On June 4, 2009, in a speech delivered in Cairo, Egypt, President Barack Obama informed his largely Muslim audience that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia . . .” He was not speaking of the southern region of Spain that bears that name today, but rather the Caliphate of Córdoba, known as al-Andalus, which flourished between 756 and 1031. In the last century or so, this period in Spanish Muslim history has been celebrated as a time of enlightenment and tolerance, set against the Dark Ages of bigotry and violence that characterized the Christian West. Such black-and-white characterizations of peoples and cultures are rarely accurate. Medieval al-Andalus was a product of its times, adhering to norms found in other Muslim kingdoms that were just as intolerant (to use an anachronistic term) as Christian ones. The “paradise” of convivencia that is so often invoked by politicians and popular authors is indeed a myth, and the world needs a good book to replace it with a dispassionate analysis of the evidence and a clear description of the people and events.
The “paradise” of convivencia that is so often invoked by politicians and popular authors is indeed a myth.
This is not that dispassionate book. It is instead a blistering indictment of the Umayyad Caliphate and its Muslim successors in Spain, as well as the modern academics who produced the myth. It begins by describing the eighth-century conquest of
