Matthew Carr is a writer, broadcaster, and journalist whose work has appeared in The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman and on BBC Radio. In 1990 he wrote a memoir about his relationship with his father, 'My Father's House', which was published by Hamish Hamilton to excellent reviews, and he is also the author of 'Fortress Europe: Inside the War Against Immigration' and 'The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism'. He lives in Derbyshire.
'Well-balanced and comprehensive … "Blood and Faith" is a splendid
work of synthesis. … it is impossible to read this book without
sensing its resonance in our own time.'
*The New York Times*
'Who remembers the last survivors of Muslim Spain, whom Spaniards
contemptuously called Moriscos ("little Moors")? Impressive
research on them has appeared in the last 30 years, yet until now,
none of it has escaped beyond the walls of the academic ghetto.
Matthew Carr's well-balanced and comprehensive book brings the
story of their tragic fate to a wider public... Splendid.'
*New York Times Book Review*
'Matthew Carr['s] magnificent "Blood and Faith" charts the tragic
end of the moriscos, … "a monumental historical crime" from which
he seeks lessons for today.'
*The Guardian*
'Eloquently written and carefully researched, "Blood and Faith" is
an important new study that synthesises much important scholarship
on the moriscos, until now inaccessible to an English readership,
and makes us aware of historical precedents to current ideological
and cultural conflicts.'
*European History Quarterly*
'Balanced and thoroughly researched history.'
*Literary Review*
'Matthew Carr's well-researched account ... is carefully written
and thoroughly documented. ... This is a reliable, if often
harrowing, account of a sad episode in Spanish and European
history, which deserves to be better known.'
*History Today*
'Carr navigates issues of assimilation and integration rather
elegantly, and arrives at carefully considered conclusions with his
deft analysis of the events that led to the expulsion and its
aftermath. Indeed, Carr has written a valuable cautionary tale for
the public on the pathways that crystallise imaginary evils.'
*LSE Review of Books*
'An estimated 350,000 Muslims were forced to abandon their homes;
many died on the journey to the ships that would take them to North
Africa, and many others were terrorized, raped, robbed and killed
by forces that were supposed to protect them. Carr deftly narrates
the complex events leading up to this little-known but horrific
episode as a warning against religious intolerance and
xenophobia.'
*Publishers Weekly*
'[A] sweeping panorama of a critical historical period . . . Carr's
account is a powerful warning of the perils of intolerance of
difference and of policies of forced conversion and
assimilation.'
'A fascinating account of perhaps the first major episode of
European ethnic cleansing and, just as importantly, the story of
the beginning of the conviction that "blood" matters more than
belief; a conviction that led, in the end, to modern racism. In an
age when so many people, on both "sides", believe we face an
historic confrontation between Christendom and Islam, it is
essential to place the relations between these two global Abrahamic
religions in a wider historical framework. This book does that
eloquently and judiciously.'
*Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah*
'In this first comprehensive appreciation in many decades of the
Muslim expulsion from Spain, "Blood and Faith" meticulously
recaptures the fateful self-mutilation of a society that might have
become Europe's first multicultural nation and offers a grim lesson
about religious and racial repression in our contemporary age of
contested faiths.'
*Professor David Levering Lewis, author of 'God's Crucible: Islam
and the Making of Europe, 570-1215'*
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