What Was the Islamic Conquest of Iberia? Understanding the New Debate brings together leading scholars to offer an introduction to a recent debate with far-reaching implications for the study of history, as well as our understanding of the present. In the year 711 CE, Islamic armies conquered the Iberian Peninsula. This seemingly uncontroversial claim has in fact been questioned, becoming an object of intense scholarly debate, debate that has reached a fevered pitch in recent decades within Spain. This volume introduces an anglophone audience to the terms and contours of this controversy, from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its contemporary recrudescence. It suggests that far from an abstract discussion, this dispute reveals methodological and moral questions that remain vital to the study of the distant past, questions than cannot be easily resolved and have far-reaching consequences for the present. This volume offers novel perspectives on, not only the controversy, but also the latest research on the events of 711. These exemplary studies of historical, literary, and material cultural evidence demonstrate the promise and challenges for a new generation of scholarship. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies.

Medieval Islamic society set great store by the transmission of history: to edify, argue legal points, explain present conditions, offer political and religious legitimacy, and entertain. Modern scholars, too, have had much to say about the usefulness of early Islamic history-writing, although this debate has traditionally focused overwhelmingly on the central Islamic lands. This book looks instead at local and regional history-writing in Medieval Iberia. Drawing on numerous Arabic texts – historical, geographical and biographical – composed and transmitted in al-Andalus, North Africa and the Islamic east between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, Nicola Clarke offers a nuanced and detailed analysis of narratives about the eighth-century Muslim conquest of Iberia. Comparing how individual episodes, characters, and themes are treated in different texts, and how this treatment relates to intellectual debates, literary trends, and socio-political conditions at the time of writing, she shows how competing priorities shaped myriad variations on a single story and how the scholars and patrons of a corner of the Islamic world distant from Baghdad viewed their own history. Offering a framework in which historians of Christian Iberia (and of Christian Europe more generally) can approach and make sense of culturally-significant texts from Muslim Iberia, this book will also be relevant to broader debates about the historiography of early Islam. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of historiography, world history and Islamic studies.

This is a historiography of western Muslim writers on the subject of the eighth century conquest of the Iberian peninsula. It examines the distinct cultural and political significance of historical narratives from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries.

This book, now available in paperback, is a challenging and controversial account of the history of Spain in the eighth century. In it Roger Collins assesses the political and cultural impact on Spain of the first hundred years of Arab rule, focusing upon aspects of continuity and discontinuity with Visigoth Spain.

A finalist for World Magazine's Book of the Year! Scholars, journalists, and even politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—"al-Andalus"—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: it is a myth. In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shines light on hidden history by drawing on an abundance of primary sources that scholars have ignored, as well as archaeological evidence only recently unearthed. This supposed beacon of peaceful coexistence began, of course, with the Islamic Caliphate's conquest of Spain. Far from a land of religious tolerance, Islamic Spain was marked by religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life and the marginalization of Christians and other groups—all this in the service of social control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise provides a desperately needed reassessment of medieval Spain. As professors, politicians, and pundits continue to celebrate Islamic Spain for its "multiculturalism" and "diversity," Fernández-Morera sets the historical record straight—showing that a politically useful myth is a myth nonetheless.

This is the first study in English of the political history of Muslim Spain and Portugal, based on Arab sources. It provides comprehensive coverage of events across the whole of the region from 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. Up till now the history of this region has been badly neglected in comparison with studies of other states in medieval Europe. When considered at all, it has been largely written from Christian sources and seen in terms of the Christian Reconquest. Hugh Kennedy raises the profile of this important area, bringing the subject alive with vivid translations from Arab sources. This will be fascinating reading for historians of medieval Europe and for historians of the middle east drawing out the similarities and contrasts with other areas of the Muslim world.

For some historians, medieval Iberian society was one marked by peaceful coexistence and cross-cultural fertilization; others have sketched a harsher picture of Muslims and Christians engaged in an ongoing contest for political, religious, and economic advantage culminating in the fall of Muslim Granada and the expulsion of the Jews in the late fifteenth century. The reality that emerges in Medieval Iberia is more nuanced than either of these scenarios can comprehend. Now in an expanded, second edition, this monumental collection offers unparalleled access to the multicultural complexity of the lands that would become modern Portugal and Spain. The documents collected in Medieval Iberia date mostly from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries and have been translated from Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese by many of the most eminent scholars in the field of Iberian studies. Nearly one quarter of this edition is new, including visual materials and increased coverage of Jewish and Muslim affairs, as well as more sources pertaining to women, social and economic history, and domestic life. This primary source material ranges widely across historical chronicles, poetry, and legal and religious sources, and each is accompanied by a brief introduction placing the text in its historical and cultural setting. Arranged chronologically, the documents are also keyed so as to be accessible to readers interested in specific topics such as urban life, the politics of the royal courts, interfaith relations, or women, marriage, and the family.

A magisterial, myth-dispelling history of Islamic Spain spanning the millennium between the founding of Islam in the seventh century and the final expulsion of Spain's Muslims in the seventeenth In Kingdoms of Faith, award-winning historian Brian A. Catlos rewrites the history of Islamic Spain from the ground up, evoking the cultural splendor of al-Andalus, while offering an authoritative new interpretation of the forces that shaped it. Prior accounts have portrayed Islamic Spain as a paradise of enlightened tolerance or the site where civilizations clashed. Catlos taps a wide array of primary sources to paint a more complex portrait, showing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews together built a sophisticated civilization that transformed the Western world, even as they waged relentless war against each other and their coreligionists. Religion was often the language of conflict, but seldom its cause -- a lesson we would do well to learn in our own time.