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In English-language surveys of the history of Muslim Iberia, the Almohads have traditionally received comparatively short shrift. Authors with as disparate approaches as Richard Fletcher and Maria Rosa Menocal have characterized the religious and political movement founded by Ibn Tumart (d. 524/1130) as "fundamentalist" and "puritan," framing it historiographically in opposition to the earlier Umayyad caliphate and the subsequent fractured political landscape of the party kingdoms. In these narratives, the Almohads and their fellow Berber predecessors, the Almoravids, are understood to have put an end to the golden age of convivencia in al-Andalus, and the Almohads' ultimate historical significance is largely reduced to their admittedly strict application of legal injunctions against Jewish and Christian minorities and the dramatic burning of the books of the philosopher Averroes only a few years before his death. A reader of such surveys could easily be forgiven for thinking that these fundamentalist Berbers were remarkable only for the expansion of their political control and that when their rule collapsed a century after the death of their founder, they would hereafter be thought of as an anomaly with little connection to the intellectual and political orders that preceded and followed them.
In the two volumes under consideration the editors have succeeded in bringing together a remarkable collection of thirty-eight articles addressing almost every facet of the Almohad movement. The result of three conferences held in Madrid at the Casa de Velásquez between 2000 and 2002, these articles succeed admirably in furthering our understanding of precisely how the Almohads can be properly understood only in light of their relationship with previous political, economic, cultural, and intellectual orders and how much they influenced the societies that followed their disappearance. With the exception of two articles written in English and one in Arabic, the contributions to these volumes are almost evenly split between scholarship published in French and Spanish and can be taken as the "state of the field" of research on the Almohads in France, Spain, and Morocco. With some notable exceptions--including the excellent contributions to this collection by Frank Griffel and Madeleine Fletcher--if this is the state of the field in Europe, American academics working on the Almohads, and not just those writing introductory surveys of...