This book was recommended to me after I was disappointed by Ornament of the World (by Maria Rosa Menocal ).

This book is everything that Ornament was not. Fletcher provides a good overview of the political and social history of 700 years of Islamic history in Spain, with the right amount of detail for the nonspecialist reader. I appreciated the way he handled his sources -- he described them briefly and pointed out their weaknesses. The book is roughly chronological, and is written in engaging, nontechnical prose (although I found that by the end, some of the asides became tiresome).

I'm absolutely floored by how different Fletcher's interpretation is from Menocal's. Here's one brief example. The Umayyads (the earliest Muslim rulers of Southern Spain) required that Christians and Jews pay a special tax.

Menocal breezed over this tax, saying something to the effect of it being a light burden to bear in exchange for a surprising amount of religious freedom and tolerance. Fletcher described the tax in a bit more detail, and interpreted it as a marker of the lower status Christians and Jews held compared to Muslims and pointed to a few sources that seem to show that Christians in particular hated the tax, and that it later contributed to Christian fervor in the Crusades.

It's hard for me to adjudicate between these viewpoints, being unfamiliar with this period of history, but it's also hard for me to swallow Menocal's interpretation -- we're talking about a tax of goods or money after all, and no matter how much toleration Christians and Jews received, I find it difficult to believe that they didn't mind paying extra taxes!

Overall, I enjoyed Fletcher's book, and recommend it hands down over Menocal's.