Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain by Dario Fernandez-Morera, 240 pages

In the eighth century, civilized Muslims from North Africa crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered the barbaric Visigoth kingdom that ruled Spain.  For nearly seven hundred years al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia - was a center of culture and knowledge, spreading classical learning to backwards Europe, and serving as a rare oasis of tolerance and civility, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived peacefully side by side.  This golden age came to an end with the success of the Christian reconquista, which represented the return of intolerance and Inquisition, culminating in the expulsion of the remaining Muslims and Jews under Isabella the Catholic.

According to Spanish historian Fernandez-Morera, the only problem with the above is that none of it is true.  The Visigoths were not backwards barbarians, but possessed a highly developed culture that existed in continuity with the classical past, but was utterly destroyed by the Muslim invasion.  The Muslim conquerors, who were mostly Berbers and not Arabs, did not civilize Spain - they were civilized by it.  The successive Muslim regimes were governed according to the strict Maliki interpretation of Sharia law, with no distinct civil law.  While after the initial invasion, and the accompanying massacres, the active persecution of Christians and Jews was only intermittent, with occasional pogroms and mass deportations, both groups were always kept under subjugation.  Although members of the three faiths found ways to accommodate the others, as populations living in close proximity always have, all three also legally divided themselves from the others - all three punished apostasy with death (although Christians pardoned the apostate if he returned to the faith), all three prohibited intermarriage for women (and for Jews and Christians, for men as well), all were prohibited from eating with infidels (and Jews and Muslims were forbidden to even use utensils that had previously been used by members of another faith).  Even the transmission of the Greek classical patrimony into Europe was achieved through Constantinople more than through the Muslim world, and that transmission would likely have been faster if not for the disruptions caused by the rise of Islam.

How, then, has the myth of the Andalusian paradise become so engrained in scholarly understanding as well as public discourse?  Fernandez-Morera briefly sketches how it grew out of the Black Legend of Inquisitorial Spain and became a useful weapon with which to attack Christianity during the Enlightenment.  It truly came into its own, however, with the increasing importance and influence of Islam in the last fifty years, serving as both an emblem of past Muslim virtue and a promise of an enlightened future Islam.  Scholars who have resisted this narrative have been systematically marginalized, while supporters have been rewarded.  This has been compounded by the tendency of scholarship to focus on the behavior of elites and exceptional individuals rather than the formal structures of law under which the vast majority of the population lived - for example, some Muslim rulers kept male as well as female sex slaves, leading to the astonishing claim that Muslim Spain was tolerant towards homosexuality, but homosexual acts were still legally punishable by death, the rulers merely failed to enforce the law against themselves.  Similarly, while some have praised the Andalusian Muslims for their treatment of women, Fernandez-Morera demonstrates that most of the examples used to support this idea were, in fact, Christian slave women, who were, ironically, more free to move about in public than Muslim women.

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise is intended as a corrective.  As such, the author shows no interest in the genuine accomplishments of Muslim Spain, since those have been more than adequately chronicled - and hyped - elsewhere.  This is therefore far from a balanced picture of al-Andalus.  It is an excellent and necessary contribution to the understanding of medieval Spain, but it should not be considered as presenting a complete picture.