The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

Laced with polemics and an undiminished onslaught on Convivencia, Professor Fernandez-Morera’s book certainly benefits from a wide variety of multi-lingual source material including Arabic, though only as far as they are selective and help perform the demolition job. The coexistence and even a lateral celebration of multi-faith and multi-ethnic pluralism in Muslim Spain was called Convivencia by Americo Castro, a literary scholar in the last century, and it has been acknowledged by writers such as Montgomery Watt, Thomas Gluck, Anwar Chejne, Christian Troll, David Levering Lewis and certainly by Maria Rosa Menocal. However, banking on selective reading of Muslim sources including Ibn Khaldun and then more recent works by Sylvain Gouguenhim, Patricia Crone and others, our author tries to show that views about Islam, jihad, minority rights, and even the philosophical contributions made by the Asian and African Muslims all have to undergo a radical revisionism to show that Muslim rule in Spain, like elsewhere, had nothing positive to offer....