The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

500 Pages·2016·2.69 MB·English

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic
Rule in Medieval Spain
Darío Fernández-Morera
Wilmington, Delaware
Muslim horsemen and their black slave warriors herding Christian
prisoners and their cattle: from the Cantigas de Santa María,
thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript
Dedico este libro a los Fernández-Morera y a los que ayudaron a
criarme: Darío (“El Gran Dary”), mi padre, el mejor mago que ha dado
Cuba; su ayudante “la bella Ester” (“Sonia”), mi querida madre; mi
hijo Brent (“El Árbol”); mi prima Rosa María (“Pety”); mi tío-abuelo
Gomer (“Gordo”), conocedor de Voltaire y de la poesía de Victor Hugo
y de Rubén Darío, y quien tanto me ayudó en mi adolescencia; mi
abuelo Oscar, el pintor de nuestra ciudad natal, Sancti-Spiritus, y el
mejor pintor que ha dado Cuba; mi tía Selmira, pintora y profesora,
quien siempre insistió en que me hiciera de una profesión, porque de
pintor y ajedrecista “te vas a morir de hambre”; mi tío Plinio (“Cuco”),
el cazador, el primero que me enseñó el uso de las armas; mi tía
Flérida, lectora voraz, siempre elegante; mi tío-abuelo Higinio (“El
intelectual”), periodista y editor de la revista literaria Hero; mi tío-
abuelo el finísimo poeta y también editor de Hero, Anastasio (“El
Poeta”); mi tío-abuelo Jacinto (“el Jacintico”), admirador de Herodes;
mi bisabuelo Jacinto Gomer Fernández-Morera, fundador de Hero,
poeta de corte clásico, maestro, y crítico valiente y lúcido; mis
Padrinos Federico e Iluminada del Castillo, quienes también ayudaron a
criarme; y mi querida María Rojas, gran practicante de la Santería,
quien tanto me quiso y cuidó en mi niñez.
Ma, sendo l’intento mio scrivere cosa utile a chi la intende, mi è parso
più conveniente andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa, che alla
immaginazione di essa.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, capitolo XV
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Conquest and Reconquest
Chapter 2. The Effects of the Jihad
The Destruction of a Nascent Civilization
Chapter 3. The Daily Realities of al-Andalus
Chapter 4. The Myth of Umayyad Tolerance
Inquisitions, Beheadings, Impalings, and Crucifixions
Chapter 5. Women in Islamic Spain
Female Circumcision, Stoning, Veils, and Sexual Slavery
Chapter 6. The Truth about the Jewish
Community’s “Golden Age”
Chapter 7. The Christian Condition
From Dhimmis to Extinction
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Introduction
On the intellectual level, Islam played an important role in the
development of Western European civilization by passing on both
the philosophy of Aristotle and its own scientific, technological,
and philosophical tradition.… Religious tolerance remained a part
of Islamic law, although its application varied with social,
political, and economic circumstances.
—Bert F. Breiner and Christian W. Troll, “Christianity and
Islam,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic
World, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009)
[In the Middle Ages there emerged] two Europes—one [Muslim
Europe] secure in its defenses, religiously tolerant, and maturing
in cultural and scientific sophistication; the other [Christian
Europe] an arena of unceasing warfare in which superstition
passed for religion and the flame of knowledge sputtered weakly.
—David Levering Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and
Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University,
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 335
Muslim rulers of the past were far more tolerant of people of other
faiths than were Christian ones. For example, al-Andalus’s multi-
cultural, multi-religious states ruled by Muslims gave way to a
Christian regime that was grossly intolerant even of dissident
Christians, and that offered Jews and Muslims a choice only
between being forcibly converted and being expelled (or worse).
—“Islam and the West: Never the Twain Shall Peacefully
Meet?” The Economist, November 15, 2001
The standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were
far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.
—Tony Blair, then prime minister of Great Britain, “A Battle
for Global Values,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007
This book aims to demystify Islamic Spain by questioning the
widespread belief that it was a wonderful place of tolerance and
convivencia of three cultures under the benevolent supervision of
enlightened Muslim rulers. As the epigraphs throughout this book
illustrate, the nineteenth-century romantic vision of Islamic Spain has
morphed into today’s “mainstream” academic and popular writings that
celebrate “al-Andalus” for its “multiculturalism,” “unity of Muslims,
Christians, and Jews,” “diversity,” and “pluralism,” regardless of how
close such emphasis is to the facts. Some scholars of the Spanish
Middle Ages have even openly declared an interest in promoting these
ideas.1
Demythologizing this civilization requires focusing a searching light
on medieval cultural features that may seem less than savory to modern
readers and that perhaps for this reason are seldom discussed. The first
two chapters of this book examine how Spain was conquered and
colonized by the forces of the Islamic Caliphate. Some scholars have
argued that the Muslim takeover was accomplished largely through
“peaceful pacts”; some even refuse to call it a “conquest,” preferring to
call it a “migratory wave.” Other scholars argue that the conquest was
carried out by force.2 Neither side is entirely right. The Muslim
conquerors used force to defeat the resistance of the Christian Visigoth
kingdom, a nascent civilization. But they also granted pacts to those
Visigoth lords and Christian leaders who saw it as advantageous to
accept the offered “peace” and become dhimmis (those Christians and
Jews living in subaltern status in Islamic lands) rather than face the
consequences of resisting. Behind the “peaceful pacts” was always the
threat of brutal force. The remaining chapters of this book examine
fundamental aspects of Islamic Spain that are rarely highlighted:
religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life and the
marginalization of certain groups—all this in the service of social
control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities.
The proponents of a harmonious and fruitful convivencia sometimes
adduce as proof the mutual influences among Muslims and non-
Muslims and their military alliances. But this argument overlooks that
mutual influences, coexistence in the same territory, cooperation,
military alliances and even intermarriage, and productive and
fascinating artistic results frequently obtain as a matter of course in
places where different cultures have been antagonistic—from Spanish
and Portuguese Latin America to British India to French Algeria to the
American West to even the slaveholding American South—without this
in any way diminishing the fact of conflict between cultures or the
existence of some groups who dominate and others who are dominated.
Of course there was convivencia, in this rather banal sense, between
conquerors and conquered, but this cannot be considered characteristic
of Islamic Spain: it is characteristic of cultural clashes between
hegemonic and hegemonized groups most everywhere.3
This book’s interpretive stance is Machiavellian, not Panglossian.
Those who portray Islamic Spain as an example of peaceful coexistence
frequently cite the fact that Muslim, Jewish, and Christian groups in al-
Andalus sometimes lived near one another. Even when that was the
case, however, such groups dwelled more often than not in their own
neighborhoods. More to the point: even when individual Muslims,
Jews, and Christians cooperated with one another out of convenience,
necessity, mutual sympathy, or love, these three groups and their own
numerous subgroups engaged for centuries in struggles for power and
cultural survival, manifested in often subtle ways that should not be
glossed over for the sake of modern ideals of tolerance, diversity, and
convivencia.
A “CULTURE OF FORGETTING”
The Umayyad Caliphate collapsed in the eleventh century.… In
1085, Alfonso VI, Christian king of Leon and Castile, captured
Toledo; unlike the Franks, he knew better than to impose
Catholicism on the people at the point of a sword.… The spirit of
tolerance that the Arabs had created survived their departure. It
took nearly four more centuries to get … to the religious
intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition.
—Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University
Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University, “How Muslims
Made Europe,” New York Review of Books, November 6, 2008
It is not easy to explain the existence of this “culture of forgetting” that
has allowed the fashioning of a certain kind of Islamic Spain. It can
hardly be explained by linguistic ignorance, since the primary medieval
Latin, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew sources required for a good general
understanding of Islamic Spain have been translated into accessible
Western languages such as Spanish, French, English, and German, in
some cases more than once; and in any event, many scholars of Arabic
and Islamic studies also engage in this hagiographic fashioning.
Perhaps writers have thought that the artistic achievements of al-
Andalus cannot withstand a more realistic appraisal of its society.
Perhaps it has to do with what economists call “stakeholder interests
and incentives,” which affect the research of academics in the
humanities no less and perhaps even more than those in the sciences.4
Perhaps it has to do with what psychologists call “motivated
blindness,” which inhibits an individual’s ability to perceive
inconvenient data.5 Perhaps it has to do with the “innocence of
intellectuals.”6 Perhaps it is simply the result of shoddy research by a
number of university professors repeated by many journalists. Or
perhaps since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment the critical
construction of a diverse, tolerant, and happy Islamic Spain has been
part of an effort to sell a particular cultural agenda, which would have
been undermined by the recognition of a multicultural society wracked
by ethnic, religious, social, and political conflicts that eventually
contributed to its demise—a multicultural society held together only by