book reviews
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Alejandro García Sanjuán
La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado. Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2013. 500 pp. € 28.00.
This volume is conceived as a series of arguments in favour of the historicity of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, refuting the arguments of some scholars who deny it ever took place. This—now old—controversy, laid aside years ago, seems to have been rekindled by the eleventh centenary of the conquest, celebrated in 2011. The origins of the debate, if it is truly worthy of the term given the lack of impact the theory had at the time, go back to the publication of Les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne (Paris: Flammarion, 1969) by Ignacio Olagüe (1903–1974). Olagüe’s principal idea, unambiguously proclaimed in his title, was that the Arabs never occupied the Iberian Peninsula and that the Arab chronicles’ claims that they had done so were later inventions. In 1974, Pierre Guichard refuted the theory, which he considered completely unfounded, with a series of sound arguments in his “Les Arabes ont bien envahi l’Espagne : les structures sociales de l’Espagne musulmane” (in Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 6, 1974, pp. 1483–1513), putting an end to any debate in academic circles and relegating the theory to less scientific spheres. There, however, it survived, intermittently revived by novelists, journalists and the like, as part of a flourishing genre alongside the Templars or the Kabbalah in a mixture of conspiracy theories and esoteric themes (which, as García Sanjuán correctly states, often become bestsellers). In 2009, Maribel Fierro, in her characteristically elegant style, returned to this theme, delving into the figure and ideology of Olagüe himself, and his links to the origins of the JONS, a Fascist political party which sowed terror in the years running up to the Spanish Civil War and even more so after the triumph of General Franco’s coup d’etat and in the forty years of dictatorship that followed (“Al-Andalus en el pensamiento fascista español: La Revolución islámica en Occidente de Ignacio Olagüe”, in Al-Andalus/España. Historiografías en contraste, siglos XVII-XXI, ed. Manuela Marín, pp. 325–349, Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2009). In addition, the 2011 eleven-hundredth anniversary of the Islamic Conquest served as an excuse for the organisation of numerous conferences and the publication of various studies bringing up to date our knowledge of the events of 711. Notable among the latter is the collective volume 711. Arqueología e Historia entre dos mundos (Alcalá de Henares: Museo Arqueológico Regional, 2011), which brought together the work of many of the most prestigious historians and archaeologists working on al-Andalus.
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In his La conquista islámica, García Sanjuán draws on this and other material to construct a refutation of the theories of those who would deny that the Islamic conquest ever took place, principally, Ignacio Olagüe himself, and González Ferrín, author of a volume entitled Historia General de Al Ándalus: Europa entre Oriente y Occidente (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2006) in which he echoes Olagüe’s controversial theories one after the other. García Sanjuán’s first chapter, by far the longest, is dedicated to a ferocious critique of what he terms negationism. After a brief review of the main spheres where the theory has survived (literature, cinema and the press), he launches into a merciless attack on the two aforementioned authors, in an avalanche of disparaging remarks which rather disconcert the reader in search of scientific debate. To give just a few examples, Olagüe is repeatedly described as a pseudo-historian (“seudohistoriador”, pp. 76, 99, 120, 133, 139, 273, etc.), or on another occasion as an amateur dilettante and unlettered falsifier (“aficionado, diletante, indocumentado y falsario”, p. 118); González Ferrín as a dilettante and upstart (“diletante y advenedizo”, p. 141) and his arguments as lies and fallacies (“patrañas y falacias”, p. 129) or a succession of fallacies, fabulations, untruths and distortions (“sucesión de falacias, fabulaciones, inverosimilitudes y tergiversaciones”, p. 257). Such verbal excesses reach their highpoint when García Sanjuán compares the negation of the 711 conquest with Holocaust denial (pp. 70–71), a frivolous if not downright unfortunate comparison. Among all the disparaging remarks thrown at Olagüe, it is particularly striking to see constant references to his Basque origins—mentioned some 57 times, and on occasions as many as three times on one page, e.g., on p. 105—the context seeming to suggest that this too is regarded as a fault. The next three chapters are devoted to the rejection of the main arguments of the so-called negationists: the supposed absence of coetaneous accounts of the conquest; the consideration of early Islam as a variant of Arianism rather than as a new religion; and the radical minimisation of the demographic contribution of extra-peninsular contingents in the centuries immediately following 711. Thus, in the second chapter, he confronts the question of the supposed lack of contemporary evidence for the invasion. He does so with great solvency calling on a range of different source materials, above all the coins and lead seals minted during the conquest and the references to invasion in coetaneous Latin chronicles. To all this he adds arguments in favour of the validity of the Arab sources, despite their late composition, based on their author-compilers’ principle of strict fidelity to their sources, which he likens to “cut and paste” (“se asemeja a lo que hoy llamamos ‘corta y pega’, sin introducir apenas modificaciones”, p. 206), an extremely optimistic evaluation which ignores the input of the compiler when choosing which material to cut and paste. In theory the medieval encounters 20 (2014) 261–275
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chapter incorporates both material and written sources, though it could be objected that his use of seals and coins is limited to their inscriptions, which technically make them a written rather than a material source, no matter that they happen to be written on metal (about this subject, see C. Domenech Belda, “El proceso de islamización en el Sharq al-Andalus a través de los registros monetales”, in Histoire et archéologie des sociétés de la vallée de l’Èbre (VII–XI siècles), ed. Ph. Sénac, pp. 275–293. Toulouse: CNRS, 2010). The third chapter is dedicated to the rejection of another of the main tenets of Olagüe’s theory: the idea that early Islam was a mere evolution of certain Christian tendencies. It is a debate which is not limited to al-Andalus—see P. Crone and M. Cook’s Hagarism. The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)—and which is related to the previous question, the composition of Arab narrative texts long after the events they relate. Once again, García Sanjuán’s arguments are sound, although here too they are rather tainted by unnecessary verbal excesses. Finally, it is in the last chapter that we find some of the most interesting contributions to the debate surrounding the conquest, specifically in relation to suggestive questions such as the situation in the Iberian Peninsula in the period immediately prior to the invasion, the activities of the Muslim conquerors, the modes of submission employed, or the false dichotomy between pacts (sulḥ) and use of arms (ʿanwa). Overall, the book constitutes an interesting recapitulation of the most recent research on themes related to the 711 conquest, with some of the author’s own contributions, though embedded within the critique of the theory of Olagüe and González Ferrín which is expressed in terms and style that add little to the debate. The structure of the work also suffers from this reiterated critique, as it frequently obliges the author to repeat his arguments. Thus, for example, the question of the inscriptions on coins and lead-seals is repeated three times in the four chapters (chapter 2, pp. 152–172 and 247–252; chapter 3, pp. 302–304), without any new details justifying the repetition, which instead seems dependent on the desire to build towards an increasingly powerful demolition of Olagüe’s theory. With this book García Sanjuán finally puts to rest a debate which one had assumed to already be over, at least on a scientific level. The militant tone of the volume seems likely to draw the applause of the like-minded but to be rejected by its detractors, towards whom, paradoxically, it seems to be directed. Jesús Lorenzo
Universidad el País Vasco—Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Paseo de la Universidad 5, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain e-mail:
[email protected] medieval encounters 20 (2014) 261–275
