What Was the Islamic Conquest of Iberia?

Understanding the New Debate

Hussein Fancy, Alejandro García-Sanjuán, Hussein Fancy, Alejandro García-Sanjuán

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000385106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

“The new convivencia”

Hussein Fancy

ABSTRACT

This essay offers an introduction to the recent and impassioned debates between two Spanish Arabists, Emilio González Ferrín and Alejandro García Sanjuán, about the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711. While offering an overview of the controversy between them and representing their respective positions, it also calls attention to the methodological and philosophical underpinnings of the debate, underpinnings that echo earlier, trenchant disputes about medieval Spain.

Since the nineteenth century, North American critics have stood at the margins of the study of medieval Iberia, peering into what feels like an intramural game, played without a published schedule or written rules. At times, we have been accused or have accused ourselves of hopeless solipsism, writing about Spain but really only speaking about ourselves, suffering from a malady that might be known as “Prescott’s Paradigm.”¹ At other times, the distance has turned into a salutary and welcome perspective, the ability to see Nessus’ shirt for what it is.² Thus, I confess a profound sense of curiosity when my colleague Alejandro García Sanjuán invited me into a recent and impassioned debate between himself and Emilio González Ferrín about the Islamic conquest of 711, something I had imagined was uncontroversial. But as I peeled away the layers of the dispute – empirical, methodological, and philosophical – that curiosity gave way to a vertiginous ambivalence. The fundamental nature of this debate echoes another, earlier debate that one might well have thought was past. The central purpose of this special issue – “What was the Islamic Conquest of Iberia?” – is not to take sides, although in some respects there is little contest. Instead, the purpose of this issue is to introduce to an Anglophone audience the argument that now stands at an impasse, to examine the significance of that impasse, and to look for a path forward. Beyond critical reflection, this introduction also considers a fundamental question: What does it mean to view this debate from a distance? And what would it mean to view it from inside, to have skin in the game?

The controversy begins with the relatively obscure figure of Ignacio Olagüe (1903–1974).³ An intellectual dilettante and affable flâneur, linked to the fascist thinker Ramiro Ledesma Ramos as well as the French historian Fernand Braudel, Olagüe penned a series of amateur works that offered a rather novel take on a matter that had obsessed generations of Spanish thinkers, the cause of Spanish decline – or “decadence” – since the seventeenth century.⁴ Like many other “traditionalists,” Olagüe sought to erect a coherent and positive narrative of Spanish history by downplaying the influence of Islam and Judaism.⁵ However, echoing or influenced by fascist scholars such as Ángel González Palencia (1889–1949) and Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899–1988), he took the extreme position of denying the existence of an Islamic conquest altogether, seeing the emergence of al-Andalus – Islamic Spain – as the result of an internal process.⁶ Olagüe argued that rather than alongside invaders in 711, Islam arrived over a hundred years later with a handful of missionaries, who found a land riven by religious disputes between Arian and Trinitarian Visigoths, between those who denied and those who believed in the divinity of Jesus. As a result of their unitarian beliefs, the Arians were naturally inclined toward Islamic theology and embraced Arabic to create a unique and authentic Spanish Islamic society, what Olagüe referred to as “Andaluza.” This resplendent society thrived, he claimed, until an environmental upheaval in the Sahara drove Berber fanatics from North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh and twelfth century, fanatics who destroyed this western paradise.

Seen as either wildly speculative or demonstrably false, Olagüe’s arguments were met with sharp criticism and derision by professional historians. Olagüe proposed, for instance, that Tāriq b. Ziyād was in fact a Goth, named “Taric,” akin to Alaric; he argued that Mūsā b. Nuṣayr could not have possibly been an agent of the Umayyad court at Damascus, which lay at too great a distance from Spain; he suggested that the mosque of Cordoba was in fact an Arian temple; and he claimed that Arabic was unknown in the Iberian Peninsula before the middle of ninth century. Soon after its publication, Pierre Guichard excoriated Les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne as a work of “historical fiction.”⁷ On account of its obsessive denial of Islamic and Jewish influences, James Monroe called the book fundamentally anti-Semitic.⁸

While Olagüe’s ideas went mostly ignored by scholars after his death in 1974, they found a new life in surprising corners, among Andalusian nationalists and Spanish converts to Islam in a post-Franco Spain. Although seemingly unlikely allies for Fascist thought, these groups found resonance with Olagüe’s account of al-Andalus, his insistence on its unique and authentic place within Spanish history.⁹ Indeed, Blas Infante (1885–1936), “Padre de la Patria Andaluza,” and Rodolfo Gil Benumeya (1901–1975) had already promoted their own accounts of the Islamic conquest as an internal struggle, a civil war within Spain, paving the way for this receptivity.¹⁰ It is also worth recalling that these nativist accounts of al-Andalus went hand in glove with paternalistic support for Spanish colonialism in Morocco.¹¹ Similarly, figures like Roger Garaudy were drawn to Olagüe’s unitarian thesis for their own counter-narratives of European modernity and gave wide currency to his work among converts to Islam.¹² Nevertheless, the extent of Olagüe’s influence remained mostly within non-scholarly circuits until recently.

In 2006, the Spanish Arabist Emilio González Ferrín published his Historia general de Al Ándalus, in which he revived Olagüe’s thesis.¹³ While distancing himself from Olagüe’s politics, González Ferrín also relished a particular animus toward Spanish academics for having failed to look beyond those politics and see anything of worth in Olagüe’s ideas.¹⁴ In his own work, González Ferrín argued provocatively that there was no Islamic conquest of Spain precisely because there was no “Islam” to speak of in 711.¹⁵ Citing a lack of unambiguous evidence, he claimed the “conquest” was in fact a series of uncoordinated raids by soldiers who lacked any single linguistic or confessional identity.¹⁶ But more precisely, drawing inspiration from revisionist works like that of John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, and Michael Cook, González Ferrín contended that Islam emerged in the Iberian Peninsula – as it had across the late antique world – through a slow process of fusion, confrontation, and migration that culminated in the ninth-century invention of something called “Islam” as a distinct religious tradition.¹⁷ From this perspective, the “Islamic conquest” of Spain was nothing but a retrojection, a myth that was later and ironically embraced by Catholic traditionalists because it cast Islam as a foreign presence in the peninsula, which readily justified the ideology of reconquest.¹⁸ In other words, both conquest and reconquest are historiographical fictions that have been mistaken for reality. This perspective led González Ferrín to a conclusion that strongly resembles Olagüe’s, that al-Andalus, before the Berber invasions of the eleventh century, should be celebrated as an authentic part of Spanish and European history, a “pre-Renaissance.”¹⁹ But the moral he aimed to draw from this history is different from his fascist predecessor’s. His is a vision of liberal inclusivity in the spirit of Américo Castro.²⁰

While other scholars have criticized González Ferrín, none has done so on the scale or intensity of Alejandro García Sanjuán, who has devoted a significant part of a book as well as a series of articles to dismantling his thesis, a critique that he has partly summarized in English for this special issue.²¹ In other words, García Sanjuán’s essay here should not be read as editorial but rather as a representation of his own position. His criticisms are twofold, empirical and ideological. In the first respect, García Sanjuán rejects González Ferrín’s skepticism of the written sources. Although belated, Arabic chronicles – written both in the east and the west – all tell the same story; all concur with the basic outline of the conquest.²² This Arabic story, moreover, is confirmed by Latin chronicles, such as the Liber Pontificalis and the “Mozarabic Chronicle of 754.”²³ Beyond literary sources, however, García Sanjuán sees the strongest evidence for the conquest in material culture, above all numismatics.²⁴ The existence of lead and gold coins from as early as 713 and as far north as Ruscino, near Perpignan, upset all of González Ferrín’s presumptions. They demonstrate with certainty the organization, language, and religious identity of the conquerors.²⁵ In particular, García Sanjuán highlights the bilingual, gold solidus of Umayyad governor of al-Andalus al-Ḥurr b. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Thaqafī (r. 716–718), which contains part of the shahāda (Muḥammad rasūl Allāh) as evidence that the conquerors held a clear confessional identity from the first.²⁶ The coin also includes perhaps the earliest reference to “al-Andalus,” indicating a clear territorial identity. García Sanjuán patiently c...