In this exquisitely illustrated book, art and literature are seen as focal points of civilization, those manifestations of human activity that are most informative about the enduring values of a society. Therefore, Burkhardt’s presentation is a narrative of high culture in Islamic Spain. As such, it is an effective introduction to Andalusi culture for the nonspecialist. The illustrations alone make the volume worth while, and author and editor have done a fine job of mating the visual material to the text, which frequently stresses the significance of artistic themes as abstract representations of philosophical and religious values generalized in the culture of urban Muslims.
Burkhardt’s forte is mysticism, and his sensitive discussions of religion, evocative of medieval piety, are the most successful sections of the book, along with those on art and architecture. But his characterizations of cultural, political, and social processes are uniformly confused and misleading. He consistently confuses race with culture, as when he asserts that “a strong culture [i.e., Arab] connected with a particular language will almost always favor the development of certain physically and mentally distinguished types” (pp. 28-29, emphasis mine); the first proposition is a nonsequitur, the second, a tautology. Similarly, he alludes to an “interchange of racial characteristics” (p. 30) whereby the Arabs became scholars and the Spanish (i.e., indigenous) population “adopted some of the nature of the Arab nomad and has never lost it.”
The author’s views on religious pluralism are excessively optimistic. Neither the Christian mozarabs (quaintly styled “guests” of the Caliphate) nor the Muslim enclaves in Christian Spain lived their lives unhampered by conflict or severe discrimination, cultural inter change notwithstanding. Nor is the political process well understood. In Burkhardt’s telling, ibn Khaldun’s theory of the circulation of elites, whereby political life is periodically renewed through the sedentarization of nomads, becomes a simplistic formula according to which a high level of urbanization leads inexorably to decay.
