May 2019
Review Article
THE MYTH OF THE ANDALUSIAN PARADISE:
Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain
by Professor Darío Fernández-Morera. ISI books (2016), pp. 336.
Available from Amazon in Hardback, Kindle edition & Audio CD.
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled
with the entrails of the last priest.
- Denis Diderot
It certainly seems like they hate us.
Who are “they”? They are the reprobate Western elites who infest our governments, our media, our corporations, and, especially, our universities.
Who are “we”? We few, we happy few, we band of brothers are the keepers of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and Holy Mother Church.
They hate us because we, the anachronism that we are, continue to exist when we should have been extirpated from history long ago. They hate us because they have sold their souls to the Father of Lies and cannot bear that we have the temerity to remain aloof. But we, if we persevere in faith and good works, have heaven within our grasp. Their power then is as transitory as transitory gets: we struggle for what lasts — they struggle for what is ephemeral. No wonder our Lord cautioned us that the wise will be foolish and the foolish will be wise.
What this practically means is that the contemporary “culture” produced by them has virtually no value for us. Indeed, what future generations will marvel at when the chronicles of this age are written is the astonishing cultural wasteland that we inhabited. Thus, like everything else cultural and intellectual, the only things worth reading today are generally written by authors who are long dead. Those authors lived in worlds not so congenitally hostile to our Lord and Holy Mother Church. Fortunately, or at least until our technology masters erase the past, there are enough good things to read to last several lifetimes. But occasionally, something new and good slips through our censors. But it is rarer indeed when something great slips through — something that tells our story and speaks of our civilisation and culture. We have been cultural dhimmis for far too long.
All Hail Al-Andalus
Speaking of dhimmis, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (hereafter "The Myth") by Professor Darío Fernández-Morera is just such a work — a truly great and contemporary one.
As one might remember, the Muslims from North Africa invaded Spain in 711 and defeated the Visigothic army. Within a decade, Muslim invaders subjugated almost the entire Iberian Peninsula. Famously, the Muslim advance was checked by the inestimable Charles Martel in 732 at the Battle of Tours, but, for the next eight centuries, Muslims ruled parts of Spain until the last Muslim prince surrendered Granada to Spain’s Catholic Monarchs in 1492. Spain is thus one of the few places in the world in which Muslim territorial aggrandisement and cultural asphyxiation were checked and reversed, and the conquered culture and civilisation reclaimed its political power.
During their domination of Spain (or parts thereof), the Muslims "Arabised" and erased — demographically, architecturally and culturally — Spain’s Visigothic and Catholic past. Spain itself became Al-Andalus. The story of that domination and erasure is the subject matter of Professor Fernández-Morera's work. It is told within the context of rebutting the contemporary hypothesis of Western academicians and Muslim apologists that Islamic Spain was a land of an admirable "Convivencia" in which Jews, Christians and Muslims lived and co-operated with one another in a remarkable "Golden Age" of diversity. To hear them tell the tale, Christians, Jews and Muslims under Islamic rule in Spain lived with one another with tolerance that allowed a flowering of an outstanding multicultural civilisation the likes of which has never been seen since.
If that sounds too good to be true — too convenient — when one considers that "diversity" and "pluralism" are used by Western elites as cultural cudgels to erase, as it were, any positive connotation of historic and classical Western Civilisation and especially that of Catholicism, you are correct. Indeed, today’s cultural annihilators who detest the West evidently have a soft spot for yesterday’s cultural annihilators: who did their best to destroy the West a thousand years ago.
It is one thing, however, simply to know intuitively that the idea of "Convivencia" must be false because the very notion contradicts what we know and understand about Islam. Having that highly questionable thesis savaged — part by part — in an exhaustive and comprehensive fashion is quite another. At the service of this latter task is The Myth: an evisceration of the jejune and contemporary lie that Muslim Spain was an example of harmonious cooperation in a pluralistic wonderland. And when I write that the good professor deconstructs this myth systematically, I genuinely mean it. And not just systematically but using the vital yet hitherto neglected primary sources:namely, the very chroniclers (Muslim, Jewish and Christian) who lived during the period and understood its values first-hand, whose then-contemporary commentaries the good Professor has translated from the original languages!
So, instead of Islamicised Madison, Wisconsin, superimposed upon the plains of Al-Andalus, we find instead — authoritatively and unquestionably — an abominable cauldron of violence, oppression, humiliation, sexual bondage and war. It is so far removed from our (admittedly imperfect) civilisation, that it is impossible even to imagine.
The "Convivencia" Delusion Shattered
The Myth is organised both in historic and thematic fashion. With delicious pointedness, Professor Fernández-Morera begins each chapter with some recent hagiographic epigraph from the current professoriate extolling Al-Andalus, then quickly renders it tragically comical when it is juxtaposed with factual and brutal aspects of the Islamic Spanish experience.
During the best of times for the Christian and Jew, it was a religious and cultural apartheid in which both were second- or third-class (or worse) inhabitants. Part of the myth of Convivencia is based upon the contributions made by some Jews and Christians to the ruling Muslim hegemony. But, as Fernández-Morera makes clear, these periods were informed primarily by Christians and Jews (in Spain and elsewhere) possessed of a superior culture to that of their Muslim overlords and thus used from time to time in the administrative or architectural reordering of Spanish life.
In the worst of times, which was far more often, Christians and Jews in Spain were the humiliated subjects of intolerant Muslim rulers who could kill, enslave or deport them on a whim. Perhaps worse still, the periods of relatively calm apartheid were punctuated for no reason with episodic bouts of violence and repression. What’s more, Fernández-Morera thoroughly details the prevailing strict jurisprudence in Islamic Spain that guided Muslim rulers in the application of the law as it pertained to all three religious communities.
Instead of "strawberry fields forever," we find that Jews and Christians were segregated in their dhimmi communities and burdened with the humiliation of the jizha (or "extortion" tax). Over time, the combination of an intentional political and social humiliation, flight or deportation from Muslim-controlled areas, conversion (sincere, forced or otherwise), slavery and murder eventually de-Christianised almost all Southern Spain. Using contemporary sources (taken from all three communities) Fernández-Morera plainly lays out how each group did its best to segregate from one another.
Truly, when taken in its entire context, the myth of Convivencia is tantamount to antebellum firebrand extolling of how much African-American slaves enjoyed their involuntary servitude, or how much Native Americans enjoyed their cultural and physical displacement during the European conquest of the Americas.
Another interesting aspect of this work is that Professor Fernández-Morera demonstrates that those instances of co-operation that serve as the grist for the Convivencia mill were frequently lamented by contemporary Muslim scholars and scribes: as evidence of the failure of particular Islamic rulers to abide by the demands of ruling an Islamic state. Thus, occurrences of the famed Convivencia were isolated and exceptions; quickly lamented by Muslims as lapses of judgment and Muslim propriety.
Moreover, Islamic Spain adopted the most severe form of Islamic jurisprudence of the several varieties that existed in the Muslim world. In other words, far from a liberal enclave within greater Islam, Muslim Spain was one of the more conservative corners of the Islamic world during its tenure. Professor Fernández-Morera demonstrates the virtual police-state quality of Al-Andalus religious functionaries who ruthlessly enforced the prevailing norms of Muslim piety.
To emphasise that The Myth is a probative reading of our history, the author spends a great deal of time defining terms. He refuses, for example, to refer to Medieval Spain as "Iberia." He documents that no contemporary during the period in question ever referred to the place as Iberia or its inhabitants as Iberians. He proffers that the standard use of Iberia by today’s academics is done to rob today’s Spaniards of legitimacy within their own country. It is a subtle way to convert the Reconquista of Hispania into the Spanish conquest of Iberia. The defeated Christians, from the beginning of the invasion, understood that the occupied territory was Spain, and they further understood that they were Spaniards. Similarly, Fernández-Morera refuses to use the term "Byzantine" to describe what he calls the Greek Roman Christian Empire. Like the use of Iberia, the term Byzantine was never used by the Greco-Roman Christians to describe themselves or their country. He suggests the imposition of Byzantine is just another way to 'otherise' Greco-Roman Christians from their co-religionists in the West.
Taken together, both semantic devices are deployed to sow definitional confusion — to rend what was one cohesive civilisation (albeit with geographic, linguistic, cultural and even religious variations) and define it down to artificially differentiated parts that suggests, without directly saying so, that no such greater civilisation existed.
We did not need Professor Fernández-Morera to destroy the utter absurdity of the contemporary myth of the Convivencia and the splendid pluralism and humanism of Medieval Islamic society in Spain. But it's certainly helpful that he did. Notwithstanding Islam’s famous modesty, the Professor does not shirk from making sure we know, in fulsome detail, that this Muslim Emperor has
no clothes.
Why They Lie
It is interesting why so many of today’s "scholars" continue to push this ridiculous narrative of a Golden Age of the Convivencia in Islamic Spain. Their push to do so creates a closed network loop in which the media uncritically apes the "experts" in Spanish history to further push out this narrative. Thus, if this period is ever mentioned in the popular media, one can be sure that some mention will be made of the Convivencia of Al-Andalus, and another will be made of the horrors of the Spanish Catholics.
The cumulative effect of this ephemeral and repeated lie is to program a populace to believe that which is demonstratively false. A similar example of this phenomenon is the "Crusades," which have been academically and popularly re-branded as lamentable episodes of proto-European imperialistic wars of aggression against a peaceful Muslim population, when in fact they were defensive wars fought after centuries of brutal Islamic aggression. Taken together, both historic Spain and the Crusades are filthy ideas in the programming of our people undertaken by Western elites.
Why? It has often struck conservatives as odd that Western liberals embrace and apologise for Islam and its relentless history of violent conquest but condemn, in the most hyperbolic terms, generally peaceable Christians of all stripes in their own midst.
Consider the irony of the so-called "Women’s March" following the election of Donald J. Trump as President. There, mostly middle-aged and angry White women protested the ascendancy of Trump and his cohorts. Part of the protests involved opposition to his hard words on Islamic immigration to the United States, which itself was based on the cultural differences between modern Western countries and Islamic societies. Some were shocked to see steadfast liberal White women wearing the hijab in solidarity with Muslims. If we consider that the hijab is a marker of the subjugation of women in Islamic societies, and if we further consider that these angry White women would be reduced to domestic and sexual servants if Islam ever gained political power in the United States, it is strange that one of the sacramentals of modern feminism has become the hijab. Then again, logic and consistency have never been hallmarks of modern feminism.
All of this makes sense if we consider that Western elites do not see Islam as a meaningful threat. In their private moments they dismiss it as a hopelessly backwards and repressive culture that has no future. Rather, the threat that they fear is a revitalised Christianity that begins to reassert its cultural prerogatives and identity. Christianity — and not Islam — has the ability to offer a competing vision for cultural primacy against secular-humanism. Indeed, we already have demonstrated that we can create a beautiful and rich civilisation and culture of art, music, architecture, literature, philosophy, science and industry that is morally and spiritually satisfying. The modern liberal is doing his very best to hide, obfuscate and distort that civilisational potential latent in today’s work-a-day Christians by inventing counter-narratives that, while ridiculous and false, nonetheless create a drip-drip impression of historic plausibility. If this analysis seems far-fetched, consider that the modern Left does not despise ordinary Christians per se, but seeks to destroy any Christian who calls his brethren to realise the political and cultural potential inherent in the recovery of what has been lost in the shipwreck of the Reformation and Enlightenment periods.
Thus, do not see the incongruity when you see a feminist in a hijab. Instead, see it as complementary ideological programme of our destruction. The Left has no use for Christian culture and, unlike Islam, there is not even the concept of dhimmitude for us. We are to be destroyed.But the programme for our destruction is to be accomplished by the very warping of our minds such that we see our heroes as villains and our villains as heroes. Works like this book are vitally important because, by exposing the counter-narrative, two things are demonstrated to the Christian reader: one, the falsity of the mythic Andalusian Convivencia; and two, the reason why such a myth was ever constructed in the first place.
The second question is one that needs be answered by the sincere Christian; an answer that leads squarely down the rabbit hole and, with God’s grace, to the realisation that we are in a fight for civilisational survival whether we know it or not.
A Meditation on Dhimmitude
To repeat myself: although the falsity of the Convivencia myth is known to some degree or another, it is more than helpful to have its rebuttal summarised so adroitly by the admirable Professor Fernández-Morera, who has doubtless been attacked for his academic integrity. But if this book were merely the restatement of the obvious — that medieval life for Christians and Jews under Islam in Spain was atrocious — I would not recommend it so highly.
To go one step further, for the observant Catholic, this painstaking piece of scholarship, while not religious per se, almost constitutes spiritual reading. Yes, it is a history of conflict, violence and unspeakable horrors that overwhelmingly rebuts the sophistry of today’s academics. Yet it is much more than that. What makes The Myth so compelling is that it is a spiritual mediation on the dhimmitude of our forefathers in faith. As mentioned above, Professor Fernández-Morera has written our story — the story of Catholic suffering and cultural desolation in Islamic Spain. He reminds us of the nascent Visigothic culture that was cut down as a cultural sapling. To read The Myth is to remember them — to remember their sufferings — to pray for their souls — to redouble our efforts to live a genuinely Christian life and rebuild the culture of our fathers in the Faith.
This is not then a book of Christian saints versus the infidels. It is a story of ordinary Christian men and women, faults and all, enduring a cultural rape of historic proportions; a meditation on the cruellest form of Christian suffering.
It is the sadness of seeing a Christian Kingdom overrun by an alien and inferior culture. It is the sadness of Christian churches burned, torn down or converted into mosques. The sadness of precious relics, vestments, chalices, and crosses of great workmanship destroyed, melted down or burned. The sadness of the burning of our books that robbed us of the history of our Christian forefathers. The sadness of Christian women forcibly taken into sexual slavery for all parts of the Islamic world. The sadness of Christian children taken to be raised as Muslims.
It is the sadness of seeing the Christian’s status as a freeman reduced to a hollowed-out second-class dhimmi. It is the sadness of reflecting on a glorious way of life slowly but surely suffocated by an Islamic anaconda that gives no cultural room to breathe or grow. The sadness of contemplating those Christians who gave up the fight against the cruel humiliation and slavery of dhimmitude and converted away from their ancestral faith, and thereafter consigned their future generations to that religion. It is the sadness of seeing a great culture of science, architecture, worship and law erased from the pages of history and recast as "barbarian" by intellectual knaves.
And beyond deep sadness, it is the horror of witnessing a cultural genocide that was perpetrated with an unnerving level of brutality. Though the myth of the Convivencia is preposterous on its face, the reality is far worse than rebutting the argument of hopeless, cowardly academics — it is coming face to face with the terror of Islamic political domination.
Further, as Professor Fernández-Morera underlines throughout, this cultural genocide was not a Spanish phenomenon: it stretched from wherever military victories delivered territory to Muslim invaders. So, we lost a vibrant, learned and advanced Christian world when we lost the southern half of Christendom (including Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa and greater Greece and Anatolia). Have we had our differences? Of course, but the reality is that we were a people and culture united in baptism and sacramental life. The fracturing of that world and its replacement by an inferior culture leaves us withered in ways we cannot fathom.
No Catholic Whitewash
Professor Fernández-Morera does not whitewash our history either. While he differentiates our infliction of suffering on Jews and Muslims when we returned to power, he rightly points out the shameful episodes of our cruelty and stupidity. The Catholic Monarchs are rightly admired as heroes in a heroic age, but, arguably, they erred in their decision to expel the Jewish population — a successful and talented people — in 1492. In my own view, it was a terrible decision that did untold damage to Spain.
The thread of anti-Jewishness that connects the Visigothic Kingdom and the later Spanish realm is a black mark that cannot be obscured. It doesn’t matter that animosity existed between the communities, and it further does not matter that the Christians of that era reasonably viewed the Sephardic community as a fifth column of Islamic aggression; a group that had co-operated with Muslims against Catholics for centuries. While we cannot adequately put ourselves in the shoes of another people — let alone when they are separated from us by five hundred years — we can say that the principles of Catholicism frown decidedly against the sort of corporate expulsion inflicted upon the Jews. The better coda to this story would have been to demonstrate that a genuine Convivencia could have existed in post-Islamic Spain between Jews and Catholics (as it did, for example, in the Italian Peninsula).
In other words, Catholicism in political and cultural terms has been defined by its cultural flourishing, learning and adornment — not by its subtraction and expulsions. I believe that this episode sullies what should have been a story of unmitigated Catholic heroism, redemptive suffering and holiness.
Post-script
The only instances of complete de-Islamification of which I am aware, occurred in Spain and the Philippines. While other areas, like the Balkans and Central Europe were recovered from Ottoman Muslims, those reconquests did not involve the reconversion, as it were, of the native population. Spain and the Philippines both involved a political re-conquest followed by a re-conversion of Muslims. And both times, the Spanish accomplished it. We Catholics owe far more to Spain than any other Catholic people — they, and they alone, bested the Muslims with tenacity and bravery.
That the Muslims must hate the Spanish above all Christian peoples is proof enough. They alone converted the Americas and the Philippines, and countless saints have flourished because of the great Spanish missionaries who undertook the arduous adventure of bringing the joy of the Gospel to foreign and often hostile lands. As living proof that suffering can be redemptive if united with our Lord, the centuries of persecution the Spaniards endured under Muslim rule forged a Catholic character that is both timeless and noble.
Indeed, seven years ago, for the first time, I set foot in the Spanish capitol of Madrid and visited the ancient city of Toledo. I felt at home. Now I know why.
Saint John of the Cross, pray for us.