Muslim Spain

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, describing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews together built a sophisticated civilization that transformed the Western world.

Widely hailed as a revelation of a "lost" golden age, this history brings to vivid life the rich and thriving culture of medieval Spain, where, for more than seven centuries, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, and literature, science, and the arts flourished.

Scholars, journalists, and 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. As professors, politicians, and pundits continue to celebrate Islamic Spain for its "multiculturalism" and "diversity", Fernández-Morera sets the record straight.

What makes this book different is that before each historical Moorish story begins, the author tells an introductory story that makes Moorish history relevant to present day circumstances. Most of these introductory stories involve explaining the world to his daughter. Moorish history starts in when the "Age of Ignorance" ends. There was a time when people lost their sense of humanity, but a message inspired them to change the world. The same message that was brought to the world by many prophets and leaders before that moment in time. The message of freedom, justice, and prosperity ...

Toledo, Spain, AD 1094. When the Almoravids swept away the music, freedom, and religious harmony of Muslim-controlled al-Andalus during their conquest of southern Spain, Yasin Ibn Faraj lost the culture of his beloved home. Disowned after disobeying his family’s command to convert to Islam, he follows other Christian Mozarabs north to Toledo. There, Yasin clings to wine, women, music, and luxury that the Almoravids forbade. Though his tastes are expensive, his skill at leatherworking and thievery lets him indulge them. But, one misjudged theft sees him arrested and dismissed by his ...

Prayer, or salah, in Islam is something amazing, and it's the way Muslims talk with Allah. Muslims make Salah every day, five times a day. It's a form of worship that was previously reserved only for prophets, yet during Muhammad's life, peace be upon him, Allah included any of the followers in this honorable and most distinguished group.

In Crucible of Light, Elizabeth Drayson pulls together the epic interwoven history of the Muslim and Christian worlds over an 800-year span, taking in the conquest and re-conquest of Spain, the meteoric rise of Arabo-Norman Sicily, the Ottoman renaissance of the 16th to 18th centuries, the ebb...

Our odyssey begins in the little-known Sufi lodges in Cyprus, where Muslims arrived in 647AD. From there, we travel through the continent – visiting places such as Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain – encountering red-haired European Sultans and Arabic-speaking Christian Kings. We meet forgotten Muslim pioneers, such as Abbas Ibn Firnas who gave us flight and Ibn Sina who gave us modern medicine. We see the Islam-inspired mudejar art of fourteenth-century Christians in Spain, and how such cross fertilisation birthed Europe’s ‘Renaissance’.

Rethinking the history of the last thirteen centuries, in Crucible of Light, Elizabeth Drayson pulls together the epic interwoven history of the Muslim and Christian worlds. ‘Absolutely fascinating. At a time when ahistorical Christian Nationalism and chauvinism are gaining ground, this book...