Living Under Islamic Rule
Non-Muslims living in today’s Islamic influenced regimes cannot boast of freedom and security.
Saudi-Arabia, Iran, Northern Sudan, Afghanistan, to name a few examples, have not provided the world with examples of free societies.
Modern literature tries to coax us to accept today’s Islamic regimes as an anomaly, while claiming historical Islamic regimes built sophisticated, advanced, and safe havens for all its citizens. We are presented with visions of harmonious utopian societies filled with a free exchange of ideas, advanced philosophies, magnificent architecture, science and literature.
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.
(Front-cover: Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, Dario Fenandez-Morera)
This imaginative ‘utopian’ world of harmonious living between world faiths, was in fact the worst form of segregation; a cruel apartheid. To quote a friend in Spain “of course there were times of ‘peace’ - we were kept separate, living in submission to brutal invaders!”
The reality of 400 years of Reconquista push-back and wars against the oft-called ‘peaceful rulers’ similarly points to a not-so-harmonious environment.
Stories of nuns raped, European and African women enslaved, black boys drowned ‘for fun’, crucified Christians on palace doors, humiliated jiziya tax offerings, minorities subjugated, homes destroyed, destruction of Christian libraries and scientific treatises, churches burned, pagans forced into battle (Myth of Andalusian Paradise, pages 119-175) - all and much more, dismantle modern rhetoric advocating Islamic Medieval Andalusian and Ottoman societies.
Current beliefs stem from unverified versions of history. Political policies and educational institutions prefer a false narrative over stark reality, advanced by attractive claims in books like Ed Husain’s, The House of Islam (Bloomsbury, 2018). Delighted statements of this version of Islamic history influence our educational and government institutions:
The decline of the Muslim world and the current crises of leadership mean that a glorious past, full of intellectual nobility and purpose, is now exploited by extremists and channelled into acts of terror. How can Muslims confront the issues that are destroying Islam from within, and what can the West do to help work towards that end?
And yet, is this statement true? Which version of history is being exploited, and who is doing the exploiting? The extremists, or proponents of the Andalusian myths?
What exactly is Islam’s glorious past? Based on which accounts? With so few footnotes, how can readers of ‘the house of Islam’ and its many companions from modern writers, be sure of this version of history. From what source have these new ideas been mined from?
Are extremists the exploiters, or are they being true to Islamic accounts of history?
Is Islam being destroyed by Islamists, or are Islamists reclaiming Islam back to its original position? What do the biographies of Muhammad tell us? What do the earliest histories of Islam reveal? What does the Qur’an teach?
What is the source for the notion of ‘intellectual nobility’ found in Islamic Spain, Islamised Turkey, Islamised Arabia, North Africa and Central Asia? Or did intellectual nobility come from Christian, Persian, Kurdish, Berber, Ethiopic and far Eastern civilisations? Where are those pre-Islamic Christian Arabic, Turkish and African nations? Where are the ancient citadels of pre-Islamic Kurdish civilisations? Where are the palaces of Berber Queens and extensive African Christian libraries? Where are the millions of women and children taken from the East coasts of Africa to Islamised Arabia? Where are the European women taken into sexual slavery under the Ottomon empire? Whaat was their ‘utopian’ reality? And why would modern day authors support this empire, over pre-existent empires which gave science, philosophy, scripture, universities, freedoms and libraries to the world?
Have modern views of Islamic and medieval history skewed the facts of the past, and thereby clouded our view of the present?
If we do not understand what happened in history about current world ideologies - such as Islam - how can we begin to address the true root causes of today’s troubles.
The ground breaking book by Darío Fernández-Morera, The Myth of the Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, (Wilmington, DE: ISI books, 2016) challenges the very premise romanticised visions of Islam are built upon.
How?
Simply by going back to the eye-witness accounts of the time, both Islamic and non. Historians interested in truth, no longer fear the academy. It is their voice that testify to the cries of witnesses past. It is their voice which must win over the populist writers of myth, if we are to understand the world we currently live in.
Truth is at stake throughout our societies and it is time to reclaim it back to its rightful place.
Dig deeper to understand the truth of the matter:
