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    The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
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    The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
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    The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
    Ebook456 pages10 hours

    The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

    By Dario Fernandez Morera

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Scholars, journalists, and politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—“al-Andalus”—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony.
     
    There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: it is a myth.
     
    In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shines light on hidden features of this medieval culture by drawing on an abundance of primary sources that scholars have ignored, as well as archaeological evidence only recently unearthed.
     
    This supposed beacon of peaceful coexistence began, of course, with the Islamic Caliphate’s conquest of Spain. Far from a land of tolerance, Islamic Spain was marked by religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life, and by the marginalization of Christians and other groups—all this in the service of social control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities.
     
    As professors, politicians, and pundits continue to celebrate Islamic Spain for its “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” Fernández-Morera sets the record straight—showing that a politically useful myth is a myth nonetheless.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 9, 2016
    ISBN9781504034692
    Unavailable
    The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
    Author

    Dario Fernandez Morera

    Darío Fernández-Morera is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. A former member of the National Council on the Humanities, he holds a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD from Harvard University. He has authored several books and many articles on cultural, literary, historical, and methodological issues in Spain, Latin America, and the United States.

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    Reviews for The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

    3.5/5

    25 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is very much a provocative work that spends more time attempting to debunk the "mythic" history of Andalusian Spain under the rule of Islam than it does on providing a history of that era. The result is a somewhat frustrating read as this reader was continually questioning the arguments being present by the author. A polemical work that presumably was made necessary by the the scholarship of the era that the author believes is sloppy if not outright fraudulent.
    • 2/5
      I read the introduction and was interested enough to start reading the first chapter. The author claims that Spanish Jews were left in charge of numerous towns and cities (Cordoba!) after the Moors conquered them. This enabled them to rapidly overtake much of Spain. I find it impossible to believe that a small minority population of Spanish Jews could subjugate and quell the blowback from the recently defeated Christians. I had to stop reading. The author appears to be deeply devoted to an alternate history mostly supported by historic texts written long after the events he describes took place.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Deeply researched, full of facts, well organized and easy to read.
      Allows the reader to grasp the reality of living as a conquered, oppressed, enslaved, forcefully assimilated, extorted, deported, plundered and massacred-at -will Christian community.
      A courageous book, which goes against the dominant discourse successively held by English Protestants, French anticlericals and Qatari-funded American scholars, all people strongly prejudiced against Spanish Catholicism ; a book which clearly describes how intolerant, murderous, unequal and oppressive the successive Islamic rulers were in Hispania.
      Read and see the truth behind the touristic cliché of the beautiful mosque of Cordoba (actually a cannibalized cathedral).
    • 1/5
      Very poorly received by respected historians.
      Will appeal to the choir.

      4 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      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.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The Myth of the Andalusian Paradiseby Dario Fernandez-MoreraISI Press 2016$29.95; 358 pagesISBN 978161017095It 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.

      1 person found this helpful