This is an exceptional history that looks at the era of medieval Spain when the spread of the Islamic empire reigned. As suggested by the title of the book it is a different sort of history that uses detailed research and documentation to argue against a generally prevailing view that the rule of Islam in this era was one in which the conquered peoples were treated well.

While this is an atypical way to present history, it appears that the method used by the author was necessary to counteract the myths that have developed through incomplete and shoddy scholarship. With the level of documentation provided, this book provides a more balanced and authentic history of the medieval period of Spain under the control of the Islamic empire. Some aspects of the history that impressed me were the way the author described the details of controversy within the Christian and Jewish cultures. This approach helped make his overall case and demonstrated a more balanced approach than would have occurred if he had ignored uncomfortable issues.

Overall I appreciated the documentation and the balanced approach in this necessary antidote to reconsider and reconstruct a misleading history that can be reasonably described as mythology. ( )

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
by Dario Fernandez-Morera
ISI Press 2016
$29.95; 358 pages
ISBN 978161017095

It has been quite a while since I've read a proper work of non-fiction in book form. I tend to get all of my non-fiction reading as journal articles, blogs that usually reference journal articles, or international consensus standards. Thus my book reading tends toward fiction as a palate-cleanser and method of winding down.

However, I saw this one on the shelf at my local public library, and I just had to take a look. One of the most fun things about reading is way one can make connections between all of the different things on my mind. Here, I found a perfect alignment between Stirling's Ice, Iron, and Gold, the Way of St. James, and Islamic millennial movements like the Almohads. I love it when everything comes together.

Fernandez-Morera has written a rather polemical book. I don't mean this as a criticism; I rather like polemical books, as long as the author can make a case. Fernandez-Morera can indeed make a case that in popular Western culture, Islamic Spain has been consistently presented as something that it was not. As evidence of this, Fernandez-Morera starts each chapter with a quotation from a well-known person or persons claiming it was a paradise of tolerance between different religions and ethnicities. These quotations are generally pulled from other works of popular history, although in at least two cases, Carly Fiorina and Barack Obama, the setting was a political speech. Whatever specialists might say in their journals, I think this is the popular conception.

The rest of each chapter is devoted to listing counterexamples to this myth of tolerance, focusing on broad topics such as Jihad, women, Jews, or Christians. Here, I am a little less convinced that Fernandez-Morera has made his case. While I do think the broad outlines of what Fernandez-Morera says are broadly true, I can find some examples of analytical overreach. For example, the colonial practice of renaming places in order to assert control comes up in several chapters. Broadly, this is correct, but footnote 119 in Chapter 1 says:

Ironically, the word Istanbul, used to eliminate the memory of the politically and religiously charged Constantinople, arises from the conquerors' mispronounciation of the Greek phrase εις τήν πόλι "eesteen pohlee" or "To the Polis!"—that is, "to the CIty!", or "to Constantinople!"
That is certainly one interpretation. Another is that the invading Turks ended up calling the city the exact same thing the locals had been calling it for 1,000 years: "the City". In a strange twist, this ended up confirming my prior belief that any idea labeling itself as "colonialism" is probably dumb. [although I am open to alternative explanations]

I also suspect some exaggeration by exclusion in the chapter on the Jews. While I appreciate the important context that Jews were used by the invading Muslims as a counter to the initially more numerous Catholics, the Jews themselves seem to have enjoyed the wealth and status that resulted, at least until the more literal-minded Almoravids and Almohads showed up and ruined the party.

On the gripping hand, I wept for the Visigoth culture of Spain that was destroyed by the invading Berber armies. All that remains now is a few ruins, and the Mozarabic rite of the Catholic Church. If you want a flavor for what might have been, then L. Sprague de Camp's classic Lest Darkness Fall imagines a world in which the Visigoths weren't destroyed [albeit helped by a visitor from the future].

I ultimately found this an interesting book, but probably one I remain cautious about. I am not really familiar with the popular historical literature that Fernandez-Morera is reacting against, and I suspect that the book would probably seem far more reasonable in light of the many foolish assertions made on this subject. Considered in isolation, I think many of the things said are narrowly true, and perhaps broadly a bit misleading, but that is very context dependent. I think this book is worth a read as a counterweight to far more seriously flawed popular histories of Islamic Spain. ( )

This is a quite strongly worded rebuttal of the currently widely held view that Islamic Spain (especially before the Almoravid invasion in the late 1000s) was an exceptionally tolerant culture marked by the "convivencia" (peaceful coexistence) of Islamic, Christian and Jewish peoples. So far, I have only gotten as far as the Muslim conquest, which he insists was essentially Muslim,not pirmarily an Arab or Berber ethnic migration as some scholars suggest. Personally, I accept that as true, though a lot of the evidence he adduces so far is simply Islamic law of the Malikite school later influential in Spain,which praises the practice of jihad in the sense of military conquest of unbelievers. . I recall many years ago at Yale I had a graduate class in Islamic Spain with John Boswell, who favored a less military interpretation of the conquest and assigned me a reading from one of the early Christian chronicles which he supposed supported that view; I did not see the passage as evidence for that interpretation and actually checked to make sure I had read the right selection (which I had).

Reading further on, I till find a lot of irrelevant material.The writer also does not clearly differentiate between material from sources close to the events and others written much later. It is true that later ones can be based on lost earlier material, but he needs to explain when that is true and why he believes later sources are credible. Some of the material he quotes about the vast riches gained in the conquest, which he uses as evidence of the advanced qualities of Visigothic culture, sound to me simply like the typical exaggerations added as history turns into legend. These include the great table of precious metal, the giant silver pillars, the quantities of rubies and emeralds, and the numbers of extraordinarily beautiful slave girls. i can believe the conquerors took loot and slaves, but the descriptions sound hyperbolic.
There is also at least one actual error --he says the caliph al-Mamun instituted his "inquisition' to suppress the rationalistic doctrines influenced by Greek philosophy, but in fact al-Mamun accepted those doctrines and his "inquisition" was supposed to suppress the opposition to them by the group who emerged ultimately as the successful orthodox theologians. ( )