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

411 Pages·2016·2.76 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 multicultural, 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 the ruthless power of
autocrats and clerics.7
This ideological mission would then be the ultimate reason for the tilting of
the narrative against Catholic Spain prevalent since the Enlightenment and the
writings of Voltaire and Edward Gibbon. Briskly selling, beautifully illustrated
books have contributed to this intellectual construction.8 In the past few decades,
this ideological mission has morphed into “presentism,” an academically
sponsored effort to narrate the past in terms of the present and thereby reinterpret
it to serve contemporary “multicultural,” “diversity,” and “peace” studies, which
necessitate rejecting as retrograde, chauvinistic, or, worse, “conservative” any
view of the past that may conflict with the progressive agenda. Thus it is
stupendous to see how some academic specialists turn and twist to downplay
religion as the motivating force in Muslim conquests, and even to question the
invasion of Spain by Muslim Arab-led Berbers as the conquest of one culture
and its religion by another. Failing to take seriously the religious factor in
Islamic conquests is characteristic of a certain type of materialist Western
historiography which finds it uncomfortable to accept that war and the
willingness to kill and die in it can be the result of someone’s religious faith—an
obstacle to understanding that may reflect the role played by religious faith in
the lives of many academic historians. This materialist approach has also
generally prevailed in scholarly analyses of the Crusades.9
In Spain, the reality of al-Andalus is better known, thanks to the work of