Modern Age - Fall 2016 - 145

REVIEWS

mulation of historical facts based on primary sources and buttressed by a carefully organized array of specialized scholarship.
The author is emphatic about the rigor of his approach:
This book gives special attention to primary sources (medieval
Christian, Muslim, and Jewish chronicles; literary works; religious
and legal texts; and biographies), and usually quotes them verbatim so that nonscholars can read these materials (which in
modern publications on Islamic Spain frequently are not part of
the narrative and often not even part of the notes) and decide
for themselves whether the widespread hagiographic interpretations of Islamic Spain are warranted or not. (11)

This assertion is powerfully vindicated by more than 100 pages
of documentation following 240 pages of text. As FernándezMorera remarks, the sheer weight of accumulated evidence from
medieval Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sources is a formidable
obstacle to the willful insistence on finding in Islamic Spain a progressive, multicultural utopia.
First of all, he demonstrates that the Muslim entrance into Spain
was an invasion, not a gradual "migration," as some modern
writers have maintained; and that the conquest was, in fact, an
exceptionally ferocious military conquest motivated by the obligation to engage in jihad-that is, in religious war. It is difficult to
see how the Muslim forces could have otherwise brought under
their control almost the entire peninsula in fewer than ten years.
Fernández-Morera is understandably im- patient with modern
writers who, in the face of overwhelming evidence from primary
texts, nonetheless explain jihad as personal spiritual discipline:
"Now, it is certainly possible that, for centuries, the medieval Musmoder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Fall 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Fall 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Fall 2016 - Cover1
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Modern Age - Fall 2016 - Contents
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