The myth of Muslim tolerance for Jews and Christians
By
Paul Monk
There
is a widely held belief that in Spain, during the European Middle Ages, Islam,
Christianity and Judaism co-existed peacefully and fruitfully under a tolerant
and enlightened Islamic hegemony. Dario Fernandez-Morera, associate professor
of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University in the US, with a PhD from
Harvard, has written a stunning book that upends this myth.
The
myth itself has been a comforting and even inspiring story that has underpinned
the so-called Toledo Principles regarding religious tolerance in our time. It
has buttressed the belief that Islam was a higher civilisation than that of
medieval Europe in the eighth to 12th centuries and that the destruction of
this enlightened and sophisticated Andalusia should be lamented.
The
great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a century ago, saw it that way. US
President Barack Obama and The Economist magazine have both very recently cited
Muslim Andalusia as evidence that Islam has been a religion of peace and
tolerance. In short, the myth of Andalusia has been a beacon of hope for
working with Islam in today’s world with a common commitment to civilised
norms.
This
vision was spelled out in Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and
Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002)
and reinforced by David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making
of Europe, 570-1215 (2008). But it has deep roots. Edward Gibbon, in his famous
18th-century history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, wrote in
glowing terms of the 10th-century Umayyad caliphate in Spain as a beacon of
enlightenment, learning and urban living, at a time when Europe was plunged in
bigotry, ignorance and poverty.
As
someone who has long taken this vision for granted, it came as a considerable
shock to me to discover that the conventional wisdom is quite unfounded. In The
Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, Fernandez-Morera systematically refutes the
beguiling fable. The picture he draws is starkly different from the
conventional one, troubling in what it reveals and compelling in its arguments.
If
we are to satisfactorily resolve current disputes about Islamophobia and the
future of Islam as a world religion, this book is required reading.
International reviewers have greeted it as a desperately needed corrective to
delusion and propaganda. That will invite pushback from those who either remain
committed to the myth or believe it is too important a beacon to allow it to be
extinguished.
However,
Fernandez-Morera argues trenchantly that we must shake off the sense of the
superiority of Islam to medieval European culture. He makes the point, for
example, that, given Islam’s antipathy to graphic art and music, had Europe
been Islamised in the 8th century, we would never have had Gregorian chant,
orchestral music or opera. No Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Verdi. No Caravaggio,
Michelangelo or Titian. Ponder that, at least as a thought experiment.
He
shows that the Muslim invaders of Spain in the 8th century did not arrive as a
higher civilisation conquering Visigothic barbarians. They arrived as
barbarians intruding on a strongly Romanised, Catholic and materially
sophisticated culture. As other scholarship has shown, the Arabs in the 7th and
8th centuries were barbarian invaders every bit as much as the Germans or
Bulgars in Europe. They plundered, enslaved and sacked from the Middle East
across North Africa and eastwards to Central Asia and India. As the great
Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun would put it in the 14th century, war in the name
of religion was integral to Islam.
Secondly,
Fernandez-Morera argues that Islam was not the vehicle through which classical
Greek learning was preserved, as is so often claimed.
It
was chiefly Constantinople that archived and protected the patrimony of Greek
antiquity, philosophical, medical and mathematical. The Arabs acquired all this
through Greek Christian scholars translating the classics for them. Greeks from
the east and Christians in the west later revived such learning for themselves.
Meanwhile, the rise of Islam had disrupted the flow of trade and ideas between
the Greek east and the Latin west, thus harming rather than fertilising
European civilisation.
Even
these background theses will strike many readers as controversial, but they are
only the beginning. The real thrust of Fernandez-Morera’s critique of the myth
of Andalusia is that Islam in Spain, far from setting a high bar of tolerance,
was characterised by plunder, domination, the harsh application of sharia law,
the persecution of Christians or Jews who openly avowed their non-Muslim
beliefs, and the violent suppression of ‘‘heresies’’ and apostasy within the
Muslim community.
He
also points out that the Christian and Jewish communities tended towards
dogmatism, enclosure against the other religions and the fierce persecution of
both heretics and apostates. Andalusia has been extolled as a convivencia, he remarks,
but in reality it was what he dubs a precaria co-existencia between the three
monotheistic religions that eventually disintegrated.
Chapter
four, The Myth of Umayyad Tolerance: Inquisitions, Beheadings, Impalings and
Crucifixions, and chapter five, Women in Islamic Spain: Female Circumcision,
Stoning, Veils and Sexual Slavery, reveal what has been airbrushed from
history. The Moroccan Muslim feminist Fatema Mernissi and others have laboured
to argue that the sexual slaves in Andalusian harems were somehow ‘‘free’’
women. Fernandez-Morera draws attention to the considerably greater freedom of
women in Christian Spain, by contrast, in terms of everyday outdoor work and
access to political power.
The
myth of Andalusia has been based on neglect of primary sources and selective
adulation of worldly Muslim rulers, as if they were representative of the
clerical ulema and Muslim masses. In fact, as Fernandez-Morera shows, both
mullahs and masses tended to bigotry and anti-Semitism. There were anti-Semitic
pogroms every bit as violent and irrational as those in Christian Europe. And
many Christians were expelled from Muslim Spain.
Among
the many shocks to my settled beliefs in reading this book was learning of the
atrocities committed, publicly and privately, by Muslim rulers I had long seen
as models of enlightened despotism, notably Abd al-Rahman I (731-788) and his
descendant two centuries later Abd al-Rahman III. Both committed abhorrent
deeds of torture and murder.
Far
more shocking is Fernandez-Morera’s documentation of the harsh sharia law in Spain under
the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, something endorsed even by the
celebrated 12th-century philosopher from Cordoba, Averroes (Ibn Rushd). It was
neither pluralist nor ‘‘secular’’. It offers no model at all for what we might
want or do now in civil society.
I
learned things reading this book that I wish were not true, but the
documentation is voluminous and compelling. There are occasional errors of fact
and some surprising omissions — no discussion, for example, of the great
library of Cordoba or of its other public amenities in the 10 century — but the
overall impact is profound. His book will surely run into hostility, but
Fernandez-Morera is a formidable scholar.
The
classic works of Patricia Crone or John Wansbrough on the origins of Islam are
the best comparison with what Fernandez-Morera has achieved. They demonstrated
that the Koran as a canonical text dates from long after the traditional death
of Mohammed and the hadiths (sayings attributed to Mohammed) were
overwhelmingly just made up by storytellers long after he was gone.
In
Meccan Trade and the Rise of
Islam, Crone argued that the traditional story of Mecca as a great
spice-trading centre where Mohammed founded Islam from whole cloth
(‘‘revelations’’) does not stand up to scrutiny. The actual history of early
Islam and the traditional religious account of it diverge radically. Yet this
extraordinary finding has never sunk in. It is, understandably, resisted
strenuously by Muslim believers and an academic establishment that makes a
living out of writing about that traditional story.
Meccan
Trade and the Rise of Islam and books like it are vital works. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
is one of these books. Rather than accepting conventional or politically
correct views about either Islamic Spain or the rise of Islam ‘‘in the full
light of history’’, read these probing works of historical scholarship.
We
do need the ‘‘cultural secularism’’ that Menocal and others think they can
point to in Muslim Andalusia. We do need to find a way for those who still
adhere to the old religions to live in reasonable harmony. We should want a
tolerant, cosmopolitan order here and abroad. What we cannot do any longer is
take Muslim rule in Spain as our model for accomplishing that laudable goal. We
need to invent something new. There is no Andalusian golden age to emulate.
The
Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews Under
Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. By Dario Fernandez-Morera. ISI Books, 336pp,
$59.95 (HB).
Paul
Monk is a consultant, writer and speaker. He is the author of Opinions and
Reflections: A Free Mind at Work 1990-2015.
From Spero News
@ http://www.speroforum.com/a/TGAMKPIMOU45/78516-The-myth-of-Muslim-tolerance-for-Jews-and-Christians
For more information about Islam see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/islime
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