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When the Moors Ruled in Europe

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In the domain of documentaries of ancient history, this seems to be the hour of Bettany Hughes. Until I watched another of her productions, The Island of the Minotaur, I was unaware of the big splash she was making as a celebrity historian. I was quite bowled over by her performance in that documentary. Yes, I say "performance" even though supposedly she was only the narrator/commentator. With her charming British accent and an articulate and self-assured way of utilizing it, I think it fair to say that her presence accounted for a good deal of the appeal of the documentary, although it was very well done on all levels.

But Ms. Hughes vividly dramatized some of her revelations about that ancient culture with a manner that suggested she revels in being an iconoclast. It is one thing to reveal that the much-admired Minoan civilization practiced human sacrifice and quite another to suggest that there has been a huge conspiracy to belittle the achievements of the Moors in Europe. The difference is that most of us today have no ego-stake in whether the Minoans sacrificed people to their gods or not, and if archaeology can prove it, so be it. But unfortunately the issue of the Moors in Spain and France during Europe's dark ages is likely to hit a nerve because of the current animosity between Christianity and Islam.

My perception is that in her documentary of the Moors, Ms. Hughes practiced iconoclasm with a vengeance. I am not saying that she is necessarily wrong about any of the views she espoused in this program. But I do think she may have gone overboard in her methods of setting the record straight. In this study, almost every reference to Christians was a disparaging one, and almost every reference to the Moors was an admiring one. Obviously, this type of emphasis is bound to please some groups more than others. The truth needs to be told, but I question whether this activist form of presentation is going to contribute more to enlightenment or to an increased perception of grievances.

The visual aspect of this program is sumptuous, with a major focus on the truly amazing Moorish architecture that still remains. There is much discussion of the Moorish regard for learning, where even the common people were encouraged to become literate and study. The Moors had irrigation and sewer systems and a successful agriculture. Their cities were pleasingly laid out, with harmoniously proportioned buildings and exotic and fragrant fruit trees to delight the senses. They practiced an advanced form of medicine for the time, and excelled at mathematics and astronomy.

According to Ms. Hughes the Moors were responsible for the Renaissance in Europe which came after the end of their rule in Spain. This is because the conquering Christians appropriated the Moorish heritage of knowledge and made it their own. All of this may be true, but I have a hard time believing that this is the whole story. For instance, I watched another documentary called Byzantium: The Lost Empire, in which it was stated that Christian Byzantium preserved the learning of the ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians during the dark ages of Europe and transplanted that knowledge back to the Christian West towards the end of the Byzantine empire. There has been a book written which claims that Irish monks preserved manuscripts of Classical learning during the dark ages- How the Irish Saved Civilization. Perhaps there was more than one source for the ideas of the Renaissance, but this concept is given no consideration by Ms. Hughes.

Really, the point is that Christian Europe is portrayed as being inferior in all the aspects in which the Moors were excelling. This is probably true, but there is a strong connotation given off that the Christians were morally inferior and blameworthy for bringing about the downfall of Moorish Spain. That I do not buy. It seems likely that internal weaknesses also contributed to the downfall. And, it seems to me that the Christians are being retroactively held as reprehensible in light of a current fashionable way of viewing history. Christian Europe had not too long before, in terms of the history of civilization, been barbaric tribes and had not achieved the enlightened discernment that certain of their descendants now use to condemn them. It seems to have been a common practice that civilizations advanced by conquering and absorbing others. I don't say that is praiseworthy, but that seems to be the way it worked.

It is indeed lamentable when the ignorant destroy what is refined and beautiful, but ignorance is somewhat of a mitigating circumstance. In other words I wonder if Ms. Hughes has oversimplified the picture of admirable Moors and reprehensible Christians for the sake of making an iconoclastic fashion statement. If the Moors of that particular time and place were more enlightened than their Christian neighbors, that could be a result of many factors, both evolutionary and circumstantial, rather than a sign of inherent superiority, moral or otherwise.

Ms. Hughes shows such obvious relish for her role as iconoclast that I wonder if I can trust her objectivity. But it can certainly be said that she possesses a flair for adding zest to the study of history.

Historian Bettany Hughes gives a decent, sometimes too politically correct overview of the influence of Islam on Medieval Spain. Ms. Hughes starts her journey with the conquest of the Visigoth Kingdom by the Moors coming from North Africa at the beginning of the 8th century C.E. She ends this journey with the fall of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada at the hands of the armies of the Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand at the end of the 15th century C.E. Ms. Hughes introduces her audience to the splendors of Moorish architecture in cities such as Grenada, Cordoba, and Toledo. Ms. Hughes rightly reminds viewers about the decisive but often-ignored contribution of Moorish Spain to the European Renaissance in domains such as medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Italy is usually credited as the key driver for the European Renaissance. To her credit, Ms. Hughes emphasizes that the Christian Reconquista of Moorish Spain often was about gaining land, prestige, and wealth under a veneer of religious fervor. The Reconquista turned out to be a civil war rather than the black-and-white antagonism between Christianity and Islam that has carried the day in the popular imagination. Many inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula converted to Islam for a variety of reasons in the centuries following the arrival of the Moors. Ms. Hughes rightly compares the expulsion of many Muslims from Spain after 1492 C.E. with what is today understood as ethnic cleansing. Ms. Hughes is at her weakest when she almost completely ignores the important contribution of the Jewish community to the splendor of Moorish Spain. This lapse of judgment is somewhat surprising because Ms. Hughes rightly denounces again and again the selective interpretation that has been given to the contribution of Moorish Spain to this day.

This is an important topic which deserved a far more comprehensive treatment. If you knew nothing about this subject except what you saw in the DVD then you would conclude that Muslims were all wonderful, Christians were all bad, and that Jews hardly existed in Medieval Spain. For example, Hughes uses the word Crusade, but not Jihad. She also skirts the reasons just how Islam expanded from Arabia to France and Persia in less than a century. It was not just due to the attractiveness of its ideas. On the positive side, she explores the contributions Muslims made in preserving and expanding upon the works of Greece and Rome and how they were transmitted to the West. I only wish she spent more time discussing Averroes, Avicenna, and other great scholars. She might also have spent some time discussing how and why Islam turned its back on science and philosophy in the 12th and 13th centuries. We in the West need to understand more about the rise, grandeur, and decline of Islam followed by the rise of the so called gunpowder empires in Turkey, Iran, and India without fear of being politically incorrect.

Combining excellent imagery, appropriate graphics, and expert narration, this documentary boldly goes into historical depth and will not lose its viewers in the process. Rather than cultural bias, historical pragmatics are at the heart of this somewhat new approach to Spain under Muslim rule. It is not a revisionist view for most of us who have been following developments in this field for the past 25 years; it is now completely accepted among scholars that the divisions between the muslims and other groups in Spain were exaggerated in the past. However, Islam in the middle ages was anything but marginal in its level of sophistication. What better way to demonstrate this than with the wonderfully technical yet never dry diagrams of the Alhambra in this film. Olé (yes, the muslims gave Spain that word, too)!

Here in the United States, enlightened folks are anxious to reverse the American-Indian-as-villain paradigm, but too often they reverse this by making their Amerinds implausibly noble and ecologically enlightened.

Bettany Hughes suffers from a similar disorder in "debunking" the Muslim-as-villain paradigm of European history. Certainly Christians handled themselves badly at many points in European history, for example in their persecution of Jews, who hadn't the power to fight back, but the Muslims had similar faults.

Hughes celebrates how Spanish cities "voluntarily" allowed themselves to be annexed as Muslim territory without seeing -- as she certainly would were Christian troops involved -- that they did so to avoid a worse fate in the face of overwhelming military forces.

Hughes tells us to thank the Muslims for the Arabic numeral system. Isn't she aware that the Arabs got it from the Hindus they were plundering and slaughtering in India?

There's a good deal to enjoy in this documentary, but one has to be on the alert for the constant slanting and simplifying of a complicated history.

"When the Moors Ruled in Europe," is a British television documentary made for BBC4, the experimental channel, by that remarkable young woman, Bettany Hughes. It is a real eye-opener as she travels Spain, thinking and talking about those seven centuries when the Moors, as they were known then, we would now call them Moslems, ruled the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal.

Hughes shows us their surviving, stunning architecture, in Cordoba, their capital city, Granada, even Madrid, and gives us a look at the surviving irrigation systems, by which they encouraged the arid peninsula to bloom, creating a rich agricultural economy. She proves that, at that time and place, Islam was a great progressive force: she shows us their leadership in translating and keeping alive the Greek and Roman classics, science, medicine, marine navigation, and astronomy, and reminds us that many words in our vocabulary come from the Arabic. She touches upon the fact that they welcomed Jews, and their knowledge. Most important of all, she reminds us that we currently use Arabic numerals, and that the great leaps forward in bookkeeping that underlay the businesses that bankrolled the famed Renaissance of the 16th century, could never have occurred if clerks were still struggling with those clumsy Roman numerals. Nor, of course, could Europe have rediscovered the Roman and Greek classics, another major ingredient of the Renaissance, had the Moslems not preserved them.

The presenter explains how the united monarchy of Spain in the late 15th century, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, drove the Moslems out, culminating in that great celebration of 1492, when they sent Christopher Columbus off, they thought, to find a western sea route to Asia (though, of course, it turned out America was in the way). What's even more interesting, she shows us the costs of this long, epic battle. Less sophisticated Moslem troops poured in to fight from North Africa: they vandalized the beautiful statuary progressive Islam had created in its 700 year rule: fundamental Islamism, as Judaism, Forbids representation of human beings, and so these troops destroyed the statues' faces. Progressive Islam was never actually fully to recover from the know-nothingism of these soldiers; until the current day the religion, most would agree to its detriment, is dominated by fundamentalists.

But the cost to Spain was also high: it has denied and misrepresented its own history through generations of the royal family, down even to the late dictator, Francisco Franco, to minimize Arab contributions and influence. And it created the Inquisition, to sniff out secret Arabs and Jews, marranos and moriscos, as they were called, torture and burn them alive at the stake, and, finally, expel them. Many of these people went to the Netherlands, then a Spanish colony, where they spearheaded a great intellectual and medical flowering, another important precursor of the Renaissance, giving us such leaders as Erasmus, and Spinoza. And many people will tell you that Spain never recovered from the forced expulsion of its best and brightest intellectual lights.

Hughes does a good job of making all this ancient history come alive, interviewing interesting people (thank goodness, the Spanish-speaking interviewees have subtitles, but I wish the whole program had), and showing us and explaining such remarkable and beautiful sights as the Arabic palace of Alhambra. She's quite a gal, showing an interest in ancient history when she was four, studying Latin and Greek as a teenager, going to Oxford on scholarship, and going from strength to strength now. Atta girl, Bettany.

The Renaissance was sparked in medieval Euorpe with a major push from the establishment of a network of medieval universities and all of the great thinkers that emerged from them. There you will find our foundations in the trivium and quadrivium which unfortunately are not mentioned at all in this video. The number one thinker, to which many Renaissance artists devote their work to was Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is influenced by Averroes but is still very much an original thinker on his own in interpreting not only Greek but Roman philosophers, and making acceptable pagan philosophy which fundamentalists opposed, just because they were pagan. In Islam Averroes loses this battle.
In Catholic Europe, Aquinas popularizes faith and reason and from many of his ideas art and science flourish, but especially art. The the rest is history.
A great scholarly work on this topic can be found in the Art of Memory written by Dame Frances Yates. I wish someone would do a video based on the knowledge found in this book.

It is one of the best documentaries that I have ever seen before about Spain. The Spanish people should see this video if they want to know their past.

When the Moors ruled in Europe is a documentary with some good educational value.
However, I still suffer from the price versus the content problem. I still feel that I am not getting my money's worth. Overall I still enjoyed the film and the information about the Moors. If you are interested about the period of the Moors ruling Spain than this DVD is a good addition to your collection.

There is a reason why the Moors ruled for 8 centuries during Europe's "dark ages" and this documentary explains exactly how