386 in Kingdoms of Faith, Brian A. Catlos Strives to Fully Reconstruct

386 book reviews

Brian A. Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. London: Hurst, 2018. Pp. 482. isbn 978-1-78738-003-5.

In Kingdoms of Faith, Brian A. Catlos strives to fully reconstruct Spain’s Islamic history by steering away from the historiographic concepts of Convivencia and Reconquista that have epitomised such (national) histories till now. Convivencia holds that Arab Muslim rule constituted an enclave of enlight- ened, interreligious tolerance in an intolerant, backward Western Europe. In contrast, twentieth-century Spanish historians present Spain’s Islamic period as one of a 700-year-long ‘reconquest’ (Reconquista) project by the northern Christian kingdoms of Iberia that was completed with the defeat of the ‘Moorish Saracens’ at Granada in 1492. While historians in the past two de- cades have only criticised these concepts, Catlos’s book encompasses the com- plete picture of Muslims in Spain from their arrival in 711, until the expulsion of crypto-Muslim converts to Catholicism (Moriscos) in 1614 without engag- ing with either concept. Instead, the author retells the history of Islamic Spain focusing on innate, human pragmatism. Apart from the extended timeline, Catlos, in every chapter presents Muslim and Christian rulers forming alliances to fight coreligionist adversaries out of political ‘conveniencia’ rather than Convivencia or Reconquista. He ultimately argues that, rather than conceiving of the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula as exclusively Muslim, Christian, or even Jewish, they should be seen as humans, religious but also deeply pragmatic and concerned primarily with their own well-being. With his unique, accessible, dramatic-comedic style already seen in Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors (2014, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York), Catlos synthesises, alongside primary sources, several hundred academic articles, chapters and books from recent English, Spanish and French scholarship into a balanced, critical historical narrative that spans almost a thousand years. These thousand years are divided into two halves, each split into three parts, all with specific power dynamics. The first half concerns the formation of the blooming emirate of Al-Andalus under the Umayyads until its collapse. For instance, in Part 1, Catlos intersperses descriptive and analytical evalua- tions of the interreligious alliances that enabled the Islamic conquest and the success of early Umayyad rule. Part 2 highlights how intra-Muslim rivalries between the Umayyads, Abbasids and Aghlabids led to pragmatic, opportu- nistic interreligious cooperation with, for example, Charlemagne. In Part 3, the Umayyad Caliphate is (re-)established, and Catlos expertly relates this to geopolitical events in the Muslim world. The second half starts with the political fracturing after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate in the so-called Taifa period, which kicks off the ‘Reconquista’ in Part 4. This part also contains

Catlos’s fascinating reinterpretation of the Almoravid and Almohad invasions as being less intolerant than current historiography supposes. Throughout Part 5, Catlos highlights how the Reconquista centred around competition between the northern Christian kingdoms (Léon, Aragon and Castile). Strikingly, its fruition was predicated on peaceful surrender agreements with local Muslims who opposed their own Muslim leaders. The minority circumstances Muslims faced under and among Christians is Part 6’s focus which subsequent- ly leads to their forced conversions to Catholicism, the Spanish Inquisition, crypto-Islam, esotericism and, ultimately, the expulsion of Muslims from Iberia. The book formally closes with an epilogue that is Catlos’s poetic, over- arching conclusion to the role of religion in Spanish history and more. Catlos’s descriptive story-telling is bookended with intertextual analysis to debunk the overly religious depiction of events in medieval chronicles and non-contemporary folkloric sagas, to analyses of architecture, poetry, to medieval and modern Spanish literature, linguistics, topography, and even to nu- mismatics. Despite Catlos’s reliance on secondary material, the book feels far from derivative for it provides a refreshingly structured, comprehensive per- spective on the various polities (Iberian, Middle-Eastern, North-African and European), religious groups (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, but also, Sufi vis-à-vis Maliki and Almohad), social classes, ethnicities and, when possible, genders. Strangely enough, Catlos covers almost every field in depth, except for legalis- tic religious developments. Although he frequently reports the Maliki ulama doing the bidding of the amir, he barely discusses peculiar developments in Andalusian Maliki Islam that reflect the power dynamics that are central throughout the book. Nevertheless, all the individual chapters are admirably well-balanced, pro- viding various lenses through which to see the historical developments in Iberia and prevent the book from becoming simply a political history of great, opportunist men. For instance, Catlos finds a way to make otherwise anecdot- al minor characters, such as the poet Blackbird or Fatima bint al-Ahmar, into emblematic figures that explain social mobility, cultural exchange and even economic development of the world(s) they inhabited. Moreover, the author manages to do so while, again and again, relating events in Europe to Iberia and vice versa in a seamless way. There is an excellent segment covering the formalisation of Catholicism through the Cluny monasteries and Popes such as Urban ii, to overpopulation in Europe, all of which led to the Crusades, some in Iberia, which caused the northern Christian kingdoms to propagan- dise the Reconquista as a religious struggle. Catlos then finishes this section by highlighting how previous historians have blindly followed such polemi- cised propaganda. He also argues that Islamic Spain was not an aberration

Journal of Muslims in Europe 8 (2019) 381-389