair and Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam: "Chapter 9: The Nasrids," pages 119 to 124