Figures of Al-Andalus: Men and Women Who Built a Civilization

Nine centuries. Thirty-six lives. One civilization ? built, fractured, and finally erased.

From the general who conquered a continent and vanished without a known grave, to the caliph who declared himself equal to Baghdad and Cairo, to the slave girl who made a chamberlain with her own hand only to be cast aside by her own creation ? Figures of Al-Andalus tells the story of Islamic Spain through the people who actually lived it.

Here are the philosophers Europe silenced and then couldn't stop reading ? Averroes, exiled by his own caliph, became "The Commentator" whose ideas shaped medieval Christian and Jewish thought alike. Here are the physicians whose instruments are still recognizable in operating rooms today, the astronomer who corrected Ptolemy from a workshop in Toledo, and the women ? poets, scribes, queens, and a mathematician ? whose voices survived a historical record built almost entirely by and for men.

And here, with the same unflinching honesty, are the figures who ended it all: the Catholic Monarchs who broke a signed treaty within a decade, the Grand Inquisitor whose name became a synonym for religious terror, and the decree that erased the last trace of Muslim Spain in 1609.

Drawing on classical Arabic chronicles and rigorous modern scholarship alike, this book refuses easy nostalgia and easy condemnation both. It is the story of a civilization exactly as complicated as any civilization actually is.

A companion volume to A History of Al-Andalus: From Conquest to Legacy.