Product Description

How Islamic civilization tamed Western Europe

"Inspiring" --The Observer (U.K.)

Join British historian Bettany Hughes as she examines a long-buried chapter of European history--the rise and fall of Islamic culture in what is now Spain and Portugal. Although generations of Spanish rulers have tried to expunge this era from the historical record, recent archaeology and scholarship now shed fresh light on the Moors who flourished in Al-Andalus for more than 700 years.

This fascinating two-part documentary explodes old stereotypes and offers shocking new insights. You’ll discover the ingenious mathematics behind Granada’s dazzling Alhambra Palace, trace El Cid’s lineage to his Moorish roots, and learn how the Iberian population willingly converted to Islam in droves.

Through interviews with noted scholars, you’ll see how Moorish advances in mathematics, astronomy, art, and agriculture helped propel the West out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. What emerges is a richly detailed portrait of a sensuous, inquisitive, and remarkably progressive Islamic culture in Christian Europe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16675 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-06-10
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

The Wall Street Journal
"The drama seems infused, suddenly, with important complexity, with great questions of war, peace, civilian casualties

Memorable TV
highly informative and entertaining

Customer Reviews

Few TV Documentaries Rise to this Level
Combining excellent imagery, appropriate graphics, and expert narration, this documentary boldly goes into historical depth and will not lose its viewers in the process. Rather than cultural bias, historical pragmatics are at the heart of this somewhat new approach to Spain under Muslim rule. It is not a revisionist view for most of us who have been following developments in this field for the past 25 years; it is now completely accepted among scholars that the divisions between the muslims and other groups in Spain were exaggerated in the past. However, Islam in the middle ages was anything but marginal in its level of sophistication. What better way to demonstrate this than with the wonderfully technical yet never dry diagrams of the Alhambra in this film. Olé (yes, the muslims gave Spain that word, too)!

Hughes Shows Islam as Once a Great Progressive Force
"When the Moors Ruled in Europe," is a British television documentary made for BBC4, the experimental channel, by that remarkable young woman, Bettany Hughes. It is a real eye-opener as she travels Spain, thinking and talking about those seven centuries when the Moors, as they were known then, we would now call them Moslems, ruled the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal.

Hughes shows us their surviving, stunning architecture, in Cordoba, their capital city, Granada, even Madrid, and gives us a look at the surviving irrigation systems, by which they encouraged the arid peninsula to bloom, creating a rich agricultural economy. She proves that, at that time and place, Islam was a great progressive force: she shows us their leadership in translating and keeping alive the Greek and Roman classics, science, medicine, marine navigation, and astronomy, and reminds us that many words in our vocabulary come from the Arabic. She touches upon the fact that they welcomed Jews, and their knowledge. Most important of all, she reminds us that we currently use Arabic numerals, and that the great leaps forward in bookkeeping that underlay the businesses that bankrolled the famed Renaissance of the 16th century, could never have occurred if clerks were still struggling with those clumsy Roman numerals. Nor, of course, could Europe have rediscovered the Roman and Greek classics, another major ingredient of the Renaissance, had the Moslems not preserved them.

The presenter explains how the united monarchy of Spain in the late 15th century, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, drove the Moslems out, culminating in that great celebration of 1492, when they sent Christopher Columbus off, they thought, to find a western sea route to Asia (though, of course, it turned out America was in the way). What's even more interesting, she shows us the costs of this long, epic battle. Less sophisticated Moslem troops poured in to fight from North Africa: they vandalized the beautiful statuary progressive Islam had created in its 700 year rule: fundamental Islamism, as Judaism, Forbids representation of human beings, and so these troops destroyed the statues' faces. Progressive Islam was never actually fully to recover from the know-nothingism of these soldiers; until the current day the religion, most would agree to its detriment, is dominated by fundamentalists.

But the cost to Spain was also high: it has denied and misrepresented its own history through generations of the royal family, down even to the late dictator, Francisco Franco, to minimize Arab contributions and influence. And it created the Inquisition, to sniff out secret Arabs and Jews, marranos and moriscos, as they were called, torture and burn them alive at the stake, and, finally, expel them. Many of these people went to the Netherlands, then a Spanish colony, where they spearheaded a great intellectual and medical flowering, another important precursor of the Renaissance, giving us such leaders as Erasmus, and Spinoza. And many people will tell you that Spain never recovered from the forced expulsion of its best and brightest intellectual lights.

Hughes does a good job of making all this ancient history come alive, interviewing interesting people (thank goodness, the Spanish-speaking interviewees have subtitles, but I wish the whole program had), and showing us and explaining such remarkable and beautiful sights as the Arabic palace of Alhambra. She's quite a gal, showing an interest in ancient history when she was four, studying Latin and Greek as a teenager, going to Oxford on scholarship, and going from strength to strength now. Atta girl, Bettany.

Too Common Selective Reading of History
Historian Bettany Hughes gives a decent, sometimes too politically correct overview of the influence of Islam on Medieval Spain. Ms. Hughes starts her journey with the conquest of the Visigoth Kingdom by the Moors coming from North Africa at the beginning of the 8th century C.E. She ends this journey with the fall of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada at the hands of the armies of the Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand at the end of the 15th century C.E. Ms. Hughes introduces her audience to the splendors of Moorish architecture in cities such as Grenada, Cordoba, and Toledo. Ms. Hughes rightly reminds viewers about the decisive but often-ignored contribution of Moorish Spain to the European Renaissance in domains such as medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Italy is usually credited as the key driver for the European Renaissance. To her credit, Ms. Hughes emphasizes that the Christian Reconquista of Moorish Spain often was about gaining land, prestige, and wealth under a veneer of religious fervor. The Reconquista turned out to be a civil war rather than the black-and-white antagonism between Christianity and Islam that has carried the day in the popular imagination. Many inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula converted to Islam for a variety of reasons in the centuries following the arrival of the Moors. Ms. Hughes rightly compares the expulsion of many Muslims from Spain after 1492 C.E. with what is today understood as ethnic cleansing. Ms. Hughes is at her weakest when she almost completely ignores the important contribution of the Jewish community to the splendor of Moorish Spain. This lapse of judgment is somewhat surprising because Ms. Hughes rightly denounces again and again the selective interpretation that has been given to the contribution of Moorish Spain to this day.