“ANDALUSIA” WITHOUT CAMOUFLAGE

The Iberian Peninsula was conquered in 710-716 CE as a classical jihad, that is, with enormous pillaging, enslavement, deportation, and massacre. Most churches were converted into mosques.

Levi-Provencal, observed, three quarters of a century ago in his seminal analysis of Muslim Spain:

The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation.⁴⁰

Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, another preeminent scholar of Muslim Iberia, provides these illustrations of the resulting religious and legal discriminations dhimmis suffered, and the accompanying incentives for them to convert to Islam:

Non-payment of the poll-tax (jizya) by a dhimmi made him liable to all the Islamic penalties for debtors who did not repay their creditors; the offender could be sold into slavery or even put to death. In addition, non-payment of the poll-tax by one or several dhimmis—especially if it was fraudulent—allowed the Moslem authority, at its discretion, to put an end to the autonomy of the community to which the guilty party or parties belonged.

[B]y converting [to Islam], one would no longer have to be confined to a given district, or be the victim of discriminatory measures or suffer humiliations.the entire Islamic law tended to favor conversions. When an “infidel” became a Moslem, he immediately benefited from a complete amnesty for all of his earlier crimes, even if he had been sentenced to the death penalty, even if it was for having insulted the Prophet or blasphemed against the Word of God: his conversion acquitted him of all his faults, of all his previous sins.

Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came other (the mullawadun) local converts to Islam and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.⁴¹

In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to five thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade. The Granada pogrom was likely to have been incited, in part, by the bitter anti-Jewish ode of Abu Ishaq a well-known Muslim jurist and poet of the times.⁴²

The discriminatory policies of the Berber Muslim Almoravids, who arrived in Spain in 1086, and subsequently those of the even more fanaticized and violent Almohad Berber Muslims (who arrived in Spain in 1146-1147) caused a rapid attrition of the pre- Islamic Iberian Christian communities, nearly extinguishing them.

The succeeding Almohads (1130-1232) wrought tremendous destruction upon both the Jewish and the Christian populations in Spain and North Africa. This devastation—massacre, captivity, and forced

conversion—was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez— disguised as a Muslim—before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt.⁴⁴ Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews:

[T]he Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us..

Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.⁴⁵

These brutal, discriminatory practices resulted in a massive emigration of Jews and Jewish converts to Islam to the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, from both Muslim-controlled Al-Aandalus and the North African Maghreb. During the first half of the thirteenth century, Jaime the I of Aragon, in particular, advanced policies of protecting Jews within his territories, granting safe-conduct and letters of naturalization to all Jews who made their way by land or sea and established themselves in the states of Majorca, Catalonia, and Valencia.