"Moorish Spain" by Richard Fletcher

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0520248406/ref=s9_asin_image_1/102-1762748-7350520

Following up on my reading of "The Quest for El Cid" and looking for a good general history of Islamic Spain, I picked this book up. Lonely Planet recommended it and it seemed as good as any. Silly me, didn't realize until I got a few pages in that it was the same author who wrote The Quest for El Cid.

I'd give the book 3 1/2 stars. It is a good general overview of the era, I walk away feeling that I now understand the basic outlines of the history of Al-Andalus. In a nutshell: Islamic/Berber conquest - instability - Umayyad Caliphate - Taifa states - Almoravids - Almohads - steady losses to Christian kingdoms and an era of mixed populations - Granada the last stronghold - the end and final expulsion of the Moors. If I have any disappointments, one would be the general lack of detail beyond anecdotes. I would like to have seen not just more anecdotes, but attempts to present some data and discussion of agriculture, more depth on the economy, how the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish non-upper classes interacted, etc. But Fletcher can't really be blamed for this. He set out to write a summarizing history and in this he succeeded, it is merely the limitation of the genre.

Another more serious disappointment would be the relative weighting of his focus. Yes, you cannot write the history of Islamic Spain without spending a good deal of time discussing the Christian kingdoms with whom they were in constant interaction, but I had a near constant feeling that as a historian Fletcher was far more comfortable discussing the Christian history and the more human motives of the Christians than the Muslims. Not in a discriminatory way, just that the Muslim kingdoms came across subtlely more as "the other" and the Christian kingdoms as the understandable half. Perhaps this is because of a relative paucity of sources from the Islamic side (I might hazard to guess that far more Islamic bureaucratic record keeping was lost to time as they were the ultimate losers than Christian records), or perhaps Fletcher's Arabic was limited or non-existent. I can only guess. It is not a fatal flaw in the book, but certainly a weakness.

Finally, I wish more focus was placed on the cultural interactions and the cultural riches Islamic Spain and mixed-faith Spain produced. Menocal focuses heavily on this in her book Ornament of the World, which made the lack of discussion here feel like something crucial was missing from the history.

But again, having focused on these weak points, I did walk away feeling I understand the basic outlines of the region's history now and would recommend the book as a primer. And not to belittle it as nothing more than a primer, he does have interesting insights and anecdotes throughout. Primary sources are referenced more than is common for a summary history, and I found a few of his tantalizing historical analyses really interesting - for example the notion that when the Spanish conquered and colonized the Americas, they not only had a model of religious discourse with which to engage societies such as the Aztecs (as "conquering equals" I might describe it and which Charles C. Mann gets into in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus), but also a model of colonization of the land which they had gained from engaging Muslims religiously and depopulating and re-colonizing their land.

A good read, a cut above the rest, but not the best ever.