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

The Standard of Excellence & A Must Read Book!“The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” is a wake-up call written in a silver-tongued and nitpicking style by Professor Darío Fernández-Morera, Ph.D. Harvard University, who teaches courses in Golden Age and Medieval Spanish culture, literature, and history at Northwestern University. He is an outstanding and honest scholar.This book not only demolishes all fabrications and figments of the academic imagination about Christians, Jews and Muslims living in a pluralist Islamic Golden Age but also puts on the map a fact-based account of a medieval Spain largely controlled by Muslims that has been hidden by the politically correct academia and media establishment.The author stands by the idea of searching for the truth of the matter, wherever it may lead, even if the search uncovers unpleasant facts and naked struggles for power, an approach advocated and exemplified by the brilliant Italian political and cultural thinker Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 - 21 June 1527), whose well known motto opens and informs the book: “it has seemed to me better to go directly to the truth of the matter rather than to the imagining of it” and by the Muslim political thinker Ibn Ẓafar al-Ṣiqillī (1104-1170/72): “[priority must be given] to what is real rather than approximation,” (p. 9).The book comprises 17 pages of an excellent introduction, 223 pages of facts-supported narrative, generous quotes from primary and secondary Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sources, and a methodically documented narrative with historiographical accuracy, verified and validated by 95 pages of explanatory endnotes and detailed references and 11 pages of primary and secondary bibliographical entries.Fernández-Morera challenges academia’s politically correct re/interpretation of the past shaped by the present-day ideological mission of the progressives. He shows the truth of the invasion of Hispania by Muslim-Arab-led Berbers, and unmasks, among other things, the academics’ obliviousness to Christian and Islamic testimonies from al-Andalus in their academically opinionated and misleading research that obfuscates the obvious truth --which should be at the heart of every high--principled researcher--about medieval Spain from the Fall of the Western Roman Empire until the Age of Discovery.The author provides ample evidence from both primary and secondary Christian, Muslim and Jewish sources to demonstrate that: “By the end of the twelfth century, as a result of flight (or “migration”) to Christian lands, expulsions to North Africa, executions, and conversions, the Christian dhimmi population had largely disappeared from al-Andalus. When Christians entered Granada in 1492, there were no Christian dhimmis in the city.” Though very few Christians were left by the end of the twelfth century, Christian civilization had been effectively destroyed in Islamic Spain long before the end of the twelfth century.Using archeological and textual evidence from great Spanish and French scholars, Fernández-Morera shows that a brilliant Hispano-Roman-Visigoth civilization existed in Christian Spain before the Muslim conquest and that this civilization was destroyed by Muslims, who eventually replaced it with their own. He also shows the cultural connections between this Christian Visigoth Spain and the Christian Eastern (or Greek) Roman empire, and how Visigoths assimilated to this civilization, in contrast to Muslims, who destroyed it after taking what they found of practical use in it.He brings to light that: “all too often, books in English do not show a mastery of the work of Spanish scholars.” (p. 9). Too many meritorious Spanish researchers and their investigations, which this book draws upon (Felipe Maillo Salgado, Serafin Fanjul, Luis A. García Moreno, etc.) have been ignored by many academics.So have been great French scholars, this book cites repeatedly such as: Dominique Urvoy, Jacques Fontaine, Christine Pellisandri, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, Marie Therese Urvoy and many others.That during their control of large parts of medieval Espanna (he shows that the name España is an evolved form of Hispania, then Spania and then Espanna) from 710 to 1492, Muslims enslaved or tyrannized and kept under their thumb by means of Jihad and of sharia law the Christian population has not been acknowledged, and has been a fact glossed over by many university “scholars” for the sake of their ideologically or self-interested driven Weltanschaung about the era of Moorish supremacy in medieval Islamic Spain.Fernández-Morera warns readers: “be cautious and keep in mind the differences that exist between the medieval and the modern worlds of Islam, Judaism and Christianity before trying to find reassuring or disturbing similarities between the two. And [the book] it rejects all anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, and anti-Christian viewpoints. Or, as modern critical jargon would put it: readers should keep in mind that the texts examined are ‘historically situated cultural constructs.’” (p. 10).The use of the sources unveiled by Fernández-Morera about so called “tolerant Muslim culture” and “pluralism” involves a sound methodology where the truth value of a historical account or a juridical statement increases when antagonistic sources agree on its veracity; thus in a narrative where “both Muslim and Christian sources mention a story that, even if apocryphal, illustrates the knowledge of the tactical use of terror in psychological warfare. Shortly after the Islamic forces landed, the flesh of the cadavers of some Christians killed in battle were boiled in large cauldrons under the sight of terrified Christian prisoners, who became convinced that the Muslims were cannibals.” (p. 37).We learn from the primary sources that Musa, the supreme leader of the Islamic conquest, “burned any city that resisted, crucified the nobility and the older men,’ and ‘cut into pieces the young men and the infants,’” (p. 38). “A priest leading a Christian community asked of the Muslims warriors what they wanted. The priest was then told that he had ‘three options; either Islam or Jizyah or the sword.’” (p. 47). Afterwards when Musa wrote to his caliph, he described the conquest as ‘not a conquest, but the Judgment Day.’” (p. 48).Islamic law subjugating Christians was clear: [The Jew and the Christian]: “they must on the contrary be abhorred and shunned and should not be greeted with the formula, ‘Peace be with you,’ for the devil has gained mastery over them and has made them forget the name of God. They are the devil’s party, ‘and indeed the devil’s party are the losers.’” [(Qur’an, 57: 22), p. 113]. “In 919 the head judge of tolerant Umayyad Córdoba invoked the punishment that contemporary sharia law prescribed against a Christian woman accused and found guilty of having said publicly that Jesus was God and that Muhammad was a liar who pretended to be a prophet: ‘whoever deprecates Allah, praised be Allah, or deprecates his Messenger, peace be upon him, be he a Muslim or an infidel, he must be killed and must be allowed to repent.’” (p. 125). According to the early-tenth-century writer Ibn al-Faqil “Arabs in Iraq were superior to the Slavs and the blacks because the sun cooked them just right: the Slavs were undercooked and therefore had a color between ‘blond, buff, blanched, and leprous,’ while the blacks were overcooked by the sun and therefore ‘overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds and depraved passions, such as the Zanj, the Ethiopians, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between them.’” (p. 165).“A Muslim who raped a free Christian woman must be lashed; a Christian who raped a free Muslim woman must be killed. Whoever calumniated a Muslim must be flogged, but whoever calumniated a Christian was not flogged. Whereas a Christian was allowed to convert to Islam, a Muslim was forbidden, under punishment of death, to convert to a different faith.” (pp. 210-211).Citing a Muslim source from the Umayyad period (661-750), this book shows that one of the main exports of Umayyad al-Andalus was slaves, that most white eunuchs in the world came from Spain, and that blond women from Christian lands were the most desired sexual slaves. We also learn that all Umayyad rulers descended from white sexual slaves and as a result many of these rulers were blond or red haired and even blue-eyed, as was ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, by name Al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (Arabic: “Victor for the Religion of Allah,” born January 891 and died October 15, 961, Córdoba), who tinted his hair black to look more Arabic.My question to all politically correct scholars is: does it look like a land of tolerance or terror? No wonder that you do not say that the evidence that he cites from juridical, historical, and religious sources from Christians, Muslims and Jews is false, but try instead to distract potential readers of this book by attacking his credentials or his motives, in the sort of variations on the ad hominem attack that those who have no arguments against the evidence presented against their beliefs attempt to use it in order to deflect the narrative by attacking the messenger of the bad news.With good sense, Fernández-Morera fairly asks the following question neglected by politically correct academic professors and fake news: “How can Hispano-Roman-Visigoth Spain be portrayed as a land of ‘Dark Ages gloom and depression’ while Islamic Spain is hailed as ‘the pride and the ornament of the world, the most illustrious part of the earth? Why has the history of both Islamic Spain and its Hispano-Roman-Visigoth predecessor been so distorted?” (pp. 81-82).After all, more astonishing are some “politically correct inventors” who either deliberately or because of shoddy research missed by a mile archeological discoveries, primary sources, great secondary sources by excellent scholars, first-rate analysis and the train of thought of the research achieved by Professor Fernández-Morera.As a result of my examination of this book I attest to Professor Fernández-Morera’s integrity and endorse his academic honesty, intellectual bravery and logic to genuinely speak the truth about medieval Hispania, based on his reliable knowledge of history and the Christian and Arabic primary sources against the pro-Islamic politically correct nonsense, dishonesty and disinformation, disseminated by the Western academe, which misrepresented the persuasive evidence and continues to go along with a bogus and disingenuous explanation of “convivencia,” to advocate their phony “multicultural harmony” inside Islam, and to humanize the barbarian acts, propagating their fake news about a peaceful and tolerant Muslim civilization in the Iberian Peninsula when in point of fact Medieval Islamic Spain was anything but toleration.I believe that this contribution to understanding the truth about the myth of tolerance and pluralism in the “Golden Age” of Islam is a must-read book in schools, colleges and universities instead of the unscientific and ideologically driven nonsense invented by some scholars, among them Islamic Studies as well as medieval studies experts. These experts, believing to have a monopoly on the study of Islamic Spain by reason of their specialization, have deprived us for too long of access to the reality of the conquest, occupation of medieval Spain, and the destruction of Christianity in Islamic Spain for centuries until the Christians managed to reconquer the land in a political and military effort probably unequalled in history: the Spanish reconquest of the land from Islamic claws in a struggle that lasted several centuries.The author deserves our gratitude for setting the record straight, demolishing the lies about the fantasized Islamic Golden Age, presenting irrefutable facts, documenting the realistic picture of Islamic history, and exposing the unhistorical fantasy, produced by a politically correct academia by amply quoting the academics’ own foolish writings, and risking the ad hominem attacks that those endangered and evidently terrified by his research throw against him. It must be particularly irksome to so many specialists in Islamic “studies” that the book calls attention to the lavish and compromising amounts of money given to centers for Islamic “Studies” by Muslim governments and benefactors such as the disgraced Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose name many Islamic “studies” centers in many universities bear.My congratulations to Professor Darío Fernández-Morera.

Where are the standards? This book is an anti-Islam polemic masquerading as objective scholarship. But the greatest evidence of muslim tolerance in Spain is that after 700 years, Christians existed in Spain, but after 100 years of Castilian rule, Muslims did not. When the Christians had the power to expel the Christians, they did. When the Muslims had the same power, they did not. The author creates all these reasons why it was justified to expel the Muslims, but he doesn't cite the same reasons as why it would be justified for the muslims to do the same. He goes out of his way to apologize for the acts of the Castilians and exposes his double-standard way of thinking.The problem with this book is that it has no standards.It's references are selective. The main premise is to dispute the idea of a tolerance in Islamic Spain. I would agree that an overly rosy picture of confessional harmony in Islamic Spain is not historically accurate, but the idea that Islamic Spain was not unusual in Europe at the time is not historically accurate either.One could argue that the unusualness of Islamic Spain was not a positive one, but one must first set the standards by which to judge Islamic Spain. If you are attempting to answer the question of whether the Muslim rulers in Spain were tolerant to Christians and Jews, then you must first define the word 'tolerant' and then set a standard for it. In this case, the standard must be a contemporary one or, in order words, a comparison between the Islamic Spain and one of its' Christian or even Jewish contemporaries, e.g. Frankish Gaul (there was no France at the time), Lombard and other rulers of Italy, Byzantium, Khazar Empire, etc.) The standard cannot be a comparison with the post-bellum American South or with Aparthied South Africa. How much sense would it make that the name of this book were changed to “Apartheid Islamic Spain”? This type of anachronistic thinking doesn’t make historical sense and we should use our modern notions of personal liberty and rights to judge the relative tolerance of 8th century Spain.So, if this author had established standards to measure the level of tolerance of Islamic Spain and then go on to show that the level of tolerance in Islamic Spain was at or lower than its’ contemporaries, then, maybe we would have a book that could contribute to the understanding of the historical nature of Islamic Spain. Perhaps the author is simply responding to the rosy picture of Islamic Spain produced by other authors. However, adding one extreme to another does not equal a better picture, it just leads to arguing from extremes that do not aid understanding (to better understand this phenomenon read Cass Sunstein’s great little book “Going to Extremes”).So let’s just say that the standard is simply the pairwise comparison on certain issues between Islamic Spain and the contemporaries mentioned above but also including the rulers that preceded and followed Islamic Spain, i.e. the Visigoths and Castile-Aragon. And we should answer whether Islamic Spain was positively different or not? And the analysis should be from the minority perspective, i.e. if you were a Muslim living under Christian rule, or a Christian living under Islamic Rule. And we should start by saying that being a religious minority was not going to be comfortable anywhere in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Using another commentators “myths” we have the start of our issues.1. “Religion was not a factor.” Of course religion was a factor. But it was so for the contemporaries: Francia under Charlemagne waged war on Saxons in the name of Christianity; the Byzantines waged war on the Bulgars in the name of Christianity as well. So, Islamic Spain was not more or less tolerant on this issue.2. Western Europe was backwards. This has nothing to do with Islamic Spain. I suppose the myth is that the Islamic conquest ended Spain’s backwardness. That has nothing to do with whether Islamic Spain was more tolerant than its’ contemporaries, unless you equate lower levels of tolerance with backwardness. However, for our purposes, the issue is to establish the level of tolerance. I don’t see how this relates. However, it should be noted that Spain was always seen as backward, in Roman times and in pre-Roman times. It was the wild, wild, west of the ancient world. The Byzantines and the rulers of Italy would have seen Spain as backwards. And of course, as throughout Western Europe literacy declined with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. These are just facts, but I don’t know if they contribute to our analysis in a material way.3. Islamic Spain brought tolerance to Europe and was enlightened. Once again we are measuring the tolerance, so we must establish that tolerance existed before we could attempt to judge its effects.5. Muslim Spain was a feminist utopia. Obviously, not true. But in the sense that women were not property and could inherit, then Islamic Spain was more tolerant than Francia. Women in Byzantium could inherit, but Roman law still gave the pater familias the power of life and death over his wife or daughter. Islamic Spain was more tolerant to women than its’ contemporaries.6. "Jews lived happily and productively in Spain." They certainly were productive as the decline in Castilian Spain’s productivity after the Jews were expelled would show. In comparison with the contemporaries, the treatment of Jews was more tolerant in Islamic Spain. The Visigoths placed forced many Jews to convert to Christianity. Islamic Spain did not. Castilian Spain expelled the Jews entirely and the inquisition was created to root out secret Jews. There was never an Islamic inquisition. The author cites some anecdotes about suspicion of secret Christians, but that cannot compare to a Church organized institution. The author was able to make the distinction (although inaccurate) between Jihad and the Crusade, but could not make this distinction. (Technically, only the leader of the muslims, i.e. Caliph, can declare a jihad. That’s why in response to the first crusade, the muslims asked the Caliph in Baghdad to declare one.)The Byzantines were probably equally tolerant of the Jews as Islamic Spain, but the percentage of Jews in Byzantium was much less. The same low percentage was found in Francia. So where Jews were a sizable minority, Islamic Spain was more tolerant. Furthermore, where did most Jews go when they were expelled? Not Christian Europe, but Ottoman Europe and Asia. Also, Maimonides also left Spain fleeing intolerant Muslim rulers, but where did he go? Once again, not Christian Europe, but Muslim Egypt, ruled by...Salahuddin Ayyubi.7. Muslim Spain was a fairyland for Christians. Obviously, this is not true. The standard here should be one of existence. It was simply unlawful to be Muslim in a Christian land. In all of the Christian territories, you could be a type of “accepted” Christian or a Jew (except in Castilian Spain), but not a Muslim or Pagan. In fact, you couldn’t even be an Arian Christian in the west. The author refers to Arianism as a heresy, but I’m sure the Arians didn’t see it that way (by the way Constantine was an Arian, so I guess he wasn’t a Christian, but a heretic.) Clearly, being allowed to exist is more tolerant than not being allowed to exist. So, Islamic spain was more tolerant simply by allowing the existence of Chrisitians. That's an incredibly low standard, but what does it mean that the contemporary Christian rulers couldn't meet this impossible low standard.8. Fernandez-Morera writes that the popular idea that Islam preserved classical knowledge and passed that knowledge on to Christian Europe "is baseless." This claim is simple wrong. When the Castilians captured Toledo, the Archbishop Raimondo asked for scholars across western Europe to come and examine the library. If this knowledge existed in western Europe, then why come to Toledo? If this knowledge already existed in the catholic areas of Spain, then why come to Toledo? If this knowledge could be obtained from Byzantium, then why come to Toledo?The answer was that this knowledge could not be found in Western Europe at all. And it did not come through Byzantium for two reasons: (1) western Europeans weren’t interested when they had access to Byzantium and (2) when western Europeans were interested, the catholic church and Byzantium were in schism. This leads to another important fallacy of the author’s work. That the muslims destroyed the unity of the Mediterranean. No, that was done by the heretical Arian Christian Goths, Vandals, and Lombards centuries before. There was no unity at the beginning of the Islamic conquests. The author argues that since the Muslims destroyed that unity then knowledge could not flow to the West. However, this just illustrates that the author is working toward an agenda. The Danube river valley and Italy were always in contact with Byzantium and these links were never “broken” by Muslims. If scholars wanted to travel to Byzantium, they could have done so. The point is that they were not interested.And this leads to the last point that the scholar assumes but is also false. The idea that Roman civilization and culture (including Byzantine culture) was interested in Greek learning. The book “Terry Jones’ Barbarians” goes into great detail of the Roman disdain for Greek theoretical thinking. The Romans were conservative and retarded Greek thinking and the Christian church also was suspicious of Greek thinking. These are facts. Why is it that there are no great commentaries to the ancient greek philosophers from the Roman and Byzantine times? Why is it that the great commentators are Muslim and later western European? Because the Romans and Byzantines simply weren’t interested. The author quotes the story of Cyril. But his example is illustrative, one can preserve without enhancing (the charge levelled against muslims), so Cyril knew of the philosophies but he did not advance them. Why? Because his religious mission was more important to him. If he had spent his time developing philosophy instead of a Slavic alphabet to convert the Slavs maybe he would be a great philosopher. But like so many other Greeks that was not his choice.Lastly, the author presents some imagined counterfactual that the visigoths were on the verge of something great but it was aborted by the muslim conquest. Beyond the fact that the rapidity of the conquest shows that the visigoths weren't on the verge of anything great, this counterfactual suggests that the visigoths would go on to do something that the franks, germans, English and Italians would not do for another 700 years even without a muslim conquest weighing them down. The audacity of this claim is laughable.Through a lack of standards, this author does nothing but present a lop-sided view of Islamic Spain.

De una forma amena y muy bien documentada, descubre las verdades "incómodas" o "no correctas políticamente" de la ciega soicedad anticirstiana de hoy y a quien el aterra criticar al islam. Los europeos del siglo XX y XXI, al negar sus raíces cristianas, en un futuro no lejano se darán cuenta que ya nos son Europa, se habrán convertido en Eurabia islámica.

I have long ben suspicious of the story of Islam in Spain and am very preased to fin someone who has done the research to satisfy my suspicions. The thing that made me suspicious in the beginning was the inabilityof the Islam to govern themselves withoiut using violence to teplace any system of Government. If they are unable to chasnge governmemnt peaceablyu then they are in a poor condition. In this I also look at the English monarch in the years when they had the all powerful kings.Pat Howley

The book is a convincing corrective to the politically correct assertion that Muslim Spain was a place of tolerant convivencia between the three religions of the book. Unfortunately, the repetitive style makes this a cumbersome read. The use of epigraphs may be a clever way to mount the argument, but it would have been more ‘user friendly’ to place these quotations in inverted commas.

Why some historians feel the compulsion to overstate ad nauseam their thesis by inflating their polemical counterarguments, well beyond scholarly objectivity? The author commits the usual sin of “ presentism “ by drawing comparisons not between contemporary medieval societies but between our own liberal norms and those of past societies. Indiscriminate violence and religious intolerance were not the preserve of Muslim societies but were widespread across most Christian Western Societies. Didn’t a famous English king warrior threaten to kill all the inhabitants of Calais and was ready to slaughter their eminent burghers surrendering the keys of the city?Didnt his son massacre without pity all the inhabitants of Limoges? Didn’t the French Crusaders fighting the Cathar heresy butcher all the inhabitants of a city that surrendered, on the advice of the Bishop who proclaimed that God will know his own.The Crusaders committed endless abominable acts in the name of Christ, with indiscriminate destruction and butchering of besieged citizens in Antioch, Jerusalem etc. The Muslim invaders were no different but at least gave their defeated opponents the choice to convert or become “ Dhimmis “ and pay the Jizya.The changing of names of locations and towns after an invasion and occupation of foreign land has been common to all hegemonic occupying forces throughout history.It doesn’t necessarily delete the past of a country or indicate tyrannical rule. Burma didn’t displace Myanmar, Siam didn’t obliterate Thailand. It is a weak argument!The author keeps harping about the Maliki legal school and their fatwas that he finds cruel and patently discriminating against the Infidels. This is a matter of interpretation as many modern scholars believe that the rigid application of strict measures against the “ Dhimmis” was if anything lax, hence the regular exhortations of the Ulemas, who were outraged by the leniency of Rulers. There is a wide gap between legal pronouncements and on the ground attitudes.The book constantly denigrates the contribution of Muslim Scholars to Science and Medicine. The arguments frankly are ridiculous with their hostile bias. There was a strong Andalusian musical tradition ironically kept alive over the centuries by the descendants of the Jews expelled to North Africa. Moreover how can he deny the importance of the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, used for centuries in Medical Schools throughout Europe? What about the great Arab geographer from Sicily Al Idrisi and the great Persian polymath Al Biruni. The Tunisian Ibn Khaldoun considered the founder of political sociology and Ibn al Haytham( AlHazen) the great Physicist who corrected the Aristotelian theories about light and vision & the first known experimentalist. The Andalusian Al Battani contributed to the tables of Toledo used by Copernicus to predict movements of the Sun, moon etc. The polymath Ibn Rushd of Córdoba otherwise Averroes was a free thinker condemned later by the Catholic Church in view of his advanced views about faith and religious dogma. I could carry on!The author reminds us that the only route of success in Muslim Spain was to convert to Islam. Yet many Christians and Jews became prominent in government and other areas because of their own abilities. Muslim Spain produced at least three great Jewish thinkers namely Ibn Gabirol , Judah Halevi and Maimonides. No Jewish thinker came to prominence in Europe before Spinoza in the 17th Century. There was no pogroms of Christians or Jews in Medieval Muslim Spain, whereas the Jews in Europe were regularly persecuted, murdered and subject to arbitrary expulsion as in England in 1290. The Catalan theologian and polymath Ramon Llull who lived at the end of the 13th Century was the first to call for the expulsion of all Jews unless they converted to Christianity. No Muslim scholar ever called for the expulsion of all Non Muslims from the lands of Islam. Large Christian communities remain in Iraq, Syria and Egypt to this day.European Crusaders didn’t just fight in the Holy land, they killed with impunity some of their own citizenry like the heretic Cathars and the Teutonic Knights rampaged for years through Prussia and Eastern Baltic regions with the pretext of extirpating Paganism in 13th Century Europe. One must not overlook the fratricidal wars opposing the crowns of England and France for more than a hundred years! Should we bring in by way of comparison the enslavement, mass murders and atrocities committed by the Spanish Conquistadors against the pagan Amerindians?One can multiply the examples. Medieval Muslim Spain was by contrast more accommodating and tolerant, though one has to accept that such concepts are all relative. Relative to the contemporary mentalities as opposed to our own times! Though even this is arguable. It is a great historical distorsion to describe Muslim Spain as a Taliban or ISIS ruled society. The book elaborates the crudest polemic to support unsophisticated Islamophobia.

There is no doubt that Dario Fernandez-Morera, a professor educated at Harvard, is well qualified to write this book. This is abundantly evident in the authority with which he presents the material, and the impressive notes at the end of the book backing up his points; almost a volume in itself. I recommend looking him up on YouTube (for instance his interview with Professor Gad Saad).Throughout the book Fernandez-Morera includes dozens of epigraphs: quotations from all kinds of sources, including from academics, the mainstream media, and politicians including Obama, which have spread myths about Spain in the period between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. These leave the reader in no doubt that the nonsense has spread far and wide and is deep, especially in universities. On every single point of misinformation - and there are many of them - Fernandez-Morera painstakingly presents the evidence that disproves the myths. There was no convivencia, no multicultural paradise, in Medieval Spain: we are left in no doubt about that long before finishing the book. So strong is the case that, by the end, the myths had for me become every bit as farcical as a Monty Python sketch. Instead of..."Alright, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"...with Medieval Spain we could easily have something like:"Alright, but apart from the violent conquest, beheading, crucifixions, raping and pillaging, enslavement, the expulsions to Africa, the jizya, extortion, the ritual humiliation, lower status, discriminatory laws, the erasure of culture and identity, the demolition of churches and severe restrictions on worship, what did Islamic Spain ever do to them?"There was no "peaceful invasion", as if it were a migration, but instead a violent and bloody conquest. Jihad was at the time always understood in terms of holy war by the Muslims themselves. Christians and Jews were not treated well: they were treated as inferior. They had nowhere near equal rights to Muslims. It was not an enlightened civilisation taking over a backward civilisation: quite the opposite. The progress of civilisation was severely hampered, not helped. Christian churches were demolished and the superior materials used to build mosques, with severe restrictions imposed on Christian worship. It was subjugation, not tolerance. Women, including Muslims, were not better off, they were worse off.There are so many examples - too many to mention - of different myths that have, and are still being, spread about medieval Spain, that the author puts under scrutiny and demolishes; it's quite breathtaking. And, actually, annoying.Early on, the author points out that this is a book about the period in question. Clearly, though, it is of crucial relevance today. 'The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise' was published in 2016. There is another epigraph which I would add to the author's list from a book by Sayeeda Warsi, 'The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain', which is about the problems of today. It was published just after in 2017, otherwise I am certain Fernandez-Morera would have included it if he came across it, such a gem it is:"As my good friend the political journalist and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan writes, we don't need 'a Christian-style reformation of Islam', with all its injustices, persecution and bloodletting, but 'Muslims do need to rediscover their own heritage of pluralism, tolerance and mutual respect - embodied in, say, the Prophet's letter to the monks of St Catherine's monastery, or the "convivencia" (or co-existence) of medieval Muslim Spain'." p.186.Tolerance and respect in medieval Spain is not the only myth Warsi tries to spread in her book, including, as you can see, grossly distorted Christian/Islamic comparisons. But there are strong echoes of all the deceit and misinformation found in the treatment of medieval Spain when you look at the present-day discussions on "multiculturalism" and "diversity" from politicians (like Warsi), academics and the mainstream media. The same rigorous scrutiny Fernandez-Morera applies to what really happened in Spain needs to be applied to what is happening today.