Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500
by L. P. Harvey
Book Summary Information
Author: L. P. HarveyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1992-11-01
ISBN: 0226319628
Number of pages: 386
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Reviews of Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500
Book Review: Multiracial Arabesque
Summary: 5 Stars
Despite Franco, despite television, Spain in 2009 is far from a homogenous nation state. The most irreducible difference is language, with Castilian, Galician, and Catalan speakers all conducting daily life and teaching public schools in their separate languages, not to mention the many nearly separate dialects throughout the southern provinces, and the unassimilated non-Indoeuropean Basque! Oddly, however, aside from the Basques, there are not the visible differences in 'racial' types between north and south that most tourists expect. The reason is simple; everyone is everything. Spanish identity is a conglomerate of pre-Roman Iberian, Carthagenian, Greek, Italic, Visigothic, Jew, and Berber, amounting to genes for every color of hair and eyes, every complexion, and every shape of nose in every cranny of the country. Spanish history is a similar mosaic, a twining and vining of elements over time and space that looks much like the filagree on the ceiling of a mosque... or of a monastic chapel in upper Castile, built by mudejar artisans with Gothic blue eyes.
"Mudejar" is a term used to identify Muslims living under Christian rule, but don't rush to suppose that it implies a Moorish ethnicity. You'll have to make subtler distinctions and adjust to the complexities of multi-cultural, religiously pluralistic societies - both Christian and Muslim in governance - if you want to follow L. P. Harvey's dense and detailed history of the Islamic communities in Spain from 1250 to 1500. Those communities were never restricted to Andalucia; there were Muslim populations throughout Christian Spain, and some, even as far north as Pyrenean Navarre, remained semi-autonomous and privileged by law until the final expulsion. Likewise, of course, Mozarabes (Christians under Muslim rule), both Catholic and Arian, lived fairly securely if not quite equally under 'morisco' governance. And of course, there were Jews in all regions and at all economic levels.
I can't say this is an easy book to digest. The scholarship is immense, and much of it is painstakingly specific. For my taste, there's too much about dynastic rivalries and confrontations of leadership... military stuff that I find paradoxically bloodless. But the chapters that describe the legal constraints and protections surrounding the lives of religious minorities, Christian and Muslim, are both fascinating and pertinent to our modern dilemma of absolutist antagonism between the two religious camps. As much as European and American Christians have romanticized and/or forgotten the Islamic history of Spain, assuming that the Reconquest is a final episode, Muslim extremists remember it as an invasion and pillaging of their finest realm. Reading this book carefully, you'll chiefly find that nothing was ever so simple, that neither modern camp has more than a sketchy cartoon in mind.
This is the best book I know on the subject. I'd be delighted to get suggestions, via comments, about more recent studies, or about challenges to Harvey's interpretations.
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