The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

[dmitry]

Hello I wanted to ask you people what you think of Dario Fernandez-Moreras book "The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise".

[endrefodstad]

I read it some time ago. I feel that I really need more background than I have on the subject to make an accurate judgement. He certainly provides you with enough footnotes to delve deeper into the subject, but I have not had the opportunity. I have a decent informed layman's background on muslim spain, but to really evaluate Fernández-Morera case I'd have to be far better read on the primary sources, which he heavily uses, as well as the deeper academic debate over the last century.

Oh well, here goes.

It certainly shatters any idea that Al-Andalus was a shining medieval multicultural paradise, but it does not take a lot of reading on muslim spain to realize this, so I was kind of already there. It is a very pointed book - he trots out a lot of sources that clearly show living as a christian or a jew (and often as a muslim) under muslim rule was hardly a walk in the park and sometimes quite horrible - but I cannot really say, with my background, whether what he writes is representative or not.

The book starts out quite political - he starts out by stating that a lot of european and american study centres are funded by money from the middle east, and that this heavily colors their academic output. I can see this point - sadly, the ideal of the independent researcher is under serious threat these days due to the commercialization of a lot of academia (and not just on this subject). He goes on to say that if he was a specialist in islamic spain (rather than the broader medieval/early modern spanish and portugese scholer he is) he'd be dependent on this money that might dry up if he started "telling the truth" (I pharaphrase here) about islamic spain. That's going to upset some people, and is a difficult statement to validate. I also worry when I read his positive review of Emmet Scott' "Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy", which I found to be more of an irritating polemic than an actual revisitation of the Pirenne thesis. The reviews of "The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise" themselves are not very helpful either - the glowing ones seem to be from people who already agree with him, and the critical ones tend to dismiss him without really trying to examine the arguments.

While I certainly welcome a debate over the nature of tolerance and multiculturalism in islamic spain I think this book ended up being more for the choir than the scholars. Perhaps he'd have been better off not shooting off quite so many guns right at the starting line. Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz 1972 brilliant "Saladin" would have been a better model for this kind of re-examination, I think - Ehrenkreutz was not a Saladin specialist but had, like F-N, an excellent grasp of the sources, but he stated flat-out that his book was meant to be a counterpoint to the hagiographies.