Synopsis:
From the days of Charlemagne to Christopher Columbus, Islamic Spain
represents one of the most productive intercultural relationships in
Western history down to the present day. The lemon tree, the water
wheel, the astrolabe and Aristotle's lost philosophy all arrived in
Europe through Islamic Spain. Churches and temples that strongly
resemble Muslim mosques, the pinnacle of Hebrew literature's Golden Age,
the roots of modern medicine and mathematics, and the transmission of
Greek philosophy into Western Europe are just a few of the collaborative
achievements that form the legacy of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim
cultures interacting on the Iberian Peninsula over seven centuries.
Cities
of Light: The Rise & Fall of Islamic Spain, a two-hour documentary
film, journeys into one of World History's most fascinating and
important periods. With a fresh focus on the many contributions to
Western civilization made by Islamic institutions and culture, the film
also consistently cleaves to an even-handed presentation of the triumphs
and shortcomings, achievements and failures of a centuries-long period
when Muslims, Christians, and Jews inhabited the same corner of Western
Europe and there built a lasting society that was both part of Christian
Europe and the Muslim Middle East.
Cities of Light vividly
demonstrates how these very different groups found the means to co-exist
and thrive together—and yet how fragile that symbiosis could be. The
pluralistic centuries of Medieval Spain ended in the Spanish Inquisition
and the formation of an exclusively Catholic Spain.
The legacy
of Muslim Spain is rooted in the two hundred fifty year reign of the
Umayyad dynasty. This first, long interaction between the Arab Middle
East and European Spain laid the basis for a legacy of pluralism—the
Spanish term is convivencia. Nowhere in Medieval Europe was central
government more lasting, more extensive, or more successful than in
Cordoba, Spain's capital under the Muslims. By the tenth century it was
Europe's largest, richest, and cleanest city, with running water, public
hospitals, and lighted streets—(hence the film's title). The film
lingers on the creation and expansion of this stunning capital, where
religious and civil institutions were joined in a single governing
center with a national tax base.
The opening hour of Cities of
Light demonstrates how a culture of pluralism helped fuel an
institutionalized love and respect for learning in all its forms, from
science and mathematics to philosophy and poetry. The program and its
extensive website help viewers trace the development of a new
Mediterranean culture deeply influenced by Muslim scholarship and art.
Unlike
the Romans and Visigoths before them, Muslim rulers seemed to grasp
that the Jews and Christians who preceded them to the Iberian Peninsula
were necessary partners in a productive society. The fascinating story
of a central bureaucracy staffed by elites from all three faiths, with
Jews in all but the highest post and Christian scholars outperforming
"native" Arabic speakers in their own language and culture, is a
fascinating and powerful antidote to our modern stereotypes concerning
Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
Had the story of Islamic Spain
stopped here, at the apex of Cordoban central rule, it would be a
utopian history unmatched by human beings of any time anywhere. Instead,
forces of division, corruption, entropy, and prejudice enter the story.
The lack of a clear line of succession, the rise of Crusading and
Jihadist cultures, and the advent of foreign armies conspired to bring
Cordoba tumbling down in the early eleventh century. Even then, out of
its ashes, there gradually arose nearly two dozen vibrant city states
scattered around the peninsula, each one vying with the others to be the
most powerful, the most cultured.
The second hour of Cities of
Light deals with the long, drawn-out fall of the old order, the gradual
decline of Muslim power, and the rise of a Roman Catholic Spanish
monarchy as the powerful kingdoms of and Castile, Lyon and Aragon
combined to form a new national identity. Here we watch the spirit of
co-existence finally disappear as Jews and then Muslims, by stages, are
forced to convert or go into exile.
Perhaps no other period of
European history sheds so much light on our current encounter with
extremism. In the story of Islamic Spain, we see what heights may be
achieved when adherents to each of these three faiths join together to
forge a common culture and, by contrast, how absolutists and narrow
minded ideologues with their crusades and jihads may divide and bring
down a creative, pluralist society forever.
