Thesis The “three faiths in harmony” story about Córdoba does more harm than good, even as a hopeful myth
Where it stands
Four days a week I walk tourists from the Mezquita-Catedral to the old Jewish quarter. Most of them arrive wanting one story: in medieval Córdoba, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in harmony, and we have since forgotten how.
The facts are more interesting. Maimonides was born here in 1138, and his family left after the Almohads took the city in the 1140s. They lived for a time in Fez and ended up in Egypt. Ibn Rushd, also born here, served as a judge and court physician, and then in the 1190s fell from favour, saw his teaching condemned and was briefly banished to Lucena. Jews and Christians under Muslim rule had a protected status, the dhimma, which was real protection and real subordination at once. The word convivencia itself comes from a twentieth-century Spanish historian, Américo Castro.
My thesis: the harmony story does more harm than good. It makes tolerance look like a golden age that happened once, under special conditions, instead of a hard and partial legal arrangement that people built, defended and sometimes lost. A myth that hides the work teaches people nothing about how to do the work.
But I see the other side every day: the faces of visitors from three faiths standing in the same courtyard. Persuade me either way.