Update, 6/28/2020: I gather that people are finding their way to this blog post via several book and politics discussion boards/sites. Those readers who have found that there is not enough detail in this blog post may find the book chapter that I was invited to write on the basis of it to be more to their liking. It’s available here: https://www.academia.edu/41779498/The_Myth_of_the_Myth_of_the_Andalusian_Paradise_The_Extreme_Right_and_the_American_Revision_of_the_History_and_Historiography_of_Medieval_Spain?fbclid=IwAR2x_BPhJswSBpM4p7qwdtbrX-lFyWVKYFe_dSZBOqdBMIwPt3dkhAVRMug.
***
I’ve taken one for the team. I’ve read it so you don’t have to. Yep. That book.
The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise is a self-proclaimed corrective to a “wide-spread belief that it was a wonderful place of tolerance and convivencia of three cultures under the benevolent supervision of enlightened Muslim rulers” (2). The book’s author, Darío Fernández-Morera is an associate professor at Northwestern, a critic of Cervantes and other early modern Spanish literati who positions himself as a “Machiavellian” (nope, not kidding, 3) interpreter of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the book is even more politicizing than the work it discusses and tilts, appropriately for a volume written by a Cervantes scholar, at giants that turn out to be nothing more than badly misperceived windmills.
The Myth consists of over 350 pages of what a colleague poetically calls “convivencia sneering,” a resentful drive to first misconstrue nearly 80 years of scholarship on medieval Spain as a mere celebration of the convivencia, or living-togetether-ness of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and then tear down the newly constructed straw man. “Convivencia sneering” is often found in two guises, both of which are manifest in The Myth: first, the misrepresentation of scholarship on the Jews, Christians, and Muslims of medieval Spain as a uniformly idealizing and one-dimensional endeavor divorced from research into the real “realidad histórica”; and second, treating works written for a popular audience, most notably María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World, as the scholarship in the field while ignoring works written for a scholarly audience and refusing to treat writing for those two audiences as different beasts.
The author claims that contemporary scholarship on medieval Iberia perpetrates the myth of a paradise in with Jews, Christians, and Muslims all more or less got along, and that this view has been deceitfully conveyed to a gullible reading public. His book will set the record straight. In other words, his argument is that a caricature of convivencia has been perpetrated on an unsuspecting audience by scholars who are, in turn, too afraid of the Islamic world and too enamored of it to tell the truth about how horrendous Islam was and is. He supports this claim through a series of misrepresentations of the primary sources and ofthe state of the field facilitated by a desperately poor handle on the relevant secondary bibliography and a blinding need to prove the evil of Islam and the darkness of the Middle Ages.
He positions himself as the maverick outsider who alone can correct the deficiency he perceives in the interpretation of the medieval evidence of interactions between Muslims and others in medieval Spain. However, he does not approach a field that is not his own with the humility required to learn its contours. This is not to say, as Fernández-Morera charges, that everyone must be in agreement. In fact, a quick look at the field shows that a lot of us are in deep disagreement with each other about a lot of things. What it means, though, is that every field of study, and I mean that in the most literal sense of the term to refer to the material itself and not to the body of scholarship that has grown up around it, requires a certain degree of expertise and familiarity that a few years of reading can never yield. What’s wrong with this book is not only its ideology (although I firmly disagree with it), but its methodology and its unfamiliarity with the various genres of text upon which it builds its argument. This is not to say that no scholar should ever cross disciplinary or period boundaries — quite the contrary — but rather, that a first foray into a new field that attempts nothing short of tearing down that field is simply unlikely to be able to distinguish between real problems in that field and phantasms (see, for example, Fernández-Morera’s nonsensical discussion of the relationship between toponymy and language families on pp. 14). To make this kind of critique successfully requires many years immersed in the material rather than a dilettante’s grand tour through it.
Furthermore, outsider status and lack of expertise raises questions about a scholar’s ability to approach the material itself. Fernández-Morera congratulates himself for his recourse to primary sources, as though that were not a minimum requirement for all scholarship: “This book gives special attention to primary sources… and usually quotes them verbatim so that nonscholars can read these materials (which in modern publications on Islamic Spain frequently are not part of the narrative and often not even part of the notes)” (11). Yet his claim to be citing sources “verbatim” is belied by his bibliography, which reveals that he has referred to Arabic sources only in translation. This is simply unacceptable. A scholar cannot write about texts he cannot read in the original and cannot rely on the discretion of translators to choose the objects of his study for him. The fact that he seemingly consulted no sources in the original Arabic makes, for example, his attempt at a fine parsing of the term jihād in theory and practice an exercise in futility. Yet Fernández-Morera disagrees about the value of reading sources in the original and places a lot of stock in the interpretations of translators. He claims that the myth of tolerance “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”(4) and that those who cannot read sources in the original “can find consolation in the fact that they are no worse off than the celebrated Córdoban Muslim cleric Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”), a polymath who achieved lasting fame by commenting on the technical and difficult texts of Aristotle without knowing Greek and after reading them in twice-mediated translations” (13). He does not think that one need read Arabic or Latin sources in order to analyze them. Linguistic ignorance is no barrier! (Just as a side note: the fact that he includes medieval Spanish and the Latin of medieval Spain under the rubric of inaccessible non-Western languages that require translation shows just how alien the place and its languages are in his vision of the world.) Nevermind that standards and practices in all sorts of fields have changed and been updated quite dramatically since the twelfth century. I, for one, would not want my medical care to be based on Averroes’ practice as a physician; why should my own practice of the humanities warrant less?
This kind of glib attitude towards language learning and to the sources themselves reveals an anti-intellectual attitude (one that extends to all the usual complaints about the liberal academy (5-7)) and imbues its joyful ignorance with an anti-Arab and anti-Arabic slant that comes across not only in the author’s discussion of languages in scholarship and the place of translation scholarship in the same, but also in his attitudes towards the langauges he sees no need to be able to read. The book is sloppy and inconsistent with terminology in ways that betray a desire to alienate readers from medieval Arabs and Muslims: While the author explains that “to facilitate the reading by nonspecialists, I have generally avoided the use of diacritical symbols: thus Quran instead of Qur’an” (13), we see diacritics used on Spanish terms throughout, thereby suggesting that the author finds diacrticial marks on Arabic words difficult and a part of the language to be eliminated, he finds the ones on Spanish words to be a normal part of reading and to present no challenge to the reader; he describes aljamiado as “Spanish written with Arabic signs” (25) rather than letters, taking Arabic writing out of the realm of the familiar and the alphabetic — and even the realm of natural language — and placing it in the realm of a code; he consistently refers to an “Islamic caliphate,” as if there were another kinds, thereby doubly emphasizing the religion of the subject; and he does what so many would-be scholars of this material do to try to prove their dominance over the Arabic material (more on this below) and uses extra-high-falootin’ and incorrect forms of rendering and transliterating Arabic terms (for example, where we would typically talk about hadīth collections, Fernández-Morera makes sure that we know that he has come to learn that that ahādith is the plural form of hadīth and writes instead about ahādith collections; where he refers to the kitābah al-dhimam he simply borrows the outdated and silly-looking transliteration system from Pascual de Gayangos’ translation of al-Makkarī (whose name Fernández-Morera alternately transliterates with both Ks (as in FN 13 for the chapter) and Qs (as in FN 4 for the chapter)), writing kitabatu-dh-dhimam (180); what’s the point of introducing Arabic terms that the author is not even familiar enough to render in transliteration on his own? Perhaps I am falling into precisely the trap that would allow Fernández-Morera to dismiss my critique as coddling Muslims and casually dismissing those with whom I disagree intellectually as Islamophobes (7); but as these examples show, whatever I might think about the inherent immorality of adopting an anti-Arab or anti-Muslim position, to adopt such a position does skew, distort, and render incorrect historical analyses. An Islamophobic attitude is not separable from bad scholarship on the Islamic world; hatred of Arabs will always affect the reading of Arabic texts. What is on the surface reflects what is below.
Fernández-Morera accuses virtually everyone in the field of being too afraid of risking our ability to enter Arab and Islamic countries or of becoming the targets of some kind of indeterminate radical Islamic threat to be able to do honest work or assess (his) honest work fairly (7-8). I suppose the fact that I was taking notes on this book with my nifty NYU-Abu Dhabi combination pen-highlighter puts me into the category of the guilty and the bought-off; nevertheless I would say on my own authority and based on my own experience that fear of Arab nations and of Muslims simply doesn’t enter into the equation.
Yet with Fernández-Morera having written off medieval studies as too timid, the press is forced to turn to people outside the field to adjudicate his argument. In its self-promotion, the The Myth builds up its credibility not only on a logically fallacious appeal to authority (which, to a certain extent, all books do with their advertising blurbs) but with an appeal to authorities of a wholly inappropriate nature. Daniel Pipes, for example, is an activist known for his often poorly-grounded and Islamophobic assaults on scholarship; and Noel Valis is a scholar of 20th century literature whose inclusion among the lauders of the book raises questions for me about this simply having been an opportunity for Yale colleagues who both profoundly disagreed with Menocal despite not being specialists and, perhaps more importantly, deeply resented the success she achieved in the popular press and within the university, to bash her now that she can no longer defend her own work and written legacy. The author and/or the press shamelessly plays on petty academic-world fights (that are largely invisible to a non-academic and even a non-specialist audience) to build this book up undeservedly.
Ignoring scholarship and even popular writing that contradict his claims is another strategy that prevails in promoting the book, as in this video interview (which is built up on some fascinating civilizational claims about the foundations of “our culture” and “our country” that very much tip the Cuban-born author’s hand) when Fernández-Morera complains (start around 6:25) that only specialists know that the horseshoe shaped arch comes from Visigothic art and have sat on that information to mislead the public into associating it with Islam (an argument he makes in the book, too, expressing disappointment that he wasn’t actually the first to discover that horseshoe-shaped arches have a pre-Islamic history (268, FN 43)):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REljGDVQJDs
It is one thing to make information not readily available in popular works to a wider audience, but the scholarly work on the Visigothic origins of the horseshoe arch has, indeed, already received the popular treatment, as in this page from The Arts of Intimacy by, amongst others, Menocal, one of his chief historiographic villains.
Ultimately, Fernández-Morera shows that he is not speaking to a lay audience broadly in the interest of scholarly integrity, but rather to a lay audience predisposed to reading books that slam the idea that there might be any good in Islam and Islamicate culture and in the modern academic culture of expertise. The author has positioned himself as a scholar intervening in a battle over presentation to a popular audience without the necessary scholarly background and almost without realizing — or hoping that his well-primed audience won’t notice — that his book, too, is popular and exceptionally polemical rather than scholarly.
***
It would be a book-length corrective that would address and properly contextualize and source all of the errors that occur at every level in The Myth, from basic problems of terminology to broader methodological and interpretive flaws. (In fact, as long as it is, I cut quite a bit out of the first section of this review.) So I will use Chapter 6 — which claims to unveil “the truth about the Jewish community’s ‘Golden Age’” (177) as an emblematic case study in the flaws of the volume. Even in doing this, I open myself up to the charge from Fernández-Morera, writing throughout from the position of the aggrieved and slighted Christian subjugated to an intellectual and popular culture too friendly to Islam and Judaism, that we medievalists care more about Jews than about Christians amongst the dhimmi: “Some recent scholars in the English-speaking world have done excellent work, but with the exception of Emmet Scott [a self-proclaimed and self-published iconoclast who has made a career of skewering the “myths” of fields from Egyptology to Islamic history and whose credentials are not readily evident— SJP] they have either concerned themselves mainly with the Jewish experience or not adopted the approach of the present book” (9). One scholar whom Fernández-Morera dismisses for being “concerned with violence inflicted on the Jewish community, not with that inflicted on the Christian community or with religious laws” (245) is David Nirenberg, whose approach to convivencia holds that the kinds of violence that wracked medieval Spain was only possible because of the intimate familiarity between confessional communities. Rather than dismissing Nirenberg for focusing on violence in Jewish communities rather than Christian ones, Fernández-Morera might have found in his work a sounder way to argue against an idealized vision of convivencia or even evidence that no such idealized vision obtains across the field.
Some low-hanging fruit are the terminological issues: Why is “Jewish law scholar” placed in scare quotes when applied to Hasdai ibn Shapruṭ (191)? Why is the naming of the city gate in the Jewish quarter as bāb al-yahūd evidence of discrimination (190)? Is the presence in many medieval cities of a bāb al-shams (the sun gate) equally problematic? And why, oh, why, does he keep referring to Spanish Jews in Spain as Sephardim, when that term points to the fact that they are Spanish (and so a tautological term before 1492) rather than to the fact that they are Jewish?
Each chapter of the book is subdivided into sections set off with epigrams. The sources show the author’s alienation from the world of scholarship on the history of al-Andalus and his resentment toward expertise — even expertise that does not come from a traditional academic framework. In chapter 6 cites, for example, from a general online encyclopedia, the Jewish Virtual Library (and an entry by someone whose work I don’t think is especially good, to boot); from a 1983 article on the history of Islamic science not published in a humanities publication but rather in the journal Nature, thereby raising questions about the methodological integrity of the historical work; and from a high-school textbook for use in Jewish schools. When he cites from Peter Cole’s introduction to the Dream of the Poem, which is an excellent introduction to the literary history of Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, he identifies the editor and translator sarcastically as “praised by the literary critic Harold Bloom for giving ‘the best account of convivencia I have ever encountered” (200) rather than as a MacArthur fellow. These epigrams, he writes, “indicate [that] it is widely believed that Islam granted to Spain’s Jewish community, composed largely of Sephardic Jews, a substantial degree of liberty and tolerance” (177). Yet by structuring the chapter around poor (or poorly attributed) examples of popular misconceptions, he both bolsters the straw-man nature of his argument and loses the footing from which he claims to be arguing against the irresponsibility of academics whose work filters out into the popular world.
The chapter is built entirely upon secondary sources, many of which are misused. Fernández-Morera deploys Benzion Netanyahu’s widely discredited, lachrymose The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain not for the full trajectory of Netanyahu’s argument that by the fifteenth century the Inquisition was simply drawing on a suspicion of Jews that dates back to antiquity but instead to selectively read Netanyahu’s interpretation of Jewish life in Visigothic Spain (311, FN 3). On the flip side, the chapter builds its argument for the deficiencies of the field of Andalusi Studies by charging that scholars have ignored aspects of history that have in fact been the subject of detailed work. Most prominently, after effectively accusing the Iberian Jewish community of being a fifth column working against the Visigoths at the time of the arrival of Umayyad military forces, he criticizes this alliance for “having nothing to do with the fundamental beliefs held by the parties to it” and “even seasoned scholars who marvel at the ‘tolerance’ the Islamic conquerors displayed toward Jews” for having “overlooked… this simple political explanation” (178). The idea that alliances were not drawn strictly down religious lines is such a common and well-accepted one that a curious reader could go to any recent study of any topic of Andalusi cultural history and find it in that study’s foundations. Fernández-Morera is correct in identifying more than religious causes for the drive of social and cultural history in al-Andalus, but is incorrect in saying that he is virtually alone in having noticed it.
When he does deal with primary sources (always in translation), he does not do it well or with methodological awareness or skill. He selects verses from the Qur’ān that support his argument and ignore those that cut against it (178). And despite his obsession with Mālikī law, he reads them in isolation and not with any of the interpretive or analytical tradition that governed how Andalusi Muslims understood those verses; at various points in the book he claims that practical or applied religion and law don’t matter in the face of what is written in text. (And, in fact, the section of this chapter that looks at Jewish law (187-99) just doesn’t make a coherent point; it’s difficult to refute a cacophony of references to old scholarship on Maimonidean and other rabbinic responsa that just isn’t doing much other than apparently arguing by volume of words.)
His discussion of the life of Samuel ibn Naghrīla neatly encapsulates all of the methodological issues: Fernández-Morera writes that Ibn Naghrīla’s departure from Córdoba “demonstrated the insecurity of Jewish life” because “Jews were expelled from Córdoba in 1013 and their wealth was confiscated as punishment for taking the side of a defeated Muslim leader” (181). In other words, they were not expelled for being Jewish, but expelled for allying themselves with a losing political side. For someone who, in his introduction, is so hell-bent on proving that he’s the only one who looks at political, rather than religious, reasons for conflict, this is a serious misstep. He also takes all of the Islamic sources for Ibn Naghrīla’s life and reads them at face value with no consideration for the conventions of writing in this time and place and for the ways in which authors would often play with meaning and write a single text for multiple audiences (181-5). Neither his bibliography nor his notes suggest he is familiar with Ross Brann’s study of these sources in his Power in the Portrayal, which offers thoughtful, detailed, and contextualized reading of this material. Again, he doesn’t refute scholarship that disproves his point; he just ignores it.
And finally, there is the question of Karaism. Karaite Judaism, which bases its system of legal reasoning on the Hebrew Bible and largely excludes Talmud and other post-biblical sources for law, appears in Spanish texts often as a rhetorical foil, standing in for other enemies or threats. There is not a tremendous amount of evidence for a large Karaite community there and Fernández-Morera does nothing to remedy this documentary problem, but this does not stop him from expressing outrage at this community’s “elimination” and the reluctance of mainstream scholarship to address that. He offers no evidence for his claims for the “destruction of Karaism in Spain” (203) nor for a flourishing of a crypto-Karaite community in Castile (202). Although he describes Karaites as “disciples of scripture” (200), apparently borrowing a flowery phrase from a 19th-century letter written by the Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovitch, Fernández-Morera does not seem to fully understand what Karaite Judaism is at all. He regularly contrasts Karaite Judaism not with Rabbanite Judaism, but rather, anachronistically, with Orthodox Judaism (200-201, and other places), which is an invention of the 19th century in reaction to changes in northern European Judaism that seemed, to some practitioners, to be to quick to accommodate the modern world. Although he presents this Karaite-“Orthodox” battle as part of his claim that the intranecine squabbles of Judaism disprove the idea of a Jewish “Golden Age” in Spain — “In Islamic Spain, there was no more ‘convivencia’ and ‘tolerance’ within the Jewish community than outside it” (188)— he concludes the chapter almost admiringly, writing about “Orthodox” Jews who were able to stand up to a threat to their religion and contrasting them to the oversensitivity of today’s mores, with a description that is similar in tone to the way he writes about Christians defending themselves against Muslims he deems jihādīs in other chapters: “It is easy today to condemn traditional medieval Judaism’s elimination of the Spanish Karaites. It was achieved at a human cost…From the point of view of traditional medieval Judaism, then, the true religion was threatened in its essence, and after the failure to convince the heretics to give up their erroneous beliefs and rejoin the traditional Jewish community, only force could neutralize their threat” (203).
The only way that Fernández-Morera is able to sustain his argument that life under Islam in Spain was just horrendous is by ignoring many relevant primary sources, ignoring the literary conventions that governed reading and writing in the Middle Ages, and ignoring vast swaths of scholarship and historiographic models that offer a nuanced take on the period. Every chapter in the book replicates these and more errors, missteps, and misinterpretations.
***
Let me just say it plainly: Nobody in the academic world seriously talks about medieval Spain as “an Andalusian Paradise.” (Nevermind that the adjective “Andalusian” hasn’t applied to Islamic Spain in something like the last twenty years; we now use the adjective “Andalusi” and reserve “Andalusian” for the description of the modern province of Andalucía.) The entire book is constructed against a straw man and a few popular appropriations of scholarship. The Myth‘s myth is a myth.
The book, plainly speaking, is a waste of paper and ink, full of cherry-picked examples and unsophisticated analysis. So why dedicate so many pixels to refuting it? Partly, it’s just irritating to have some under-researched interloper waltz into my field, bash it on the basis of fantasy, and then waltz on. Beyond that, there is a faction within the academy of scholars who feel threatened in one way or the other by the rise of Andalusi Studies, either because they don’t read Arabic and so can’t participate fully in this scholarly conversation or because they see a Christian or Spanish-national intellectual hegemony slipping through their fingers; and that faction should be reminded that it does not have a serious champion in this book. At the popular level, there is an aggrieved audience for this sort of thing that then draws its arguments into the increasingly dangerous political discourse of the present day that has resulted in arson fires destroying mosques and bomb threats disrupting life at synagogues across the country; and so there is a duty to push back against that narrative. It is an ignorant blow against expertise in a world in which ignorance is triumphing more and more over research, knowledge, and careful thought. And it’s a bibliographic challenge: I saw this book cited in some of my undergraduates’ research papers in the fall, which means that as a teacher I have to talk about it and talk about how we evaluate a book like this.
So, no. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise doesn’t merit all these words of refutation. And yet here we are. Thanks for bearing with me.
786 Thank you for taking one for the team! I encountered this volume whilst doing research on a related theme; I could tell immediately that it was a polemic disguised as real history. The guy’s CV is nowhere to be found. The publisher is a conservative think-tank, not an academic press, which fact alone ought to give pause. But the right, predictably, has spent the intervening months lionizing the book because it tells them exactly what they want to hear and confirms their refrain that there is a gigantic pro-Muslim, anti-Christian conspiracy within all of academia (yes, the whole thing).
Such a work is usually extremely easy to demolish, and I have been considering purchasing the book so I could do it myself, since there seemed to be a shortage of critical reviews based on real scholarship in the field in question.
I still might bite the bullet; although your take-down is intelligent, well-reasoned, and skilled, and benefits by being written by someone actually in the field the work affects to criticise, my critiques tend to follow somewhat different lines. I’m still contemplating. But this review is invaluable and ought to be given the widest possible dissemination. Again, Thank You!
“Yep. That book.”
You write like a 12 year-old girl composing her drama queen diary entry for the day. You accuse Morera of bias and then proceed to be every bit as biased as him. All you’ve done is make me want to read and study his book. I believe it will back up and support the potent arguments put forward by Rodney Stark in his view of the subject.
I’m glad that my post has inspired you to read more. After you read Fernández Morera’s book — oh, and Spanish last names are two-parters, so it’s not correct to refer to him as Morera — you might want to try Brian Catlos’ new book, Kingdoms of Faith, or Hugh Kennedy’s Muslim Spain and Portugal. Since you are very concerned about bias, you’ll surely want to read a variety of scholarly perspectives. And finally, given your concern about my writerly voice, if you prefer the more academic one you can check out my book, which I assure you is written in high academese: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=808632
Let me begin with this: you are a professor and a teacher, but your response to this book is little more than a passive-aggressive snark post on how you didn’t like this book. All is well and fine, but you routinely accuse the original author of not reading the original Arabic sources, and yet go on to say that pretty much ‘everyone’ in the academic world doesn’t think the Andalusian paradise was a paradise at all, yet don’t offer a single scholar or academic who holds this view. You say the book doesn’t ‘merit refutation’, which in other words means that you didn’t actually read it and wanted to trash the book by giving a garbage review. Let me quote you on this:
“He positions himself as the maverick outsider who alone can correct the deficiency he perceives in the interpretation of the medieval evidence of interactions between Muslims and others in medieval Spain. However, he does not approach a field that is not his own with the humility required to learn its contours. This is not to say, as Fernández-Morera charges, that everyone must be in agreement. In fact, a quick look at the field shows that a lot of us are in deep disagreement with each other about a lot of things. ” – That is why, later on, people call Morera’s book ‘Islamophobic’, though Islam is not a race and seemingly the only religion that cannot be criticized.
“What it means, though, is that every field of study, and I mean that in the most literal sense of the term to refer to the material itself and not to the body of scholarship that has grown up around it, requires a certain degree of expertise and familiarity that a few years of reading can never yield. What’s wrong with this book is not only its ideology (although I firmly disagree with it), but its methodology and its unfamiliarity with the various genres of text upon which it builds its argument.” – So basically, it’s Islamophobic and you don’t like it. You say that a professor needs to read the body of scholarship – which is in of itself based on the interpretation and discussions of primary texts – and then go on to say that Morera doesn’t have the authority because he doesn’t have the years of expertise, unlike you. This is a very subtle snark of ‘You can’t write that, you’re too dumb’.
“This is not to say that no scholar should ever cross disciplinary or period boundaries — quite the contrary — but rather, that a first foray into a new field that attempts nothing short of tearing down that field is simply unlikely to be able to distinguish between real problems in that field and phantasms (see, for example, Fernández-Morera’s nonsensical discussion of the relationship between toponymy and language families on pp. 14). To make this kind of critique successfully requires many years immersed in the material rather than a dilettante’s grand tour through it.” – Basically, you don’t have the time and effort to show how this book is oh-so-wrong, yet decided to write a review anyways. It’s that ‘I don’t have time to prove you wrong, but you’re still wrong’ rhetoric that people use when they DON’T have the evidence to objectively prove how someone is wrong. That’s quick unethical behaviour on your part, Professor. Would you allow a study to get away with that? I don’t think so.
The last part contradicts your statement that ‘everyone knows the Andalusian paradise didn’t exist’ comments: it states that Islamophobia prevents discussion of the ‘true’ nature of Islamic Spain, and blames the scholarship that does not say there was universal peace as Islamophobic. Islamophobia is not a real phobia and is a political term. Islam is not a race, but a religion, and like Christianity or Judaism, should be criticized. You and your fellow scholars do not take this view, and instead of proving Morera wrong by objective fact, brush it away as being beneath you.
It’s professors like you that the Right wing rightfully laughs at.
Hi,
You must be new here, so let me begin with my comment policy: In general, I don’t entertain comments from people except if they leave their name or a pseudonym that they use recognizably across web platforms. I blog under my own name, so you know who you’re dealing with; in future, please afford me the same courtesy. All the same, for now let me address your concerns:
— I think that you may not have read past the jump (the “read more” link) because I do in fact cite scholars whose work runs against the straw man “Andalusian paradise” narrative, such as David Nirenberg.
—I’m not sure why you think that my describing the book as not meriting a refutation means I didn’t read it.
—I’m certainly not calling Fernández Morera dumb; I’m saying that he doesn’t have the familiarity with the sources or facility with the necessary languages to write about a topic. To give you an analogue, if I were to write a book about ancient Greece, people would be well within their rights to criticize me for trying to write on that topic even though I can’t read ancient Greek; that would have nothing to do with my intelligence or my competence in my own field.
—The sentence that you quote as evidence that you think I don’t bother to give evidence that the argument is wrong ends with an example of an incorrect argument. If you’d like me to walk you through it in greater detail, I’d be happy to, but it is there as an example.
—As far as your question about whether I would allow students to write a paper with one example, it’s a bit of a straw man question. There is one example in that paragraph, and many other examples throughout the blog post. With that said, this is a blog post, and so I’m limited in the number of words that people would realistically read. If I were to give students an assignment that had a limited word count and they gave only selected examples, that would be fine.
—Again, you may not have clicked on the “read more” link, but there is a full case study of one chapter of the book with plenty of examples.
—And again, this is a blog post, which means that it’s a different genre from scholarship or from student essays. If you have questions about how I document my scholarship, please feel free to check it out. Here are two examples that are freely available online: https://www.academia.edu/3390102/The_Types_of_Wisdom_are_Two_in_Number_Judah_ibn_Tibbons_Quotation_from_the_I%E1%B8%A5y%C4%81_ul%C5%ABm_al-d%C4%ABn and https://www.academia.edu/31152622/Matter_Meaning_and_Maimonides_The_Material_Text_as_an_Early_Modern_Map_of_Thirteenth-Century_Debates_on_Translation. An example of my expectations for students can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/16046507/Presidential_Honors_Scholars_Sophomore_Seminar_Madrid_Cohort_AY_16-17_
—You mention several times that you question the nature and existence of Islamophobia on several grounds. You talk about it not being a “phobia,” and in a certain respect you are right: It’s not so much a fear as hatred. I think you may be getting hung up on the original meaning of “phobia” as fear; however, as languages evolve and as words are compounded, meanings change. So, for example, homophobia isn’t really fear of gay people but rather hatred of gay people. Or, for a different example, the word helicopter comes from the Greek word helios, meaning sun, but we all know that helicopters don’t fly to the sun. Etymology is important, but it doesn’t dictate the meaning of a word.
— With that said, while Islam is, indeed, a religion, it has also undergone a process of racialization. This is a decent place to start reading about that idea: http://religiondispatches.org/muslim-racialization/ . However, if you go to jstor.org and search for “racialization of Islam” you will also find a number of recent articles on the topic.
—I don’t really see where in my review you get the idea that I think that religions can’t be critiqued or that I hold Islam apart from Judaism and Christianity; I think you may be reading your own ideas into what I have written here.
I hope that this clears up some of your questions and concerns!
Not to engage in precisely the kind of pedantry that scholars are always accused of, but I have to note you’ve shown the ignorance of Greek which you cited earlier in the post.
“Helicopter” does not actually have anything to do with “Helios,” but “helix” (genitive “helikos”) meaning “spiral.” So it’s a “spiral wing.” (Heliko-pter, as in pterodactyl.)
That said, great review. Haven’t read the book, and do wonder if we in the field don’t sometimes suffer from implicit bias, but this guy certainly doesn’t seem to be after truth but is grinding an ax. Real revision usually requires genius, not just choler.
Yeah. I actually didn’t learn that until a bit after I had posted this and didn’t go back and change it. So, yeah. We all make mistakes. In my defense, however, I’m not attempting to use Greek sources I can’t read in the original in order to attempt a paradigm shift in a field I don’t really know.
The Emmet Scott cited and praised by Fernández-Morera is not just a self-published iconoclast, he’s also the main English-language proponent of Heribert Illig’s bizarre Phantom Time Hypothesis, which postulates that the people and events of the years 614 to 911 AD never actually existed and are the result of a medieval forgery perpetrated by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII. One of his self-published books even expounds on it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1628940395/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506483560&sr=8-1
Scott’s popularity in certain circles as a (pseudo-)historian of Islam is rather perplexing in the light of this adherence to the notion that the entire period encompassing Islam’s origin and spread never even happened in the first place. It’d be like citing and praising a book on the history of England written by someone who thinks the British Isles are a fictional creation of medieval geographers and don’t actually exist.
A rather dishonest review. The author is unable to point out any really aggravating mistakes in Fernandez-Morera’s book, so she resorts to faulting him for minor slips and technicalities (using “Andalusian” instead of “Andalusi”!) and to smears (“islamophobia”, “arson fires destroying mosques and bomb threats disrupting life at synagogues”). More seriously, she accuses him of “linguistic ignorance” and depicts him as relying solely on translations of primary sources. While this is true for Arabic texts, editions of the Latin and Spanish sourcets (some of which have never been translated) are listed in the bibliography. (The notes and bibliography, by the way, fill 107 pages, making the accusation of sloppiness a bit hard to swallow.)
The reviewer further accuses Fernandez-Morera of misrepresenting scholarship by quoting mostly from popular works on Islamic Spain; specialized studies being, presumably, more nuanced, though no examples are provided. This would presuppose a disconnection between popular history and scholarship, even though the popular books cited are typically written by (supposedly nuanced) historians. Nor is it apparently seen as a problem that these popular works are arguably even more one-sided than the book under review. While Pearce is eager to point out that scholars don’t use the phrase “Andalusian paradise”, they have certainly often depicted this medieval society in anachronistic terms as some sort of multicultural utopia, producing books with titles like “Ornament of the World” for publication by American and European university presses.
Yes. “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” is very one-sided and polemical, but a volume like this would not have been needed, nor (probably) written, if a romanticized image of Islamic Spain had not been disseminated for many decades in schools and universities. While one volume after another is produced treating the expulsion of Muslims and Jews following the reconquista, the expulsion of Christians and Jews from Andalusia in the 12th century is practically unknown to the general public. Fernandez-Morera quotes actual historians defending slavery in the medieval Islamic world, lamenting the Muslim defeat at Tours in 732 and their failure to subdue the rest of Europe, and labeling the Christian martyrs of Cordoba, not their executors, as dangerous fanatics. Something is clearly wrong when the Sultan Abd-al Rahman III, whom even Arabic sources depict as a monster, is praised for his enlightenment by modern Western historians.
Though the reviewer claims that scholarship is much more nuanced than the quotes in Fernandez-Morera’s book, we seldom see any scholarly criticism of the attitude expressed in these quotes. Apparently one-sidedness is only to be condemned if it comes from the wrong side.
I let comments like this through moderation so as not to open myself up to the favorite right-wing complaint of being silenced. However, I’m getting rather bored with responses that don’t seem to read the whole review and then accuse me of one-sidedness, so this is the last one that I will entertain on this post. Anyone else who would like to comment should have something new to say. As for its substance, “linguistic ignorance” is a phrase quoted from F-M himself, islamophobia is an issue that he raises in the book so it is fair to engage it a review, Ornament of the World is not a scholarly book and was not published by a university press. Finally, on biblio, I did refer to scholarship by Brann and Nirenberg; start there and if you’d like more recommendations I’m happy to oblige. And scholarship is not about volume. A person can give me however many hundreds of pages he wants of notes and bibliography, and if they refer to incomplete or outdated work, it doesn’t help his argument.
Thank you for your reply to my comment. Just a few observations:
I am not “right-wing”, if that’s what you’re implying.
I was not accusing you of one-sidedness, rather the bulk of scholarship and popular books on Islamic Spain, a matter which is not addressed in your review.
Your ironic paraphrase of F-M, “Linguistic ignorance is no barrier!”, refers to his own work and thus seems indeed to say that F-M is guilty of “linguistic ignorance”.
You’re right that “Ornament of the world” is not published by a university press, and I apologize for the mistake. However, this was merely one example. Indeed, I confused the book with another, no less rosy title, Lowney’s “A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain” (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Of course I can’t assess your politics; the rhetoric of your comment was similar to what I am familiar with coming from right-wing commentators on such matters. That said, I’m comfortable with “linguistic ignorance” to describe someone trying to make an argument from Arabic sources when he cant’ read Arabic. It’s the very definition of the thing, and surprising coming from a professor of literature. As for Lowney, you’re confusing publication by a university press with being a scholarly work. Look at almost any university press’ catalogue and you’ll see that they publish both trade and academic books. Lowney’s is a trade book published by a UP for a general audience. It’s not scholarship. F-M says he is addressing scholarship in the book, so the critique of his omission of a vast swath of current scholarship is a fair one; when you’re talking about “the bulk… of scholarship on Islamic Spain,” what are you talking about specifically? And finally, this is from your initial quote: “Apparently one-sidedness is only to be condemned if it comes from the wrong side.” You are, in fact accusing me of promoting one-sidedness and, explicitly, of dishonesty. If you’re going to do that, at least own it.
PSA from the blogger: I have now twice, in response to two separate commenters, addressed the notion that I do not give examples of scholarship that does not promote the idea of al-Andalus as a tolerant paradise but instead looks at the fact of members of different religions living together in a more detail-oriented and nuanced way. I do. I have reiterated it now twice in the comments. Any future comments to that effect will be summarily deleted.
I am someone who works extensively in the Late Medieval period, who reads Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources in the original. I work mostly with Ottoman history in the Balkans, or crusading in Northern and Eastern Europe, and don’t know as much as I should about medieval Spain. At the same time, I have little sympathy for anachronistic liberal bias in medieval scholarship. And as a faithful Catholic, I have little tolerance for anti-Christian and even the generally anti-religious bias that is present at a lot of institutions. I purchased this book thinking it might offer a fresh perspective on some of the ideas about “convivencia” that I felt were probably not accurate given Muslim-Christian interaction elsewhere. However… having read The Myth I think that the above review is an accurate assessment of the book’s flaws. I don’t need to repeat them, as Pearce has done a good job of it already. Morera’s bias is relentless and drives his entire narrative. It is unbecoming of an historian, who should try to maintain a sober and at least somewhat detached perspective in an effort to describe historical reality and not simply grind present-day axes. Morera’s bias is made more aggravating by a clear lack of historical acumen, command of the sources, etc. In the end, it devolves into a sophomoric rant. I am sorry I purchased it. More sorry I read it. Could someone here suggest some better alternatives? I would prefer history, not polemic.
A couple of suggestions for better books that are especially focused on the history of the Christian tradition in Spain: Ann Christys’ Christians in al-Andalus; and Kenneth Baxter Wolf’s Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain. For general historical overviews, see Hugh Kennedy and Brian Catlos’ books. Also, if you’re interested in an art historical perspective on one particular, notable work, try Shailor and Williams’ A Spanish Apocalypse.
I am an archeologist, not a historian, but became interested in the history of al-Andalus after walking part of the Camino de Santiago and visiting some of the historically significant cities in Andalusia and elsewhere in Spain. I also bought Fernandez-Morera’s book, thinking that it might bring an interesting and challenging perspective to Iberian historiography. Like others here, I found his book to be a tiresome polemic – poor scholarship with few original insights. His terminological arguments are particularly tedious. There are few, I think, who would argue that the term ‘fatwa’ is generally taken to mean Holy War and he didn’t need to take almost a full chapter to belabour the point. Fernandez-Morera’s argument that the term ‘Byzantine Empire’ should be replaced with the unwieldy term ‘Christian Greek Roman Empire’ is simply silly. His reluctance to use the term Iberia is scholastically pointless. The geographic term Iberian Peninsula includes not only Spain, but also Portugal, Gibraltar and Catalonia (which is part of Spain but only under duress). The Galicians also have reservations about being part of Spain, especially since Franco (who was Galician) is still dead.
Since the 2nd century BC, the ‘Iberian peninsula’ has been called Hispania/Spania/España. The expression ‘Iberian Peninsula’ was created by the French geographer Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent in 1823. Coming on vacation to Spain does not provide any relevant knowledge and it is necessary to have mental issues to make such comments about Galicia, Gibraltar and Catalonia.
If you want to argue the point you’re welcome to do so (although I clearly disagree with you, Marco), but it’s neither convincing nor appropriate to suggest that the only way people could disagree with you is if they have “mental issues,” so kindly knock that off.
Dear readers of this post.
I am someone from the Netherlands who literally tries to read all of the scholarly books published about the topic of Al Andalus / islamic spain. I wanted to buy this book as well. However, I read the blurb and the first chapter ans brought it back. It did not seem to represent what the experts in the field are saying. Books by Kennedy, Harvey, Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Bennison, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Miller and others.
I am grateful for this review because it gave me a couple of good examples, from the book itself and from the author and publisher, why we should not take this book seriously. I would like a full on review pointing out all of the mistakes, maybe I can do this myself. This book also fits in a trend in which non experts try to be experts.
It reminded me of a book that I read which tried to argue that the great mosque of Cordoba was built by the people from the lost kingdom of Atlantis or aliens. Basically using fancy words to express their fantasies.
I don’t have a substantive comment, other than to thank you for the review. I was looking for books on Spanish history (broadly) and saw this book. While the authorial claims of being a unique expert set off warning bells. the premise of the book was somewhat interesting. You’ve saved me not only from the time to read it, but the much more ghastly possibility of referencing it at some point or incorporating it’s ideas into my understanding of the world.
Thanks for the detailed review of this book, and thanks also to those who have responded with useful comments and bibliographic information. The book is not worth reading, certainly, but it raises some interesting and important issues about the university context in which it was produced, and where we stand presently in terms of political discourse and the academy. So few general observations if I may? The book by Dario Fernandez-Morera is embedded in the political structures of the American academic system where writing about controversial subjects and taking an extreme position is often seen as a way of gaining intellectual celebrity, ergo preferment and promotion. This noted some years ago by the historian Joseph Levine (Syracuse University) who once remarked that there was just so much research going on, most of it very good, and the only way to get noticed was to make exaggerated claims or draw utterly outlandish conclusions. A number of examples could be cited, but my favorite is Wendy Doniger whose work on Hinduism not only offends a great many Hindus, but seemed designed to irritate text-critical scholars of Indic texts and historians of religion in general. Seeing a book banned in India is, of course, a sure-fire way making sure everybody will have a look at the book “that is causing all the fuss.” Salman Rushie set an early precedent, albeit unwittingly. The establishment, right and left, rush to defend “freedom of speech,” colleagues are “utterly appalled” at how Doniger is treated — and if you dare ask if the book is any good, or if she understands the texts on which she comments, you are sniffed at and slapped down. You cannot stand in the way of these sorts of people: they have powerful institutions behind them, and any young scholar will mention the emperor’s new clothes at their peril. With Fernandez-Morera we have a slightly different case. This person is at an good university, and trained at elite institutions in the USA, Harvard among them, but he takes a deliberately provocative stance, informed by the current “standards” of political debate on the American right. The response of Prof. Pearce does not adequately address the issues, and seems, in my view, to depend primarily on the appeal to particular expertise, and need for people who are not experts to “butt out” of fields in which they are not specifically trained. Prof. Pearce candidly admits irritation that Fernandez-Morera is trampling in an area in which she has considerable authority and knowledge. Setting aside the fact that Fernandez-Morera’s book is a polemical tract and load of hog-wash, the heart of the problem is that we cannot counter works of this nature by a simple appeal to expertise. It is not enough to say that Fernandez-Morera does not know Arabic, does not read the sources in the original and therefore should not have the temerity to comment on the subject. Moreover, because Fernandez-Morera not an established scholar of Andalusian or Islamic studies, he should not dare write about it. The second level of criticism follows from this… certainly he may write, but a “popular” book is not interpretive scholarship. His historical understanding may be flawed, his inability to understand the sources to which he has access might be manifest… but these are separate and legitimate scholarly criticisms. But language is not enough: we might ask, reasonably I think, why those working on Islamic Spain bother writing in English or any European language? Why not just write in Arabic? If only those who can read the sources in Arabic can speak with any authority, then why bother writing at a linguistic step removed from the sources? Just write in Arabic and be done. Those who are trained and able will pick up the threads. This is, of course, a bit silly, but there are some serious issues lurking: the “appeal to expertise” excludes, firstly, interdisciplinary comparison. Aside from invoking a hierarchy of knowledge and power, it precludes any meaningful challenge from outside the expert’s domain. We end here with historians of India or China excluded from writing on Spain. Moreover, the dismissal of “popular” works is too hasty, and fails to acknowledge that academics exist in a social ecosystem that requires some, at least, to be public intellectuals. The popular book — even the much-hated TV series– is a powerful tool. A bad popular book like that produced by Fernandez-Morera is a dangerous thing. It needs to be countered not by appeals to authority, but by beautifully written and accessible accounts of Islamic Spain that speak with authority and touch the key historical issues and, by reflection, the issues of our own time. Retreat into the fortress of expertise, and the cosy parochialism of Oxbridge colleges, is not going to save us from storms brewing outside, and the manifest distaste that the Donald and the Erdoğan have for truth-driven discourse and expertise. It’s not for all academics to speak truth to power, but somebody needs to. Simply complaining and saying that Fernandez-Morera does not know his subject and should “go away” does not cut the mustard. He’s thrown down a challenge, a nice little stinker… now who will respond with something that will overtake him?
The strength of your anger shows the weakness of your arguments. I’m a Spanish historian and the fact that the American Academy has an instrumental conception of Spanish medieval history to support the multicultural model is something out of the question. And it is something that your own comments confirm. Mixing medieval history and modern politics is insane.
Perhaps the strength of my anger shows my commitment to getting the history right? And it’s disingenuous to suggest that only American historians “mix medieval history and modern politics.” Did you have a point to make other than that you, an unknown-to-me commenter on my blog, think that the Spanish academy is superior to the American one?