Andalusian Paradise
Andalusia is a southern region of Spain, located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in southwestern Europe.
Wide-spread myth has it that after Muslims conquered Medieval Spain, different religions and races lived in multicultural harmony. This fallacious myth is effectively dispelled in the 2014 article The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, Intercollegiate Studies Institute. A few excerpts from the article follow:
...The history of Islamic Spain begins, of course, with violent conquest. Helped by internal dissension among the Visigoths, in 711 A.D. Islamic warriors entered Christian Spain and defeated the Visigothic king Rodrigo. These Muslims were a mixture of North African Berbers, or "Moors," who made up the majority, and Syrians, all led by a small number of Arabs proper (from the Arabian peninsula). The Crónica Bizantina of 741 A.D., the Crónica mozárabe of 754 A.D. and the illustrations to the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa María chronicle the brutality with which the Muslims subjugated the Catholic population...
The jihad launched around 634 against the then-Christian Middle East by the successors of Muhammad was marked by internal conflict after the assassination of the third Caliph, Uthman (644-656). The founder of the Emirate of Cordoba, Abd al-Rahman I (734?-788), "The Emigrant," had to flee Syria to avoid the extermination ordered against his Umayyad family by the rival Abassids. Allied with Berbers from North Africa and helped by Yemenite and Syrian settlers in Spain willing to betray their masters, he proceeded to enter Spain from Africa, defeat the governor of al- Andalus in 756, and make himself Emir. He kept peace among Muslims and between Muslims, Catholics, and Jews by means of an army of more than 40,000 soldiers. It was he who ordered the demolition of the ancient Catholic church of Cordoba to build the much admired mosque. During his reign and that of Abd al-Rahman II (822-852), the conqueror of Barcelona, Catholics suffered confiscations of property, enslavement, and increases in their exacted tribute, which helped finance the embellishment of Islamic Cordoba.
Under Abd al-Rahman II and Muhammad I (822-886), a number of Catholics were killed in Cordoba for preaching against Islam, while others were expelled from the city. Among these victims was Saint Eulogio, beheaded by the Islamic authorities. Muhammad I ordered that "newly constructed churches be destroyed as well as anything in the way of refinements that might adorn the old churches added since the Arab conquest."...
Al-Mansur (d. 1002), "The One Made Victorious by Allah," implemented in al-Andalus in 978 a ferocious military dictatorship backed by a huge army. In addition to building more palaces and subsidizing the arts and sciences in Cordoba, he burned heretical books and terrorized Catholics, sacking Zaragoza, Osma, Zamora, Leon, Astorga, Coimbra, and Santiago de Compostela. In 985 he burned down Barcelona, enslaving all those he did not kill...
Between 1086 and 1212, new waves of Islamic jihadists from North Africa washed over the land...
By 1170 the almohades had taken control of Andalusia and unleashed new horrors on Catholics, Jews, and other Muslims. That the ruthless almohades also produced marvelous architecture and were responsible for the beauty of some mozarabic buildings, such as Santa María la Blanca in Toledo, captures nicely the true nature of Andalusian Spain. But the almohades were decisively beaten by the allied kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarra at Navas de Tolosa in 1212. From then on the Catholics kept the military initiative, finally defeating the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, in 1492...
... in Granada in 1066 - before the arrival of the almoravides - rioting Muslim mobs assassinated the rabbi and visir Joseph Ibn Naghrela and destroyed the entire Jewish community; thousands perished - more than those killed by mobs in the Rhineland at the beginning of the First Crusade...
By any objective standards, then, and in spite of its undeniable artistic, literary, and scientific accomplishments, and of modern wishful "let-us-all-get-along" thinking that tries to gloss over evidence to the contrary, Islamic Spain was not a model of multicultural harmony. Andalusia was beset by religious, political, and racial conflicts controlled in the best of times only by the application of tyrannical force...
So anyone who dislikes Western culture or Christianity - for any reason, be it religious, political, or cultural - goes on happily pointing out, regardless of the facts, how bad Catholic Spain was when compared to the Muslim paradise.
