Did the Golden Age of Muslim Spain really happen? A Debate.

Part III—Who’s right?

From 711 to 1492, Muslim conquerors ruled parts of Spain, which they called al-Andalus.

As with everything about Islam, what sort of rulers they were is a matter of controversy.

In Part I of this series I reviewed The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by the late Yale University professor María Rose Menocal. According to her, Muslim Spain was “the chapter of Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.” She paints a Spain where caliphs like Abd ar-Rahman III built spectacular palaces and populated them with scholars and poets. Jews like Samuel ibn Nagrillah rose to lead armies and rule at the side of kings. Christian youth were so eager to assimilate into this shimmering culture that old fogeys like Alvarus of Cordoba complained Arabic was all the rage among them. Kids today. They completely neglect Latin. Philosophers like Averroes and social scientists like ibn Khaldun pushed the boundaries of scholarship. And absolutely everyone was a poet, churning out ingenious new forms of verse to celebrate the charms of their lady loves, forms that would go on to lay the foundation for Christian Europe’s troubadour culture.

Part II covered The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain by Darío Fernández-Morera of Northwestern University, and that book paints a very different portrait. The conquest of the peninsula was bloody. Captured women were sold into slavery, to be raped in the harem. The shari’a imposed severe restrictions on non-Muslims. In Cordoba, between 850 and 860, some four dozen Christians were murdered for the “crime” of declaring the divinity of Christ. And anti-Jewish riots killed many, including Samuel ibn Nagrillah’s son Joseph.

Interestingly, Menocal and Fernández-Morera don’t disagree about facts. Their differences are over interpretation.

Menocal acknowledges episodes of intolerance like the anti-Jewish riots and the Martyrs of Cordoba. But she dismisses them. “It would be foolish,” she writes, “to suggest that this was a world devoid of all manner of intolerance and darkness. What age, no matter how golden, is?”

Similarly, Fernández-Morera acknowledges the spectacular courts of the caliphs existed. But he dismisses them. They weren’t typical of the life of the common people.

Thus, the two authors mirror each other in their confirmation bias: both are quick to grasp the smallest factoid that supports their hypotheses. But inconvenient bits of data that contradict them are dismissed as the sort of thing that can happen in any society. Of no importance whatsoever.

So who’s right?

In my humble opinion, both. Fernández-Morera was right that Muslim Spain was far from a paradise. And yet Menocal was right that its remarkable achievements really did make it the Ornament of the World.

The glittering courts, with their vast libraries and spectacular gardens, really weren’t typical of the life of the average Andalusian—but they still glittered.

The women who enflamed the romantic ardor of poets really were sex slaves—but the verses they inspired were no less heartfelt or influential.

Averroes really was exiled by his fellow Muslims, and ibn Khaldun ignored—but their accomplishments in philosophy and social science were no less remarkable.

Non-Muslims really were second class citizens under the shari’a—but many of them nevertheless rose to the stratosphere of Muslim society.

Jews really were persecuted because they were so successful—but they were successful.

Muslims really did murder Christians who insisted on broadcasting their faith—but to the chagrin of Alvarus of Cordoba, the pageant of Islamic culture enticed legions of others to assimilate.

In short, Muslim Spain was a case study in Dr. Zuhdi Jasser’s “Two Islams” hypothesis, which he explained in his book A Battle for the Soul of Islam. There’s the Islam he grew up with, which taught him that “Christians and Jews were my brothers and sisters, ‘People of the Book.’” And there’s political Islam or Islamism, which he first encountered during his college years. That pernicious doctrine preaches that “Islam comes before all else, and everything should be done to make this religion the dominant one in the world and for laws to based not on secular agreement but purely on shariah.”

Just as both of these two Islams exist today, so they existed side-by-side in Muslim Spain. To insist it was all one or all the other, besides being far less interesting, is to cling to only half a truth.

 

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092 and will be the first in a series that depicts how the Muslim world committed cultural suicide during the Middle Ages.

Photo Credit: Michael Isenberg

Did the Golden Age of Muslim Spain really happen? A Debate.

Part II—No.

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain by Darío Fernández-Morera.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

“Few periods in history have been more misrepresented than that of Islamic Spain.” So writes Darío Fernández-Morera, Associate Professor at Northwestern University, in his recent book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.

Works like María Rose Menocal’s The Ornament of the World, which I reviewed in Part I of this series, depict Muslim Spain, or al-Andalus as the Muslims called it, as a warm memory where enlightened rulers were the epitome of rationality and tolerance. It was a “Golden Age” when Jews and Christians were able to practice their religions freely, achieve great things in poetry, philosophy, and commerce, and rise to dizzying heights in a Muslim-dominated society.

But Fernández-Morera begs to differ. According to him, the Muslim era in Spain (711-1492) was a time of brutal invasions followed by brutal suppression of rebellions. Bigoted Muslim jurists joined forces with bigoted ordinary Muslims to martyr Christians and conduct pogroms against Jews. Cultural accomplishments, such as they were, were highly overrated and primarily borrowed from the Christian world.

Fernández-Morera doesn’t dispute the existence of the glittering royal palaces, as presented by Menocal, with their legions of poets, scientists, and highly-placed Jewish and Christian officials. But he argues that you can’t infer from court life what life was like for the average Jew or Christian living under Muslim rule. “This selective approach is as scholarly defective as would be assessing the everyday life and moral preferences of twentieth-century American families based on a reading of the historical records left behind by Hollywood actors and American artistes and literati,” he writes.

The picture he paints of the daily grind for the typical non-Muslim, especially Christians, is grim. “A basic fact is lost in discussions and arguments about the details of the life of the Christian dhimmis in Spain, the so-called Mozarabs, and about how much or how little they benefited from Islamic ‘toleration’—namely, that they were by definition a subaltern group, a fourth- or fifth-class marginalized people in a hierarchical society, and that they were the victims of an extortion system, the dhimma, that gave them the choice that gangsters give to their victims: pay to be protected, or else.”

Fernández-Morera concedes that life for Spanish Jews was somewhat better than for Spanish Christians. “It is true, then, that the Jewish community experienced better living conditions under Spain’s Muslim conquerors than under the Catholic Visigoths. It is also true that, as a result, for some centuries Andalusian Jewry thrived, producing a brilliant cultural output.

“But none of this mean that Islamic Spain represented a beacon of tolerance…the Muslim masses resented the Jewish community’s influence and visible material success, particularly given that this largely urban minority was relatively well educated and prosperous when compared with the poor and illiterate non-Jewish masses. This resentment contributed to several anti-Jewish riots, pogroms, assassinations, and expulsions, and eventually to a precipitous decline in status during the Almohad rule [1147-1238].”

In other words, yes, the Jews experienced persecution in Muslim Spain. But it happened because they were so successful!

To make his case, Fernández-Morera catalogs many atrocities: No quarter was given during the initial Muslim invasions. Crucifixions and beheadings followed in the wake of the periodic rebellions that followed. Women were taken prisoner and sold into slavery, to be raped in a harem. Then there was the tragic episode of the Martyrs of Cordoba, between the years 850 and 860, when Saint Eulogius and some four dozen other Christians were executed for the "crime" of declaring that Christ was divine and Muhammad a false prophet. Many of the atrocities occurred during the reign of Abd ar-Rahman III, a perennial favorite of the “Golden Age” crowd.

But even more than catalogs of atrocities, Fernández-Morera relies on catalogs of laws to make his case—in particular the so-called Ordinance of Omar. In addition to requiring Jews and Christians to pay a special tax, the jizyah, the ordinance required them to wear distinctive clothing as a badge of their inferior status. They could not build their homes or houses of worship higher than the Muslim buildings. They were prohibited from riding horses, and they could only ride a donkey if they used a wooden saddle. They were required to make way for a Muslim if they were to meet him on the road, and were banned from ringing church bells or otherwise making noise during their religious ceremonies.

Relying so heavily on the law puts Fernández-Morera on shaky ground. He is aware of this. “One should not assume that legal systems indicate how the law is applied or obeyed. Anyone can find examples in his own time and place where the written law does not reflect what some individuals do, or rulers choose to enforce, or judges decide." But he argues in his defense that these examples "do not lessen the importance of taking into account the legal system of a given culture in order to understand its customs, ethics, and beliefs.”

He is right, of course, that where tolerance reigned, it happened in spite of the shari’a, and over the objections of the ulama—the Muslim intellectuals. For example, toleration was especially common during the Taifa period (11th century) when central authority broke down and al-Andalus split into numerous petty kingdoms. These periods of “not unlikely violations of Islamic mores…which are often praised today… marked the nadir of Islamic rule in Spain—as ulama then pointed out and ulama today still do. [emphasis Fernández-Morera’s].”

Nevertheless, in my humble opinion, Fernández-Morera dismisses the tolerance that existed in al-Andalus too readily. Yes, it violated the shari'a. But it still existed.

In fact, I think Fernández-Morera is too ready to dismiss any evidence contrary to his hypothesis. In this he is guilty of the defective, selective approach of which he accuses his opponents. His dismissals are often accompanied by unbecoming sarcasm. Nearly every time he mentions the scholar and jurist ibn Rushd, he refers to him as “the great philosopher Averroes,” in sarcastic quotation marks. In a chapter on the status of women in al-Andalus, he scoffs at the idea that female intellectuals were common, and quotes Maria Luis Avila: “We must avoid allowing ourselves to be impressed by these one hundred and sixteen ‘learned’ women.” I submit that when you have 116 examples of something, you don’t get to dismiss it as anecdotal. It’s officially a thing.

Despite these shortcomings, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise is a serious work of scholarship—there are nearly a hundred pages of end notes—a marked contrast to the nearly non-existent citations in The Ornament of the World. Myth is an important book in that tells a side of the story that the others leave out.

Fernández-Morera recognizes that his conclusions aren’t politically correct. In the introduction, he laments the harsh reception academia provides to anyone who questions the established wisdom about al-Andalus. “Such questioning would also risk an end to travel to Muslim countries to do research, a loss of funding for the heretical scholars and their universities (not only from grant-giving institutions but also from governments such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Libya under Gadhafi, and Turkey), ostracism as graduate students, and difficulty finding university positions (assuming the scholars were able to complete a PhD in a department of Middle East Studies)…University presses do not want to get in trouble presenting an Islamic domination of even centuries ago as anything but a positive event, and academic specialist would rather not portray negatively a subject that constitutes their bread and butter. In addition, fear of the accusation of ‘Islamophobia’ has paralyzed many academic researchers.”

Here I agree with Fernández-Morera 100%. As we see in nearly daily headlines, hostility to freedom of speech is rampant on college campuses, and this extends far beyond the Islamic Studies department. I salute the courage of Fernández-Morera in fighting back by writing the The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise and giving the world a more truthful, more complete picture of Muslim Spain.

So who's right? Was Muslim Spain the Ornament of the World, as Menocal claims, or is Fernández-Morera correct in arguing that's a myth? I’ll reveal that answer in Part III.

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092 and will be the first in a series that depicts how the Muslim world committed cultural suicide during the Middle Ages.

Photo: The Martyrdom of Saint Eulogius of Cordova, by unknown artist.

Did the Islamic Golden Age in Spain really happen? A Debate

Part I—Yes.

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by María Rose Menocal.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

In the spring of 711 AD, the Muslim general Tariq ibn Zayid led some 7,000 fierce Berber fighters in an invasion across the straits that would later bear his name (Gibraltar = Jebel al-Tariq = Mountain of Tariq). Their landing in Spain and subsequent rout of the Visigoth King inaugurated 700 years of Muslim rule over parts of the Spanish peninsula, in particular the area in the south which the Muslims called al-Andalus and is now known as Andalucía.

When I was growing up, my Sunday School teachers told us what a wonderful place al-Andalus was (Yes, we had Sunday School at the synagogue). The Muslim rulers, we were taught, were the epitome of rationality and tolerance. It was a “Golden Age” when Jews and Christians were able to practice their religions freely, achieve great things in poetry, philosophy, and commerce, and rise to dizzying heights in a Muslim-dominated society. Indeed, the time is remembered so fondly among Jews, we still build our synagogues to look like mosques.

It was only as an adult that I learned that not all historians think things were so rosy. There is a debate among scholars as to whether this Beacon of Tolerance ever really existed. Some argue that Muslim Spain was more like South Africa under Apartheid, with Jews and Christians relegated to second class status, or Iran under the ayatollahs, with government by clergy.

Recently I read two books on opposing sides of the question of whether the Golden Age ever happened. The late María Rose Menocal, of Yale University argued "Yes" in her book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Darío Fernández-Morera of Northwestern replied with an unequivocal “No” in The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. In this post I'll review the Menocal book. I’ll cover Fernández-Morera in a future post.

Menocal was primarily a professor of literature so it’s no surprise that The Ornament of the World presents the chronicles of al-Andalus as a series of stories. “Rather than retell the history of the Middle Ages,” she explains, “or even that of medieval Spain, I have strung together a series of miniature portraits that range widely in time and place, and that are focused on cultural rather than political events.” This approach makes for a very readable book, but not without some sacrifice of scholarship. There aren't even proper end notes—mostly just sources on the quotes and their translations. Much of the book reads more like literary criticism than history. For example, she tells us that it “is about a genuine, foundational European cultural moment that qualifies as ‘first-rate,’ in the sense of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wonderful formula…namely, that ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.’” In the case of Muslim Spain, the two opposed ideas were the Islam First ideology that existed in theory in the shari’a and the tolerance that Menocal claims existed in practice.

Muslim Spain was, Menocal writes, “the chapter of Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.”

She took her title, The Ornament of the World from the writings of Hroswitha of Gandersheim, a German, Christian lady-scholar of the 900s. Hroswitha used the phrase to describe the City of Cordoba, capital of Muslim Spain. As Menocal portrays it, Cordoba was a city of spectacular edifices—tourists can still see the famous red and white horseshoe arches of the Grand Mosque (now called the “Mosque-Cathedral”). There were seventy libraries in town whose holdings ran into the hundreds of thousands—at a time when the largest library in Christendom “probably held no more than 400” books. Madinat az-Zahra, the palace of the caliph, was every bit the rival of the Dar Calipha in Baghdad (palace of a rival caliph), with a gold and silver-roofed reception hall, a pool of liquid mercury, and an animal park. Its library was so vast that just the catalog was forty-four volumes.

Menocal’s stories are chronological, starting with the departure of the young Abd ar-Rahman I from Damascus in the mid-700s as he set out to make himself Master of Spain. The tales run through the publication of Don Quixote in the early 1600s—Cervantes claimed in a (fictitious) preface that his masterpiece was a translation of an ancient Arabic history that he rescued from a pile of old manuscripts about to be made into rags. Along the way we meet:

Alvarus of Cordoba (ca.800-861), a Christian scholar who complained about the damn kids who were more interested in writing in Arabic then in Latin.

Hasdai ibn Shaprut (ca.915-ca.970), leader of the Jewish community and foreign minister to the caliph Abd ar-Rahman III. In that capacity he negotiated an alliance with Christian Constantinople against Muslim Baghdad.

Samuel ibn Nagrillah (993-ca.1056), undoubtedly the star of the show. Also known as Samuel the Nagid, he was another leader of the Jewish community who rose high in Muslim circles, in this case to the rank of vizier or prime minister to King Badis of Granada. Samuel was also a warrior and a poet. Much like twentieth century Zionists, he was active in a movement to take Hebrew, which at that point was a dead language, and revive it as an idiom of life and literature. I came across one of his poems not long ago:

Friend, lead me through the vineyards, give me wine
And to the very brim shall joy be mine…
And should you pre-decease me you, friend, select,
Some spot where vineyards twist, my grave to sink.

Clearly Samuel was a kindred spirit to the great Omar Khayyam, astronomer, poet, (and hero of my forthcoming historical novel, The Thread of Reason) who, a generation later and a continent away would write,

Take heed to stay me with the wine-cup,
and make this amber face like a ruby;
when I die, wash me with wine,
and out of the wood of the vine make the planks of my coffin.
(Ousley MS #140, Ruba'i 69, Heron-Allen translation)

Abu Muhammad ibn Hazm (994-1064), a Muslim contemporary of Samuel and a tragic figure. His life was defined by two great losses—his native Cordoba, from which he was exiled when Berber tribesmen overran it and razed the Madinat az-Zahra in 1009, and a slave girl, whom he loved passionately, and who died around the same time. Ibn Hazm spent his youth wandering around Spain and serving a series of leaders who he hoped, incorrectly, would restore the greatness of the fallen Umayyad dynasty. Somehow he found the time to write 400 books on a wealth of subjects. Few survived but among those was The Neck-Ring of the Dove, a manual of the romantic arts.

Judah ha-Levy (ca.1080-ca.1141), a wildly popular poet. In old age, he set off for Jerusalem. Stopping in Alexandria, he was lionized as an international celebrity. Little did the people of that city understand that Judah was no longer the poet they so adored, having denounced the rationality that underlay al-Andalus culture, in favor of faith. In his Book of Khazars, a philosopher and a rabbi debate the topic in front of the (probably) mythical Jewish King of Khazaristan. The philosopher loses.

On the eve of the Second Crusade, Judah left Alexandria to resume his journey. What became of him after that, and whether he reached Jerusalem in those turbulent times, no one knows.

 

Menocal concedes that Muslim Spain was not all palaces and poetry. “It would be foolish,” she writes, “to suggest that this was a world devoid of all manner of intolerance and darkness. What age, no matter how golden, is?” She mentions, for example, Joseph ibn Nagrillah, son of Samuel the Nagid, who laid out the gardens of the al-Hambra, still a spectacular Granada tourist attraction, before being killed in an anti-Jewish pogrom. She also touches on the Martyrs of Cordoba, the forty-eight Christians executed between 851 and 859 for publicly asserting the divinity of Christ and denouncing the wickedness of Muhammad. Menocal dismisses the episode on the grounds that they knew what they were doing and chose martyrdom voluntarily. Talk about blaming the victims.

IMHO, Menocal was too willing to gloss over the dark and intolerant side of Muslim Spain. More about that in Part II.

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092. It depicts the war for the Muslim soul between those who seek to enforce shari’a strictly, persecute Jews and Christians, and stamp out "un-Islamic" science, and those who wink at a few sins, tolerate their non-Muslim neighbors, and write books about science instead of burning them.

Photo credit: Michael Isenberg