The Myth of “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise”

“All in all, The Myth seeks to demonize aca­demic cul­tural history and lit­erary studies in the service of an extreme-right political agenda by badly warping their tools and then declaring victory when those tools do not perform their tasks ade­quately. Aca­d­emics who are trained with these tools and methods will rec­ognize the chi­canery; the intended audience for a popular history may not. Ulti­mately, then, Fernández-Morera is taking advantage of his audience of lay readers who are already favorably dis­posed toward highly critical rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Islam and Islamic sources in order to present himself as the lone voice of truth in a messy and par­tisan aca­demic wilderness, knowing that non-academic readers will not nec­es­sarily rec­ognize the deceptive tech­niques he uses to craft that image. He is feeding into existing con­ser­v­ative anger about Islam and about the very pos­si­bility of reli­giously and racially inte­grated soci­eties in order to make himself a hero and is doing so at the expense of edu­cating and engaging his readers. A book like this suc­ceeds at pro­moting its extreme-right political ide­ology by dis­torting its sources, obfus­cating its methods, and counting on readers to be hood­winked all the while leaving them con­vinced that they are receiving the real truth.”

S.J. Pearce, “The Myth of the Myth of the Andalusian Par­adise,” in The Extreme Right and the Revision of History, ed. 42 Louie Valencia-García. New York: Rout­ledge, forth­coming 2020.