Dust will never gather on Jonathan Lyons' lively new book of medieval history -- the opening page of his "The House of Wisdom" cites a cleric scandalized by the Crusader ladies of Antioch and their penchant for the plunging neckline and the bejeweled merkin.
If this is the Middle Ages, thinks the reader, bring it on! But this pleasure gradually gives way to another beguilement, to be found in Lyons' subtitle: "How The Arabs Transformed Western Civilization." That phrase suggests a brave viewpoint for a historian nowadays, one at odds with the us-vs.-them mentality copied from the Cold War and pasted on to any consideration of things Islamic.
Whether it's the ecstatic Lt. Gen. William Boykin claiming his Christian god is "bigger" than the Muslim god, or the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington peddling, like some harebrained imam, an inevitable "clash of civilizations," the twain of East and West has seldom seemed less likely to meet than in the last few years.
This pernicious, self-fulfilling polemic has been countered by a few peeps of scholarship, led by Yale's Maria Rosa Menocal and her "Ornament of the World" (2002), an accessible evocation of the glory and the culture of tolerance that was al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain.
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Scholarship
For Lyons, a former Reuters reporter who roved the Middle East for two decades, the task is much greater than reminding the general reader of the splendors of Umayyad Cordoba. He is out to reverse a long-standing prejudice regarding the stupendous flowering of scholarship in medieval Islam. (A related read is John Freely's new, encyclopedic "Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World.")
Even when that flowering is recognized -- but does anyone really remember learning about it in school? -- it is usually brushed off as an unfortunate hiccup in the transmission of classical Greek thought to the Renaissance. In this view, the translators and scholars of Baghdad, Cairo and Toledo were mere copyists, or at best librarians, unwittingly preserving the genius of antiquity's philosophy and science in their dimly lit mosques -- until the West recovered its brilliance.
