100 books like Exotic Nation

Here’s another true story written as a novel, this time an autobiography, which I love. Again, the locations are fantastic,  it’s something of a travelogue, and there’s a strong element of cross-cultural fluidity.

The hero of the book is a Muslim exile from Granada who was brought up in Fez and became an itinerant merchant, journeying through the Sahara and what is now Sudan before settling in Cairo. On his way back to Fez, he was captured by pirates, sent to Rome, converted to Christianity, became a translator and researcher for the Pope, and wrote a description of Africa. Oh, and then he goes back to North Africa and converts back to Islam.

Brilliant!

This is Andalusia at its most picturesque, with its castles and craggy mountains and a story with all the colour and brio of a medieval costume drama. It’s actually seriously researched history but written in the style of a romantic novel.

It was written in the mid-nineteenth century out of a fascination, which I share, for the story of the demise of the last Muslim kingdom in medieval Iberia. It’s full of heroic deeds, foolhardy escapades, chivalric episodes, and emotional scenes, all based on documentary evidence.

But what I especially like is the ironic stance the author achieves on the bigotry and intolerance characteristic of the victors in the conflict through the conceit of pretending his tale is written by a Spanish monk. It made me think about how history is written, who writes it, and how often we take for granted narratives that first emerged from political propaganda. 

This must be one of the best biographies ever!

It’s an academic take on the story of Leo the African, novelised by Amin Maalouf, and it brings out his complex identity and the richness of interconnected Mediterranean cultures in a way that is totally relevant to today.

It really made me think about the limitations of what we call national or religious identity and the almost infinite ability of human beings to adapt, chameleon-like, to different circumstances and cultures. 

What struck me about this book is the idea that while we can talk about ‘Judeo-Christian culture’ and we understand all the different manifestations of Christianity as essentially the same thing, even after centuries of bitter conflict, the idea of an Islamo-Christian civilisation is discordant to our thinking. 

The author asks why and provides a wealth of evidence that calls for a fundamental restructuring of Western thinking about relations with Islam.

It’s provocative stuff but a necessary correction to the ‘clash of civilisations’ view of history. It certainly made me think again. 

These three women give us Al-Andalus in depth. They are scholars of prodigious learning. This book shows their gift for clear explanation and offers a rich selection of color illustrations that are not collected so cogently together in any other books about the period. It is a major achievement and a joy to read; indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the history of Spain.

If there’s only one that I could recommend, it’s this brilliant, beautiful, and vexing book by María Rosa Menocal, Sterling Professor at Yale University. In a compelling and artful manner, Menocal tells the story of medieval Spain from the arrival of the first Umayyad rulers to Cervantes. Beyond being a useful introduction to the fascinating history, Menocal makes the argument that a culture of tolerance existed in medieval Spain, one that transcended religious and ethnic differences. The principal engine of this culture, she suggests, was the Arabic language. Menocal’s book has received as much praise as criticism, a testament to its enduring power and the contentious quality of medieval Spain.

Incomparable. In the long effort by scholars to establish the facts about the brilliant period of Al-Andalus—711-1492—this book is a breakthrough and a marvel. Salma Khadra Jayyusi assembled the leading scholars in the field on a whole host of subjects, and the two volumes have everything from meditations on broad historical themes to detailed accounts of book-making, ceramics, and techniques of dyeing and weaving silk. No serious reader of the history of Spain should have to live without these two extraordinary volumes.

When visiting the spectacular medieval monuments of Spain and Portugal that emblematize centuries of Islamic and Christian rule, it is impossible to ignore their surrounding landscapes, often dramatic, always thought-provoking. They remain powerful inspirations for my own work, and Thomas Glick’s wide-ranging book, which spans the entirety of the Iberian Middle Ages, stands out as a landmark of Anglophone scholarship on medieval Spain which uses the landscape as a fundamental lens on cultural change. He elegantly blends archaeological and geographic evidence with written sources to place the transformation of the landscapes of al-Andalus at the heart of understanding the implications of Christian ‘feudal’ rule. Whilst our knowledge of both Islamic and Christian cultural landscapes has advanced since this book was published, it remains a bold and thoughtful overview.

Among the wonders of medieval Spain is the appearance of the first Hebrew secular poetry since Biblical times. In this masterful and unparalleled set of translations by Peter Cole, we witness the profound, pious, chauvinistic, and indeed, sensual traditions of secular poetry over centuries. A fusion of Arabic and Hebrew traditions, in and of themselves, these poems stand as a metaphor for the Jewish community itself as well as its dynamism and endurance under Muslim and then, Christian rule. 

With intellectual life almost completely closed down and censored by the Franco regime, the shaping of Spanish cultural life was led by its guardians in exile. From an exterior focus Kamen’s light is shone back on the brilliance and resilience of Spanish intellectual life.