Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi's annotated translation of Fatḥ al-Andalus (The Conquest of al-Andalus) makes Luis Molina’s critical edition (based on two manuscripts), Fatḥ al-Andalus (La conquista de al-Andalus) (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1994), accessible for the English language reader. Mayte Penelas previously published a Spanish translation of Molina’s edition, La conquista de al-Andalus (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2002), which al-Tamimi indicates he was unable to consult. Al-Tamimi's introduction provides the reader unfamiliar with Andalusi history and Arabic-Islamic historical writing with a framework for understanding the (possibly) early-twelfth-century text, and his notes to the translation clarify points of fact and indicate places in the narrative that may coincide or depart from what is presented in other Arabic or Latin accounts. The glossary and bibliography are also useful. In an appendix, al-Tamimi presents translations of excerpts from Ibn Idhārī's (c. 1312) Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib and Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada’s (d. 1247) Historia Gothica and Historia Arabum to offer fuller narratives of some of the history briefly touched on in Fatḥ al-Andalus and further points of comparison.
English language scholarship on the history, society, and culture of al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) is flourishing, contributing to and drawing on the work of an international community dedicated to archival work and the publication and analysis of critical editions of texts and documents originally written in Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Aljamiado, Catalan, Castilian, Italian, and other languages relevant to the study of the peninsula and its history within broader maritime and territorial geographies. In tandem, museum exhibits, documentaries, fictional narratives, travel itineraries, and so on suggest a lively current popular interest in al-Andalus and the subject of intercommunal relations among Muslims, Christians and Jews in Iberia and elsewhere. The publication of English translations of primary sources, including those which have been previously translated into other European languages such as Spanish and French, may not be vital for researchers, but they are highly valuable for faculty, students, and others who are keen to explore primary source evidence in and outside the classroom. Collections of translated excerpts of sources, such as Olivia Remie Constable’s Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), and the sourcebook, Texts from the Middle: Documents from the Mediterranean World, 650-1650 paired with the textbook by Thomas E. Burman, Brian A. Catlos, and Mark D. Meyerson, The Sea in the Middle (University of California Press, 2022), provide samplings of texts by a variety of authors in an array of genres. Translations of complete texts, like al-Tamimi's translation of Fatḥ al-Andalus, offer opportunities for deeper engagement, especially when the text may be read in conjunction with other narratives. David James has published two translations of Andalusi “conquest histories,” in the Routledge series, Culture and Civilization in the Middle East: Early Islamic Spain, The History of Ibn al-Qūṭīya (2009) and A History of Early al-Andalus, The Akhbār majmūʿa (2012) and Kenneth Baxter Wolf provides English translations of Latin chronicles of the conquests in Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (Liverpool University Press, 1999), and has published English translations of ninth-century Andalusi Christian hagiographies: The Eulogius Corpus (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and The Indiculus luminosus of Paul Alvarus (Liverpool University Press, 2024). Reading these texts together and comparatively enlarges the field of study of medieval Iberia and illuminates the interpretive decisions and positions of their authors.
The name of the author of Fatḥ al-Andalus is unknown, as is the date of its composition. About a quarter of the translated text (21 out of 86 pages) pertains to the Arab-Berber conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century. The text then offers a synopsis of the history of the early governors in the first half of the eighth century, an account of the establishment of direct Umayyad rule in Cordoba by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muʿāwiya ibn Hishām (r. 756-788) in the aftermath of the Abbasid Revolution, and a brief survey of the rule of his successors through al-Mundhir (r. 886-888). The text then skips past the historically significant reigns of the amir ʿAbd Allāh (r. 888-912) and the caliphs ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III (r. 912-961) and al-Ḥakam II (r. 961-976) to provide some fragmentary information about the rule of the chamberlain al-Manṣūr in Cordoba and some of the Muslim kings who came to power in Cordoba, Seville, Malaga, Toledo, Badajoz, Valencia, Almeria, and Zaragoza, ending with the arrival of the Almoravid leader Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn, who consolidated Muslim forces and defeated the Christians at the Battle of Zallaqa. As al-Tamimi describes in his introduction, there are only a handful of narrative histories of this period and especially few that date before 1106-1110, Molina’s proposed redaction date for the original text.
Al-Tamimi's introduction does a good job orienting the reader. He gives a brief chronological sketch of Andalusi history from the original Arab-Berber conquest through the Almoravid conquest in the late eleventh century and addresses the subjects of Fatḥ al-Andalus’s authorship, title, sources, and composition. He outlines some of the text’s characteristic features and themes and relates its content and style to other contemporary Latin and Arabic texts. An important part of the discussion centers on the ways in which Fatḥ al-Andalus categorizes people and explains their conflicts and allegiances in terms of those categories: Arab, Berber (Zanata, Miknasa, Sanhaja), Baladī Arabs and Syrian Arabs, Qays tribes and Yamānī and Muḍarī tribes, Qurayshīs, Umayyads, and Fihrīs, clients (mawālī), and slaves. The reader is thus equipped to navigate a potentially confusing feature of the narrative. One aspect of the introduction that is unconventional and a bit incongruous is where al-Tamimi makes analogies between medieval and modern circumstances, including the Syrian civil war, as on pages 12-13, 23, and 27-28; arguably, such analogies will become less legible to the general reader in time.
Footnotes to the translation clarify names, terms, and dates, and enlarge on the significance of some events. Occasional notes suggest how the narrative echoes or departs from al-Bayān al-mughrib, Historia Gothica and Historia Arabum, the Mozarabic Chronicle, Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s History, Akhbār majmūʿa, Ibn Ḥabīb's Taʾrīkh, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam's Futūḥ Miṣr wa-l-Maghrib, and other narratives, and identify some common tropes and stories, such as the house of the locks, the rape of Julian’s daughter, King Solomon’s table, without necessarily noting all the texts in which certain stories appear.
Al-Tamimi describes his approach to the translation as a direct but not strictly literal interpretation. He notes his clarification of pronouns in places, and his elimination of wa (“and”) as a regular syntactical feature and fa, although the reader will observe frequent use of “hence” and “thus.” The translation is coherent and consistent, with the rare typographical or proof-reading errors, such as on page 76 where a word or phrase seems to be missing: “was appointed governor of al-Andalus.” A similar issues arises regarding whether the names al-Ṣiqalī and al-Ṣaqalī are both (or either) renditions of al-Ṣiqillī (“the Sicillian”) or al-Ṣaqlabī (“the Slav”) (p. 110). The transliteration system for Arabic names and terms is different from the one David James uses in his Routledge translations and other conventions also differ: sentences that begin with “al-” are not capitalized, “bin” is used for “son of” in the middle of a name rather than “ibn.”
In conclusion, al-Tamimi has done a service to medieval studies by providing an English translation of an early history of al-Andalus that can be instructively read with other contemporary narratives. The book with its introduction, notes, appendix, and bibliography makes Fatḥ al-Andalus intelligible to the non-specialist and suggests ways in which readers may pursue their interests further.