Is this book any good, Veeky Forums?

Is this book any good, Veeky Forums?

Other urls found in this thread:

wp.nyu.edu/sjpearce/2017/03/17/paradise-lost/
breitbart.com/london/2015/07/23/nationalists-plan-gay-pride-march-through-muslim-area-left-outraged/
bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2016/03/27/why-there-are-muslim-ghettoes-belgium-but-not-united-states/zek1CSRR0epWhLmSCiPWKK/story.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I haven't read this book, but I'll give my piece.

I generally have to remain ever suspicious of any history title that is aggressive in how it presents its findings. Specifically the idea of "busting myths" or "what you didn't learn in X", something that makes an incredibly superfluous claim using buzzwords and trying to draw your attention to a soapbox and coming in with an axe to grind,
rather than providing meaningful historical dialogue.

The emphasis on MYTH as being the largest part of the title is concerning. I don't like Islam currently, and I tend to not believe in the idea of a multicultural paradise under islam. This book screams reactionary to me, and if you are to read it, please take it with a heavy grain of salt.

Idk there's red flags. The publisher is a biased one, the reviews are all from similarly conservative as opposed to academics reviewers, and the author seems quite willing to politicize his work.

wp.nyu.edu/sjpearce/2017/03/17/paradise-lost/
"Ultimately, Fernández-Morera shows that he is not speaking to a lay audience broadly in the interest of scholarly integrity, but rather to a lay audience predisposed to reading books that slam the idea that there might be any good in Islam and Islamicate culture and in the modern academic culture of expertise. The author has positioned himself as a scholar intervening in a battle over presentation to a popular audience without the necessary scholarly background and almost without realizing — or hoping that his well-primed audience won’t notice — that his book, too, is popular and exceptionally polemical rather than scholarly."

Not a good look.

Now, this is all not necessarily a reason not to read it, it's certainly quite true that Al-Andalus wasn't exactly beyond criticism. However, it may not necessarily be the right source to learn about such. In any case, it's not one you'd want to cite with regularity. A left-wing person can derive quite a bit of pleasure from reading "the black jacobins", but that's quite a different thing altogether from actually taking it as a gospel on the subject. So, y'know, if you want to read it, you ought to.

With these works, it's better to keep a close eye on the footnotes, and work with authors sources directly, rather than with their own work. At least then you can make a sounder judgement.

Seems polisitized and biased to me just by reading the title

That's what I'm thinking. It's hard to know how factual anything is without fully reading and source checking it.

Basically this. Ones politics ought not interfere with academic integrity. both sides of the spectrum or collectively worse off for it.

I've read it. The author is definitely a Christian and shows his bias on a few occasions but overall the author's main points are backed up by tons of Islamic primary sources. Some of the main points are as follows:

- The invasion was motivated by Jihad and the leaders were accompanied by religious clerics whose job it was to ensure Islamic laws and traditions were enforced.

- Churches were destroyed and others converted into Mosques. Catholic treasures were looted and many sex slaves taken.

- Islamic laws at the time were clearly designed to increase the Muslim population and decrease the population of all other groups.

- Muslims, Jews and Christians all self segregated and was this segregation was motivated by religious teaching by all three groups. There was also infighting between all three groups (Jews vs Karites, different Taifa kingdoms fighting each other, clashes between different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, etc...).

- Though there was some mixing amongst the upper classes (Muslims with their Christian sex slaves, some Jews who became influential amongst the Caliphs), the majority of the people of the three religious groups viewed each other with suspicion.

- The Muslims were not blind to race and viewed Blacks as inferior. There was a social hierarchy with Arab Muslims at the top and ex-Christian Spanish converts at the bottom.

- There was practically no freedom for free Muslim women (who were subject to the restrictive rules of Islam on women) though interestingly the Caliphs would have some of their sex slaves educated to improve the prestige of their courts. And non-Muslim women were not expected to be subject to the exact same restrictive rules.

There's a lot more I could go into but I'm not arsed. It's well worth a read.

tldr: Life in Andalusia was no more a "paradise" than any other comparable Kingdom of the time.

It's necessarily polarising because he's completely fucking right, there's no ambiguity here. Even a cursory examination of the Andalusian period reveals how egregious modern academics are.
Theologians had more integrity in their reactions to the likes of Bruno and Galileo.

Listen to the In Our Time episodes on this for the moments the mainstream experts reluctantly reveal what Islamic Spain was really like.
The Jew, enraged at the goths not permitting them to hold slaves, conspiring with the Jihadist invaders
The Jihadists coming, primarily to rape the pale women of Europe who they regard as more attractive
The episodic atrocities

Most people who consider themselves left-wing would, if they were half informed, choose to live in Nazi Germany than under the Almoravids.

One of the funniest things from the book is one of the quotes from from an obviously leftist academic stating that "while 99% of Europeans were illiterate, Muslim women were doctors and lawyers".

These "doctors" were Muslim women who performed female circumcision on other Muslim women (because a Muslim man could not look at the genitals of a Muslim woman who was not his wife) and the "lawyer" claim was based of the fact that there were (very) few Muslim women who became a female equivalent of an Ulama.

This, though I must admit it's hilarious watching progressives argue essentially colonialist points on the benefits of Andalusia