Blood and Faith

Description

In 1609, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three days to leave Spanish territory or else be killed. In a brutal and traumatic exodus, entire families were forced to abandon the homes and villages where they had lived for generations. In just five years, Muslim Spain had effectively ceased to exist: an estimated 300,000 Muslims had been removed from Spanish territory making it what was then the largest act of ethnic cleansing in European history.

Blood and Faith is a riveting chronicle of this virtually unknown episode, set against the vivid historical backdrop of Muslim Spain. It offers a remarkable window onto a little-known period in modern Europe—a rich and complex tale of competing faiths and beliefs, of cultural oppression and resistance against overwhelming odds.

Reviews

‘Well-balanced and comprehensive … Blood and Faith is a splendid work of synthesis. … it is impossible to read this book without sensing its resonance in our own time.’ — The New York Times

‘Balanced and thoroughly researched history.’ — Literary Review

‘Matthew Carr[‘s] magnificent Blood and Faith charts the tragic end of the moriscos, … “a monumental historical crime” from which he seeks lessons for today.’ — The Guardian

‘Matthew Carr’s well-researched account . . . is carefully written and thoroughly documented. . . . This is a reliable, if often harrowing, account of a sad episode in Spanish and European history, which deserves to be better known.’ — History Today

‘Carr navigates issues of assimilation and integration rather elegantly, and arrives at carefully considered conclusions with his deft analysis of the events that led to the expulsion and its aftermath. Indeed, Carr has written a valuable cautionary tale for the public on the pathways that crystallise imaginary evils.’ — LSE Review of Books

‘[A] sweeping panorama of a critical historical period . . . Carr’s account is a powerful warning of the perils of intolerance of difference and of policies of forced conversion and assimilation.’ — The Jordan Times

‘In this first comprehensive appreciation in many decades of the Muslim expulsion from Spain, Blood and Faith meticulously recaptures the fateful self-mutilation of a society that might have become Europe’s first multicultural nation and offers a grim lesson about religious and racial repression in our contemporary age of contested faiths.’ –– Professor David Levering Lewis, author of God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215

‘A fascinating account of perhaps the first major episode of European ethnic cleansing and, just as importantly, the story of the beginning of the conviction that “blood” matters more than belief; a conviction that led, in the end, to modern racism. In an age when so may people, on both “sides”, believe we face an historic confrontation between Christendom and Islam, it is essential to place the relations between these two global Abrahamic religions in a wider historical framework. This book does that eloquently and judiciously.’ — Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton University

‘The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 is a well-known tragedy. Less well-known is the later expulsion in 1609 of the descendants of the Moors, who had ruled Spain for centuries. Carr (The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism) examines the uneasy coexistence of Christians and Muslims beginning in 1492, when Spain was united under the Christian Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Over the next century, Christian leaders grew less and less tolerant of Iberian Muslims, requiring them to convert to Catholicism. In April 1609, this growing intolerance culminated in an edict accusing these converts, known as Moriscos, of heresy and apostasy and decreeing their expulsion. Over the next five years, an estimated 350,000 Muslims were forced to abandon their homes; many died on the journey to the ships that would take them to North Africa, and many others were terrorized, raped, robbed and killed by forces that were supposed to protect them. Carr deftly narrates the complex events leading up to this little-known but horrific episode as a warning against religious intolerance and xenophobia.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘Eloquently written and carefully researched, Blood and Faith is an important new study that synthesises much important scholarship on the moriscos, until now inaccessible to an English readership, and makes us aware of historical precedents to current ideological and cultural conflicts.’ — European History Quarterly

Author(s)

Matthew Carr is the author of non-fiction books including Blood and Faith; Fortress Europe; and Savage Frontier (all published by Hurst), as well as two novels, The Devils of Cardona and Black Sun Rising. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian and others. He lives in Sheffield.