Post by perplexedseeker on May 10, 2010 9:58:36 GMT
I don't know if anyone else from the UK managed to see the recent documentary on the Moorish presence in Spain that was on Channel 4 last week?
Overall, I thought it was very good, though spoiled by gratuitious Catholic-bashing at every opportunity. They put on sinister choirs whenever a church or crucifix came on screen, with lots of doom-laden sequences of penitents carrying crosses whilst portentous commentary spoke of "the march of barbaric Christian hordes" into "civilised, rational, progressive" Islamic Spain. There were times I almost burst out laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the voiceovers. And there were all the usual tropes of the "Conflict Thesis", including the closure of the Academy by Justinian, the suppression of reason by the Church in Europe which only survived in the middle east, etc, etc, ad nauseam. The shocking thing was, it actually lessened the impact of the really horrific stuff like the Inquisition and ethnic cleansing of the Moors because it was clear that the documentary had set out to condemn the Christian side from the beginning. I'm no fan of repressive medieval religion, but this was just butchery of history.
The tragic thing is that otherwise I thought the program was a very valuable and necessary counterblast to prevailing stereotypes about Muslim civilisation. It's just a tragedy that in doing so they just ended up perpetuating an equally fallacious and damaging set of myths about medieval Europe.
For example, I learnt that some researchers are now saying that the Muslim conquest of Spain may have been less of a war and more of a long, slow process of raiding, colonisation, trade, integration and assimilation that was never directed overall by a central Islamic power (the Caliphate back in Arabia seems to have had little to do with the invasions, which were often carried out by independent tribes of Muslim nomads).
At the other end of the Moorish kingdom's history, they also made a compelling case that the famous "Reconquista" of Spain by Catholic crusaders is actually a later fiction produced in the centuries following the wars. It was suggested that a more accurate representation (backed up by archaeological evidence) of the Reconquista is one of the Muslim kingdoms of Al-Andalus auto-destructing through repeated and ruinous civil wars that crippled the infrastructure and created a power vacuum into which the northern Catholic kingdoms were to some extent sucked. Indeed right up till the end there were apparently many Muslims and Christians fighting on both sides, either for profit or reasons of personal loyalty. There's apparently even some evidence that people who are now venerated as Spanish national heroes on Ferdinand and Isabella's side may actually have been Muslims from North Africa.
There was also some interesting stuff about the collaboration between Christian and Muslim scholars in the university of Toledo in the 10th century to get authoritative Latin translations of Aristotle made and exported to European universities.
Did anyone else see this? I think that it's still available on the UK's channel 4 "on demand" online service.
Overall, I thought it was very good, though spoiled by gratuitious Catholic-bashing at every opportunity. They put on sinister choirs whenever a church or crucifix came on screen, with lots of doom-laden sequences of penitents carrying crosses whilst portentous commentary spoke of "the march of barbaric Christian hordes" into "civilised, rational, progressive" Islamic Spain. There were times I almost burst out laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the voiceovers. And there were all the usual tropes of the "Conflict Thesis", including the closure of the Academy by Justinian, the suppression of reason by the Church in Europe which only survived in the middle east, etc, etc, ad nauseam. The shocking thing was, it actually lessened the impact of the really horrific stuff like the Inquisition and ethnic cleansing of the Moors because it was clear that the documentary had set out to condemn the Christian side from the beginning. I'm no fan of repressive medieval religion, but this was just butchery of history.
The tragic thing is that otherwise I thought the program was a very valuable and necessary counterblast to prevailing stereotypes about Muslim civilisation. It's just a tragedy that in doing so they just ended up perpetuating an equally fallacious and damaging set of myths about medieval Europe.
For example, I learnt that some researchers are now saying that the Muslim conquest of Spain may have been less of a war and more of a long, slow process of raiding, colonisation, trade, integration and assimilation that was never directed overall by a central Islamic power (the Caliphate back in Arabia seems to have had little to do with the invasions, which were often carried out by independent tribes of Muslim nomads).
At the other end of the Moorish kingdom's history, they also made a compelling case that the famous "Reconquista" of Spain by Catholic crusaders is actually a later fiction produced in the centuries following the wars. It was suggested that a more accurate representation (backed up by archaeological evidence) of the Reconquista is one of the Muslim kingdoms of Al-Andalus auto-destructing through repeated and ruinous civil wars that crippled the infrastructure and created a power vacuum into which the northern Catholic kingdoms were to some extent sucked. Indeed right up till the end there were apparently many Muslims and Christians fighting on both sides, either for profit or reasons of personal loyalty. There's apparently even some evidence that people who are now venerated as Spanish national heroes on Ferdinand and Isabella's side may actually have been Muslims from North Africa.
There was also some interesting stuff about the collaboration between Christian and Muslim scholars in the university of Toledo in the 10th century to get authoritative Latin translations of Aristotle made and exported to European universities.
Did anyone else see this? I think that it's still available on the UK's channel 4 "on demand" online service.
