Reddit reviews The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain

> Besides, Christians in those places were actually pretty well tolerated by muslims, save for a religious tax on them.

This is not corroborated by primary sources.

Here’s a book regarding the myth of the Islamic paradise of Iberia which a lot of people fall for: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Andalusian-Paradise-Christians-Medieval/dp/1610170954

Not exactly what you're looking for but a hell of a lot more credible than a tumblr post.

I'm waiting on my order for "The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise" shill.


It's one of the more 'kosher' books on the topic, but it's pretty well regarded and the author researched the topic for years before writing it. The whole purpose of the book is to completely demolish the myth of 'Enlightened and tolerant Muslims in the middle ages'.

\>Did you really cite don quixote as a reason to why Spain should be recognized in my eyes as an important nation

Yes, I did. It's an important work of literature. How am I wrong? It's like saying "DUDE DID YOU REALLY JUST CITE DANTE AS A REASON WHY ITALY SHOULD BE RECOGNIZED AS AN IMPORTANT NATION"

\>The Spanish Inquisition is a largely mythologized event and isn’t any different to many other institutions within Europe that also targeted heretical groups

Well at least you know that they were nowhere near as eeeevil as most historically illiterate normies make them out to be.

\>Humboldt is German, not Spanish

True, but it was thanks to Spain that he could make those studies that he did.

\>Life is a dream also isn’t very special

Wrong.

>The play has been described as "the supreme example of Spanish Golden Age drama".[3]

\>considering that the Islamic caliphates’ freedom of expression and religion had been resulting in plays such as this for a long time as well

wrong again, read the Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

\>and I’m not even taking into account that the average human being wouldn’t care for or even know what life is a dream or what don quixote is.

Then what's the point of giving any work of literature any merit if your logic is "hurr durr most people back then were illiterate" or that they "didn't care about it"? What's even your basis for that anyway? That most people didn't care for those works of fiction? You do realize that high schools and colleges in Spanish-speaking countries highly value Don Quixote for a reason, right? You do realize that it's basically Spanish Shakespeare, right?

\>every society has its geniuses meaning that it’s really speculative when it comes down to it

Highly debateable. I doubt Subsaharan Africa or pre-Colonial Americas had any intellectuals, at least the significant kind. There's also the issue of just how important said intellectual really is. For instance, Arab intellectuals from the so-called Islamic Golden Age were really just copying the Greeks and taking concepts from other civilizations they conquered like the Persians, Indian, or Europeans, so we can scratch most of those out.

Bonus:

>Catholic Spain was the most powerful European nation by the 16th century

Any nation considered "the most powerful" within its cultural and geographic region is bound to be kind of a big deal

Actually it wasn't that progressive, more then Europe I guess but not heaven on earth.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Andalusian-Paradise-Christians-Medieval/dp/1610170954

> was under Muslim control where Christians and Jews all lived peacefully together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs_of_C%C3%B3rdoba

>With few exceptions, the Christians knowingly risked execution by making public statements proclaiming their Christianity in the presence of Muslims. Some of the martyrs were executed for blasphemy after they appeared before the Muslim authorities and denounced Muhammad, while others who were Christian children of Muslim-Christian marriages publicly proclaimed their Christianity and thus were executed as apostates. Still others who had previously converted to Islam denounced their new faith and returned to Christianity, and thus were also executed as apostates.


>The forty-eight Christians (mostly monks) were martyred in Córdoba, between the years 850 AD and 859 AD, being decapitated for publicly proclaiming their Christian beliefs. Dhimmis (non-Muslims living under Muslim rule) were not allowed to speak of their faith to Muslims under penalty of death.

>Mark Cohen, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, in his Under Crescent and Cross, calls the "idealized" interfaith utopia a "myth" that was first promulgated by Jewish historians such as Heinrich Graetz in the 19th century as a rebuke to Christian countries for their treatment of Jews.[11] This myth was met with what Cohen calls the "counter-myth" of the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history" by Bat Yeor and others,[11] which also "cannot be maintained in the light of historical reality

>The Spanish mediaevalist Eduardo Manzano Moreno wrote that the concept of convivencia has no support in the historical record [“el concepto de convivencia no tiene ninguna apoyatura histórica“].


>During the Muslim rule of much of the Iberian Peninsula, Jews were living in an uneasy coexistence with Muslims and Catholics, and the relationship between these groups was, more often than not, marked by segregation and mutual hostility.[13] In the 1066 Granada massacre of the entire Jewish population of the city, the Jewish death toll was higher than in the much publicized Christian pogroms in the Rhineland slightly later.[13] The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) was forced to flee from Al-Andalus to avoid conversion by the Almohads, which may have prompted his bitter statement that Islam had inflicted more pain on the Jewish people than any other 'nation'.[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Convivencia

https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Andalusian-Paradise-Christians-Medieval/dp/1610170954


>AD 976 – Library of al-Hakam II : Córdoba, Al-Andalus – All books consisting of “ancient science” were destroyed by the order of Al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir & religious scholars.

Does anyone know anything more about Dario Fernandez-Morera's The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain? I saw it in my local bookshop in a hardback edition with a fairly impressive list of academic cover quotes. It purports to demolish the "coexistence"-thesis of medieval Andalusia, instead arguing that the Al-Andalus was governed like most territories occupied by a foreign power; that is to say, brutally. I didn't buy it, though, because it was expensive, and for the same price I could get Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself and a copy of The Good Soldier Svejk.

It seems to have a warm academic reception from the dustjacket quotations and this review by Laina Farhat-Holzman, but I don't know enough about the period or the state of the scholarship to evaluate it myself.

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Do any other British badhistorians think that the way British popular history and national historical sites focus on the garum wogs Romans to the exclusion of the native inhabitants of the isles at the time is annoying? It seems like a classic example of history being written by the literate. The Roman invasion of Caledonia was extremely bloody judging by the evidence of reforestation around the Black Loch in Fife, yet Scottish history as taught still focuses entirely on the Romans and their supposed technical achievements.

Coexisted" in spain? The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain https://www.amazon.com/dp/1610170954/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_Jc.Uzb2K2SCER]