This translation of an anonymous early twelfth-century Arabic chronicle narrating the Islamic conquest of much of Spain—from the 711 A.D. invasion to the Almoravid invasion in the late eleventh century—is very readable and valuable. The chronicle has been edited, studied, and translated by many Spanish scholars dating back to J. de González’s edition and translation of 1888. Al-Tamimi bases his translation on Luis Molina’s critical edition of 1994.
The chronicle devotes twenty-one of its eighty-six pages to the initial conquest. It then sketches the early governorships and the period of independent Umayyad rule, from Abd al-Rahman I (r. 756-788) to al-Mundhir (r. 886-888), skipping several subsequent rulers. Finally, it offers an account of the various Muslim kingdoms (ṭawā’if or taifas) that followed the Caliphate’s dissolution in 1031 and concludes with the Almoravid invasion’s defeat of the Christians at Zallaqa in 1086.
A focus on endemic internecine wars (Berbers against Arabs, Syrian Arabs against Southern Arabs, etc.) allows al-Tamimi to offer suggestive political commentaries. Berbers even destroyed Caliph Abd al-Rahman III’s famous Madinat al-Zahra palace, named after his favorite sexual slave. Al-Tamimi correctly emphasizes that the conquest was achieved mainly by Berber, not Arab forces. Christian sources often refer to these Berbers as Moors—Latin Mauri.
Al-Tamimi provides a helpful chronology, a bibliography, and a glossary. His useful appendix contains excerpts from Ibn Idhari’s Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib (c. 1312) and Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada’s (d. 1247) Historia Gothica and Historia Arabum, both of which offer fuller narratives of some events only sketched in the chronicle.
The extensive introduction and notes offer a wealth of scholarly insights. For instance, al-Tamimi explains that the Arabic word Fatḥ, used in the title and in the Qur’an and often translated as “conquest,” means “opening.” Muslim conquests are not framed as conquests but, as al-Tamimi observes, as openings through which believers are ennobled when they force infidels to submit in humiliation via jihad. This example illustrates the effectiveness of Islam’s brilliant political rhetoric.†
General readers and scholars alike will welcome the readability and the excellent scholarly apparatus of The Conquest of al-Andalus.
†An unmentioned example of brilliant political rhetoric is the chronicle’s title. By informing readers that the conquered land was al-Andalus, the title erases from the outset the preexistent non-Muslim name. Additionally, it illustrates another tactic of Islamic domination: changing toponymy. The land’s name since the Roman conquest (218–219 B.C.) was Hispania, from which the names Spania and España are derived. Renowned scholar and theologian Bishop Saint Isidore of Seville (560–636 A.D.) wrote a Praise of Hispania (also translated from Latin by al-Tamimi).
After the Islamic conquest of much of the land, the entire northwest quadrant, remained unconquered, as the Arabist Felipe Maíllo Salgado demonstrates in his 2011 book Acerca de la conquista árabe de Hispania . In the Middle Ages, Christians referred to the territory as Hispania, Spania, or España. The name Iberia, derived from pre-Roman Greek geographers (hence,’'Iberian Peninsula”), and lately adopted by many, including al-Tamimi, for politically correct reasons (to avoid offending Catalans, etc., with “Spain”), was never used. The battle cry of the Christian reconquest was “¡Santiago y cierra, España!” (“Saint James and close ranks, Spain!”), not “close ranks, Iberia!” The only medieval Iberia was a kingdom in what is today’s Georgia.
Darío Fernández-Morera
Associate Professor Emeritus
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Northwestern University
