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""A Vanished World" provides a walking journey inside the astonishing history of medieval Spain's life for Muslims, Christians, and Jews. A fascinating historical lesson about an era that reflects the best and the worst of humanity's attempts to coexist."
-- Fajri Ansari, President of the Network of Religious Communities and Resident Imam of Masjid Nu'Man, Buffalo, New York
Product Description
Are Muslims, Christians, and Jews forever locked in a cycle of violence and resentment? Chris Lowney engages these questions by chronicling medieval Spain's impossibly panoramic history.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book to find out about the re-conquest of Andalusia by the Christians. However, it provides a wider scope than this, covering the whole period of Islamic rule from begining to end. Rather than a comprehensive text-book approach, it is more the author's guided tour, which is fine because he is clearly an expert. The author is American, and this sometimes intrudes, for example when he compares the population of Al-Andalus to that of Utah (?) There are few comparisons/contrasts with modern-day religious tensions, which I found a relief, and only the occasional repining for a time when Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in relative harmony, at least compared with the subsequent injustices meted out under medieval Christendom.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book provided invaluable, rich, and varied descriptions of life in Islamic Spain whilst I wrote The Moorish Whore set in that place and time. Many books of this type are dry academic tomes, but this one combines historic sweep with telling detail and excellent characterizations, too. It brings the period to life like a good novel, without sacrificing its academic credence.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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17 reviews
48 of 53 people found the following review helpful
Tolerance and Spanish history
31 May 2005
Format:Hardcover
This book is a super good read. It is popular history at its most entertaining. However, it is much more than that; it is a passionate plea for tolerance, and especially for religious tolerance. This is, of course, very timely, since the world today is sinking into the same religious hatreds that ruined Spain in the last centuries covered by this book.
For more than seven centuries, Christianity and Islam split the Iberian peninsula between them, with Jews forming a third major religious community. Sometimes there was "convivencia" (successful living-together); usually there was fighting, but at least there was mutual learning. Much of modern European civilization came from Islam, mostly via Spain--everything from the lute (al'ud in Arabic) to saffron (az-zafran) to the works of Aristotle and Galen, which survived largely in Arabic translations and had to be reintroduced to west Europe after the Dark Ages. For centuries, Spain was a vast, wide-open pipeline, siphoning civilization to the west. This story is repressed and hidden in too many standard histories.
I hope that Lowney's book gets many people interested in this amazing period of history. Readers will want to follow up by looking up the more serious literature. Excellent advanced histories and art studies are available. I would especially recommend the poetry: the unbelievably beautiful Spanish, Catalan and Galician lyrics that delighted the Christians, and the soaringly romantic or darkly brooding poems of the Arabic masters. (And there were, inevitably, even some poems written in both: Arabic poems with rather mangled Spanish verses interspersed.) Latin/Spanish and Arabic ideas of fine writing, as well as ideas of love and loss and beauty, cross-fertilized each other, producing some of the most musical sounds and dramatic images in all literature. Many excellent anthologies are available. Look them up on Amazon!
For more than seven centuries, Christianity and Islam split the Iberian peninsula between them, with Jews forming a third major religious community. Sometimes there was "convivencia" (successful living-together); usually there was fighting, but at least there was mutual learning. Much of modern European civilization came from Islam, mostly via Spain--everything from the lute (al'ud in Arabic) to saffron (az-zafran) to the works of Aristotle and Galen, which survived largely in Arabic translations and had to be reintroduced to west Europe after the Dark Ages. For centuries, Spain was a vast, wide-open pipeline, siphoning civilization to the west. This story is repressed and hidden in too many standard histories.
I hope that Lowney's book gets many people interested in this amazing period of history. Readers will want to follow up by looking up the more serious literature. Excellent advanced histories and art studies are available. I would especially recommend the poetry: the unbelievably beautiful Spanish, Catalan and Galician lyrics that delighted the Christians, and the soaringly romantic or darkly brooding poems of the Arabic masters. (And there were, inevitably, even some poems written in both: Arabic poems with rather mangled Spanish verses interspersed.) Latin/Spanish and Arabic ideas of fine writing, as well as ideas of love and loss and beauty, cross-fertilized each other, producing some of the most musical sounds and dramatic images in all literature. Many excellent anthologies are available. Look them up on Amazon!
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Wonderfully Entertaining, Endlessly Thought-provoking
27 Sep 2005
Format:Hardcover
Mr. Lowney's "A Vanished World" is a remarkable work that illuminates the sometimes expedient, often begrudging ability of the three great monotheistic religions to live and work amidst each other in medieval Spain. Written in a vigorous prose punctuated with warm humor and keen religious sensitivity, and informed by considerable research, A Vanished World illustrates for the modern reader a means by which we might consider a route toward cultural and interfaith understanding. Mr. Lowney capably compares the attitude of "El Cid," in which nobility and goodness is as likely to be shared by Moors as well as by Christians, with the dour certainty of "The Song of Roland," in which "the pagans are wrong and the Christians are right." The former reflects its composition in a polyglot Spain, where simple exposure to multiple faiths resulted in a tolerance by necessity that "Roland," composed in a far-off Christian country with little concern for the reality on the ground, could arrogantly ignore. The lesson for our own struggle to understand the faith-fueled crises of the present day is plainly made and gracefully argued. Mr. Lowney rewards the reader with entertaining and incisive portraits of the great figures who rose from each of the faith traditions, from the 12th-century Jewish rationalist Daniel Maimonides, to the Muslim Averroes, the great "Commentator" on Plato, to the Christian king "Alfonso the Wise," whose image appears above the gallery doors of the US House of Representatives, in honor of his law code. In all, "A Vanished World" is popular history of the highest order, eminently readable and thought-provoking.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Gripping, informative, surprising.
31 Aug 2005
Format:Hardcover
As a fan of Mr. Lowney's first book, I was frankly intimidated by the subject matter of his latest book. Where Heroic Leadership was a brisk yet insightful piece about the qualities of true leaders, A Vanished World promised to expose how thin was my grasp on world history. I feared "taking my medicine."
How wrong I was!
To my surprise and delight, I found the book informative and even gripping. Using a series of short biographies of political, military, religious, and intellectual figures in Spain during the Middle Ages, Lowney identifies the threads that held together that region and that just as frequently pulled it apart. The scholarship is solid; the writing careful, balanced, and ultimately persuasive. The book's message of how tolerance can be spread and how it can be so easily wiped out is of obvious importance and relevance. Those who feel that we live in a unique age of terror and religious confrontation would do well do learn this history and to see, if even dimly, the possibilities of reconciliation and of hope.
Like other great popular histories, it does not talk down to its readers or modernize its subjects. A Vanished World invites you to explore something you knew little about and to share in a genuine intellectual treat. A good work and well worth your time.
How wrong I was!
To my surprise and delight, I found the book informative and even gripping. Using a series of short biographies of political, military, religious, and intellectual figures in Spain during the Middle Ages, Lowney identifies the threads that held together that region and that just as frequently pulled it apart. The scholarship is solid; the writing careful, balanced, and ultimately persuasive. The book's message of how tolerance can be spread and how it can be so easily wiped out is of obvious importance and relevance. Those who feel that we live in a unique age of terror and religious confrontation would do well do learn this history and to see, if even dimly, the possibilities of reconciliation and of hope.
Like other great popular histories, it does not talk down to its readers or modernize its subjects. A Vanished World invites you to explore something you knew little about and to share in a genuine intellectual treat. A good work and well worth your time.
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