The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain

The Standard of Excellence & A Must Read Book!“The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” is a wake-up call written in a silver-tongued and nitpicking style by Professor Darío Fernández-Morera, Ph.D. Harvard University, who teaches courses in Golden Age and Medieval Spanish culture, literature, and history at Northwestern University. He is an outstanding and honest scholar.This book not only demolishes all fabrications and figments of the academic imagination about Christians, Jews and Muslims living in a pluralist Islamic Golden Age but also puts on the map a fact-based account of a medieval Spain largely controlled by Muslims that has been hidden by the politically correct academia and media establishment.The author stands by the idea of searching for the truth of the matter, wherever it may lead, even if the search uncovers unpleasant facts and naked struggles for power, an approach advocated and exemplified by the brilliant Italian political and cultural thinker Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 - 21 June 1527), whose well known motto opens and informs the book: “it has seemed to me better to go directly to the truth of the matter rather than to the imagining of it” and by the Muslim political thinker Ibn Ẓafar al-Ṣiqillī (1104-1170/72): “[priority must be given] to what is real rather than approximation,” (p. 9).The book comprises 17 pages of an excellent introduction, 223 pages of facts-supported narrative, generous quotes from primary and secondary Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sources, and a methodically documented narrative with historiographical accuracy, verified and validated by 95 pages of explanatory endnotes and detailed references and 11 pages of primary and secondary bibliographical entries.Fernández-Morera challenges academia’s politically correct re/interpretation of the past shaped by the present-day ideological mission of the progressives. He shows the truth of the invasion of Hispania by Muslim-Arab-led Berbers, and unmasks, among other things, the academics’ obliviousness to Christian and Islamic testimonies from al-Andalus in their academically opinionated and misleading research that obfuscates the obvious truth --which should be at the heart of every high--principled researcher--about medieval Spain from the Fall of the Western Roman Empire until the Age of Discovery.The author provides ample evidence from both primary and secondary Christian, Muslim and Jewish sources to demonstrate that: “By the end of the twelfth century, as a result of flight (or “migration”) to Christian lands, expulsions to North Africa, executions, and conversions, the Christian dhimmi population had largely disappeared from al-Andalus. When Christians entered Granada in 1492, there were no Christian dhimmis in the city.” Though very few Christians were left by the end of the twelfth century, Christian civilization had been effectively destroyed in Islamic Spain long before the end of the twelfth century.Using archeological and textual evidence from great Spanish and French scholars, Fernández-Morera shows that a brilliant Hispano-Roman-Visigoth civilization existed in Christian Spain before the Muslim conquest and that this civilization was destroyed by Muslims, who eventually replaced it with their own. He also shows the cultural connections between this Christian Visigoth Spain and the Christian Eastern (or Greek) Roman empire, and how Visigoths assimilated to this civilization, in contrast to Muslims, who destroyed it after taking what they found of practical use in it.He brings to light that: “all too often, books in English do not show a mastery of the work of Spanish scholars.” (p. 9). Too many meritorious Spanish researchers and their investigations, which this book draws upon (Felipe Maillo Salgado, Serafin Fanjul, Luis A. García Moreno, etc.) have been ignored by many academics.So have been great French scholars, this book cites repeatedly such as: Dominique Urvoy, Jacques Fontaine, Christine Pellisandri, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, Marie Therese Urvoy and many others.That during their control of large parts of medieval Espanna (he shows that the name España is an evolved form of Hispania, then Spania and then Espanna) from 710 to 1492, Muslims enslaved or tyrannized and kept under their thumb by means of Jihad and of sharia law the Christian population has not been acknowledged, and has been a fact glossed over by many university “scholars” for the sake of their ideologically or self-interested driven Weltanschaung about the era of Moorish supremacy in medieval Islamic Spain.Fernández-Morera warns readers: “be cautious and keep in mind the differences that exist between the medieval and the modern worlds of Islam, Judaism and Christianity before trying to find reassuring or disturbing similarities between the two. And [the book] it rejects all anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, and anti-Christian viewpoints. Or, as modern critical jargon would put it: readers should keep in mind that the texts examined are ‘historically situated cultural constructs.’” (p. 10).The use of the sources unveiled by Fernández-Morera about so called “tolerant Muslim culture” and “pluralism” involves a sound methodology where the truth value of a historical account or a juridical statement increases when antagonistic sources agree on its veracity; thus in a narrative where “both Muslim and Christian sources mention a story that, even if apocryphal, illustrates the knowledge of the tactical use of terror in psychological warfare. Shortly after the Islamic forces landed, the flesh of the cadavers of some Christians killed in battle were boiled in large cauldrons under the sight of terrified Christian prisoners, who became convinced that the Muslims were cannibals.” (p. 37).We learn from the primary sources that Musa, the supreme leader of the Islamic conquest, “burned any city that resisted, crucified the nobility and the older men,’ and ‘cut into pieces the young men and the infants,’” (p. 38). “A priest leading a Christian community asked of the Muslims warriors what they wanted. The priest was then told that he had ‘three options; either Islam or Jizyah or the sword.’” (p. 47). Afterwards when Musa wrote to his caliph, he described the conquest as ‘not a conquest, but the Judgment Day.’” (p. 48).Islamic law subjugating Christians was clear: [The Jew and the Christian]: “they must on the contrary be abhorred and shunned and should not be greeted with the formula, ‘Peace be with you,’ for the devil has gained mastery over them and has made them forget the name of God. They are the devil’s party, ‘and indeed the devil’s party are the losers.’” [(Qur’an, 57: 22), p. 113]. “In 919 the head judge of tolerant Umayyad Córdoba invoked the punishment that contemporary sharia law prescribed against a Christian woman accused and found guilty of having said publicly that Jesus was God and that Muhammad was a liar who pretended to be a prophet: ‘whoever deprecates Allah, praised be Allah, or deprecates his Messenger, peace be upon him, be he a Muslim or an infidel, he must be killed and must be allowed to repent.’” (p. 125). According to the early-tenth-century writer Ibn al-Faqil “Arabs in Iraq were superior to the Slavs and the blacks because the sun cooked them just right: the Slavs were undercooked and therefore had a color between ‘blond, buff, blanched, and leprous,’ while the blacks were overcooked by the sun and therefore ‘overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds and depraved passions, such as the Zanj, the Ethiopians, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between them.’” (p. 165).“A Muslim who raped a free Christian woman must be lashed; a Christian who raped a free Muslim woman must be killed. Whoever calumniated a Muslim must be flogged, but whoever calumniated a Christian was not flogged. Whereas a Christian was allowed to convert to Islam, a Muslim was forbidden, under punishment of death, to convert to a different faith.” (pp. 210-211).Citing a Muslim source from the Umayyad period (661-750), this book shows that one of the main exports of Umayyad al-Andalus was slaves, that most white eunuchs in the world came from Spain, and that blond women from Christian lands were the most desired sexual slaves. We also learn that all Umayyad rulers descended from white sexual slaves and as a result many of these rulers were blond or red haired and even blue-eyed, as was ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, by name Al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (Arabic: “Victor for the Religion of Allah,” born January 891 and died October 15, 961, Córdoba), who tinted his hair black to look more Arabic.My question to all politically correct scholars is: does it look like a land of tolerance or terror? No wonder that you do not say that the evidence that he cites from juridical, historical, and religious sources from Christians, Muslims and Jews is false, but try instead to distract potential readers of this book by attacking his credentials or his motives, in the sort of variations on the ad hominem attack that those who have no arguments against the evidence presented against their beliefs attempt to use it in order to deflect the narrative by attacking the messenger of the bad news.With good sense, Fernández-Morera fairly asks the following question neglected by politically correct academic professors and fake news: “How can Hispano-Roman-Visigoth Spain be portrayed as a land of ‘Dark Ages gloom and depression’ while Islamic Spain is hailed as ‘the pride and the ornament of the world, the most illustrious part of the earth? Why has the history of both Islamic Spain and its Hispano-Roman-Visigoth predecessor been so distorted?” (pp. 81-82).After all, more astonishing are some “politically correct inventors” who either deliberately or because of shoddy research missed by a mile archeological discoveries, primary sources, great secondary sources by excellent scholars, first-rate analysis and the train of thought of the research achieved by Professor Fernández-Morera.As a result of my examination of this book I attest to Professor Fernández-Morera’s integrity and endorse his academic honesty, intellectual bravery and logic to genuinely speak the truth about medieval Hispania, based on his reliable knowledge of history and the Christian and Arabic primary sources against the pro-Islamic politically correct nonsense, dishonesty and disinformation, disseminated by the Western academe, which misrepresented the persuasive evidence and continues to go along with a bogus and disingenuous explanation of “convivencia,” to advocate their phony “multicultural harmony” inside Islam, and to humanize the barbarian acts, propagating their fake news about a peaceful and tolerant Muslim civilization in the Iberian Peninsula when in point of fact Medieval Islamic Spain was anything but toleration.I believe that this contribution to understanding the truth about the myth of tolerance and pluralism in the “Golden Age” of Islam is a must-read book in schools, colleges and universities instead of the unscientific and ideologically driven nonsense invented by some scholars, among them Islamic Studies as well as medieval studies experts. These experts, believing to have a monopoly on the study of Islamic Spain by reason of their specialization, have deprived us for too long of access to the reality of the conquest, occupation of medieval Spain, and the destruction of Christianity in Islamic Spain for centuries until the Christians managed to reconquer the land in a political and military effort probably unequalled in history: the Spanish reconquest of the land from Islamic claws in a struggle that lasted several centuries.The author deserves our gratitude for setting the record straight, demolishing the lies about the fantasized Islamic Golden Age, presenting irrefutable facts, documenting the realistic picture of Islamic history, and exposing the unhistorical fantasy, produced by a politically correct academia by amply quoting the academics’ own foolish writings, and risking the ad hominem attacks that those endangered and evidently terrified by his research throw against him. It must be particularly irksome to so many specialists in Islamic “studies” that the book calls attention to the lavish and compromising amounts of money given to centers for Islamic “Studies” by Muslim governments and benefactors such as the disgraced Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose name many Islamic “studies” centers in many universities bear.My congratulations to Professor Darío Fernández-Morera.

Author Fernández-Morera is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In this book he subjects to a withering critique a widespread superstition that Islam, during the “middle ages,” created a superior civilization characterized by interfaith harmony (convivencia) and “tolerance,” as that concept might be understood by today’s ideological multiculturalists. The habit of fostering agenda-driven approaches to history is, of course, not new, but to the extent that the so-called “Golden Age of Islam” is used in contemporary discourse and education as a hedge to counter “Islamophobia,” this book offers an important clarification.The myth, stated succinctly, holds that while Europe was mired in the ignorance of its “dark ages,” Islam flourished as an enlightened civilization which not only preserved classical learning but passed it on to the West, making possible the greatness of the European Renaissance. The essence of this myth has been stated publicly by president Barack Obama, and in many elementary and secondary schools throughout America. Colleges and universities also foster it through programs of “multicultural understanding” or programs of Islamic Studies (most of which are heavily funded by Saudi Arabia).The author begins with a clarification of an issue that is tediously and dishonestly muddled by politicians and fashionable academics—the notion that the concept of jihad is mis-applied as a description of the “shock and awe” tactics of conquest seen in the expansion of the Islamic empire in the century following the death of Muhammad. Islamic texts reveal clearly that jihad is, however nuanced it may be, a device of religiously motivated warfare. Fernández-Morera cites the legal texts of the Maliki school of Islamic law prevalent in al-Andalus. “They do not talk of a ‘spiritual inner struggle,’ or of some kind of ‘self-perfecting exertion’: they talk of war against infidels—a Sacred Combat, or Holy War, or Holy Struggle, or whatever other name one may choose to give this religiously mandated war against infidels.”Indeed, the Maliki school of Islamic “jurisprudence”—the most rigid of the four major schools—prevailed in the alleged paradise of Andalusia (the Arabic re-named designation for Spain). The historical commentaries, both Islamic and Christian/Jewish, testify to widespread depredations carried out by the conquerors of the nascent and creative Hispano-Roman-Visigothic civilization emerging in Spain. One Muslim chronicle characterizes the conquest as so absolute that he describes “not a conquest, but the Judgment Day.”Nor did the ongoing administration of life in Islamic Spain represent the multicultural harmony today’s myth-makers envision. Jews and Christians were allowed to “practice” their faiths so long as it was not publicly expressed or shared. New churches could not be built, nor older ones renovated, and the special protection tax (jizya) imposed on non-Muslims was meant, specifically, to symbolize their state of humiliation. These are just a few of the many features of the institution of dhimmitude that is central to Islamic law. Fernández-Morera vividly defines what the system of dhimmitude really was (and is, where it may be applied today): “A basic fact is lost in discussions and arguments about the details of the life of the Christian dhimmis of Spain . . . and about how much or how little they benefited from Islamic ‘toleration’—namely, that they were by definition a subaltern group, a fourth-or fifth- class marginalized people in a hierarchical society, and that they were the victims of an extortion system, the dhimma, that gave them the choice that gangsters give to their victims: pay to be protected, or else.” [italics in book’s text]Culturally, the Islamic “golden age” was heavily dependent on the achievements of the prior, and superior, civilizations conquered by the Islamic armies. Contrary to the popular characterization of civilization being “saved” by the glories of Islamic enlightenment, most of the intellectual achievements of Islamic civilization were derived from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian scholars. The sustaining and recovery of classical learning would have taken place without, and perhaps even more powerfully, without the spread of Islam. “The Visigothic kingdom had functioned as a preserver of classical culture in the difficult centuries after the disintegration of the Western (Latin) Christian Roman Empire, and was in the process of creating a new Visigoth-Hispano-Roman civilization of its own, in part by drawing upon the classical legacy of the Roman Empire preserved in the Christian Greek Roman Empire [with its center in Constantinople].”Many other cultural “innovations” attributed to Islam, it turns out, have their origins elsewhere, including the famous so-called “Arabic numerals,” which originated in India. Citing scholar of Islam Dominique Urvoy, even the Arabic script so noted for its beauty and power “may have been invented by Christian missionaries from the Christianized Arab city of Hira in ancient Iraq.” Also significant is the Maliki school’s prohibition on musical instruments and songs (a prohibition that is embraced by other schools of Islamic “jurisprudence” to this day).Of special interest to this reviewer is the author’s citation of how Islamic art and architecture depended on Muslim “cannibalization” of previous classical and Christian art forms, concepts, and techniques. Interestingly, even the typical “Islamic” horseshoe arch with its alternating striped decoration was known and employed in Visigothic Spain prior to the Muslim presence. [To this day, the archetypal Islamic mosque reflects dependency on Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, the greatest architectural structure in the Christian world in ancient times.]Instead of representing a convivencia, Fernández-Morera sees Islamic Spain as more a situation of precaria coexistencia between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, all of which were suspicious of outsiders and acted to protect their intra-community authority. Nor was Islamic Spain without its periodic massacres and revolts by groups who chafed under the institution of dhimmitude.The author gives significant attention to the Reconquista, the centuries-long efforts of Spanish people to reclaim their land from the Islamic program of colonialization and destruction of cultural memory (through the Arabizing of names of towns, regions, architectural destruction, etc.). The result of the Reconquista, in which ultimately Islam was expelled from the land (and therefore viewed negatively by conventional academic culture), was the flourishing of Spanish lyric and narrative poetry, the presence of such historical figures as Saint Teresa of Avila, Miguel de Cervantes, painters like Diego Velasquez and El Greco. One is led to meditate on what would have been the effect of subsequent European civilization had Charles Martel not gathered an army to meet and defeat the Muslim colonialist armies at Tours in 732, or if Poland’s John Sobieski had not acted similarly to defend the gates of Vienna in 1683 against the rampaging jihadists of the Ottoman Muslims. Given what we know of Islamic law, we would not, today, have the art of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and countless others, nor the Louvre or Vatican museums among others.“Ideas,” as Richard Weaver observed so powerfully in his book of that title, “have consequences.” In this regard, Darío Fernández-Morera presents and defends his thesis that “few periods in history have been more misrepresented than that of Islamic Spain.” It is sad to reflect that in today’s atmosphere of threat (in response to “offensive” ideas) and multiculturalist ideological tyranny, the author earns and deserves the designation of “courageous.” One would hope that the book would have an impact in the educational world, but, as they say, don’t hold your breath.