As part of the Trump I era project The Extreme Right and the Revision of History; S.J. Pearce reviews Fernández-Morera.
This blog first reviewed The Myth back in 2019, when (I assume) Pearce was still revising his takedown. Mine own review dinged it for not spending time on its "Song Duchy" phase, before those Nāfiʿ codices trickled over there ~200/800. We can however evaluate if Pearce' review be any better than its object (or, target) - on the review's own standards.
Pearse' review claims that The Myth strawmans The Ornament of the World in particular, on its way to pillorying wider academia. Indeed: Fernández-Morera had got his book published through ISI, a sort of refuge for frustrated para-academics in an appeal to a wider (conservative) market. Pearse further pins Fernández-Morera to the Spanish Right, in particular Franco in 1939, which he associates more narrowly to the Phalangists.
The overall book's call-for-abstracts suggests that the editors had no desire to impose basic sobriety upon the submissions. If you're not on the team, you're Extreme Right. And you deserve to be punched.
Whatever The Ornament printed about how Catholic (or Jewish) life went under the Maliki dhimma: the title chosen was - as we say now - clickbait, for people who wanted to believe in a multicultural Chrislam like we got in Twohy's Pitch Black movies. Looking around this 'ere blog, direct apologetic for Corboda's amirate is rife in quasi-historical text like the pious asides in Covey. I suppose Moller's 105-IQ takes might count as less scholarly... except that her book got rave reviews by mainstream newspapers who usually pull their reviewers from the universities; it also got blurbed by Nixey.
Fernández-Morera intuited that The Ornament had a Tendenz, which he could extrapolate from its reception-history.
If we don't allow Fernández-Morera to attack a vibe, a midwit fad, surrounding a text; then I wonder why Pearce or his editors imagine that we should allow Pearse to attack a "far right" or "extreme(!) right" surrounding Fernández-Morera's text.
I also have to ask why an anti-Islamist book should be considered "far" ... anything. I can assuredly rank Franco with the far right, if not as far as - say - Carlism (or Tolkien). To that: even if we're eschewing the Almoravid "fundamentalism"; we're invited to compare Franco with a hereditary amirate backed by Malikite fiqh and a standard Qurân. If the Umayyad state was anything, it was a political project to be judged accordingly. I beg of Pearse to find any moderation in that.
Fernández-Morera wasn't writing about Spain in its 1930s. As an aside, I don't think Franco would much approve an antiMoroccan text, himself; given how the Moroccans helped him win.
Much of Pearse' review is just namecalling. Here we must handle his treatment of the Phalanx. If Pearse could read Spanish, or even use Google Translate in its 2019 edition, he should know that the Phalanx appealed to a racial Spain bypassing Islam and Christianity both. "Phalanx" evokes no history in Spain; it evokes classical Greece. Frankly that crew were kinda gay, sort of a Spanish Sturmabteilung. Franco like... that other guy... could use such a Front, but he never much controlled them and he'd come to get rid of them. If you would like to know more (so-to-speak): also from 2020 we have AH Lloyd.
A proper review of Fernández-Morera's project would be welcome. Pearse cannot provide it.
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