Word: arabized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...debut speech before Israel's parliament as the country's new Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin suggested that Arab heads of state come to Jerusalem to talk peace. Actually, Arab leaders have long had a standing invitation to do that, and Rabin was just repeating it -- predictably, to no avail. But the Prime Minister followed up with an extraordinary appeal to his own countrymen to shake off the siege mentality that until now has made the concessions required for peace too scary for them to contemplate. "No longer is it true," Rabin said, "that 'the whole world is against...
...sons of the Prophet brought no Arab women with them; they intermarried with Iberian ones. The conquering power became an indigenous one in short order, although the successive caliphs tended to retain a nostalgia for Baghdad. Out of the Moorish conquest grew the first unified culture Spain had seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted until 1492, when Catholic armies, under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, drove the last vestiges of Arab power back to North Africa. If you want to grasp why Spain, traditionally, is unique in Europe, you must begin with the fact...
...Andalus," which runs through Sept. 27, is the first large-scale attempt to supply American art lovers with a sense of this vanished and brilliant culture. Given the ignorant animus against the Arab world in America, it is a valuable show, and its massive catalog is the best introduction to Spanish Islamic civilization ever set before a general audience by a museum. If the show itself, with its 120-some items, seems a little thin to the casual eye, this is due to the extreme paucity of works of art that have come down to us from the Hispano-Islamic...
Adaptation lay at the cultural heart of Islamic Spain. It was not always benign; like the Venetians bringing back war plunder to St. Mark's, the Arab rulers symbolized their victory over the Christian infidel by taking bells from church spires and converting them into mosque lamps. The most impressive single work of sculpture in the show, the 11th century Pisa griffin, is so hybrid that without a context, scholars seem unable to decide where it comes from -- or even whether it is from al-Andalus at all. It may equally well be Egyptian, North African or Iranian, though...
Partly, at least, this is because it gives such sharp vignettes of cultural crossing. Islam the Destroyer is a myth; in fact, much of what we know of classical Greek thought was preserved by Arab scholars, without whose efforts we would know little or nothing of Aristotle. In science, Europe until the 14th century was illiterate compared with the Arab world, and a group of exquisitely made brass instruments in this show reminds one that the universal astrolabe was invented in al-Andalus around...