Tag Archives: Cordoba

The Truth About the Fall of Muslim Spain | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 31

Spanish history really is amazing. As someone from the United States, who has spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East, I tend to focus on British and ancient history. Last year my family took a trip to Spain and Morocco and I really got a sense of what I’m missing. Spain has its roots in a fascinating conflict and mixture between Roman, Medieval Christian, and Islamic cultures. The Crusades focusing on Jerusalem, a much more transitory affair, get a lot more press. Which seems nuts. You’ve got to go back to 1961 and the surprisingly woke, and gloriously bloated, Charlton Heston film El Cid to find a treatment of the Spanish Reconquista in popular culture.

This is a shame, because it’s an incredibly epic story. You’ve got Medieval culture clash that literally ends the SAME YEAR, 1492, as a new and even more momentous clash between continental civilizations. The Crusades don’t have the conquest of a continent as their aftermath. The lack of coverage may have something to do with the fact that Spanish history, and Latin American history hasn’t always been the happiest. Here’s hoping that that changes in future years. I’m definitely excited to do some more work on the topic, and I am super excited to be covering it in this week’s video

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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Islam’s “History of Evil” | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 29

History can be used as a weapon. There are a lot of people in my YouTube comments, and in the US at large, who have some weird ideas about Islam. The things they know aren’t necessarily wrong, but the conclusions they draw are. This is a problem that comes up again and again in contemporary political discussion. The more context you have, the more you realize that individual facts don’t tell you as much as you think they do. This video, and the next couple I will be producing, aim to provide the context necessary to better understand the darker aspects of world history, and Islamic history in particular.

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Cordoba: One House, Two Religions

The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Originally constructed in 784, over a demolished Visigothic church, the Mosque is one of the oldest in the world. Cordoba at the time was part of a Muslim Empire. Spanish Christians re-took Cordoba in 1236. Rather than demolish the place, the Spanish decided to convert it to Christian worship. In some people’s eyes, supposedly including those of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, it’s an unholy mess. To my eyes it’s beautiful.

Throughout history, most people spend most of the time getting on well with each other. In her book A Distant Mirror, historian Barbara Tuchman made an important point:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening — on a lucky day — without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

We know the history of religion and relations between Christianity and Islam as one of unmitigated disaster, cruelty, horror and intolerance. In fact, these moments are few and far between. Most people spend most of their time muddling along. Unfortunately, all it really takes is one bad moment to rob us of an invaluable monument like the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. Think of ISIS for example. In just two years, they have destroyed physical heritage going back millennia across a wide swathe of Mesopotamia. Jokers like that only emerge every couple centuries, but when they do, the potential for destruction is immense. We’re incredibly lucky that Cordoba’s monument has survived as long as it has. Spain has had it’s fair share of religious thugs. We’re lucky. The building has many lessons to teach. The video above lays out one or two.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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