Nietzsche and the Lost Paradise of Moorish Spain

Europe’s identity was not found — it was constructed. From the Renaissance onward, scholars and theologians traced Europe’s lineage to Greece and Rome, deliberately bypassing the Middle East, where both Christianity and modern science once shared roots. This selective inheritance created what Palestinian-American academic and literary critic Edward Said later called a “civilizational fiction”: the myth of a self-made Europe, rational and pure.

The Church’s Latin liturgy and humanist devotion to classical antiquity hardened this self-portrait, leaving little room for Islamic or Jewish voices. By aligning itself with antiquity rather than the multilingual, multifaith worlds of al-Andalus and the Levant, Europe chose a story of continuity over complexity.

Yet this narrative concealed a deep contradiction — how could a civilization claim universality while denying the traditions that sustained it? This tension, between selective inheritance and suppressed hybridity, set the stage for German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical critique of what he called life-denying civilization.

Christianity’s famine of life

For Nietzsche, the moral revolution of Christianity marked the moment when Europe began to starve its instincts. In The Antichrist (1888), he accused the Church of destroying “the whole harvest of ancient civilization.” What began as a transformation of Jewish ethics into Roman law soon became, in Nietzsche’s eyes, a moral economy built on guilt and repression. Power became sin; pleasure became shame; suffering became virtue. 

In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche diagnosed this as the psychology of ressentiment — a world where the weak define “good” by condemning the strong. “Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all,” he wrote, describing how the will to life was replaced by a will to denial. Ascetic ideals turned vitality inward, away from creation and toward salvation. 

While Moorish Spain celebrated philosophy, architecture and sensual beauty, Christian Europe retreated into metaphysics. Nietzsche’s critique, though aimed at his own century, looked backward in search of worlds that had once embraced existence. This hunger for vitality, this famine of the spirit, would drive him southward, to the civilization he saw as the embodiment of life-affirmation.

Moorish Spain and the lost East

To show what Europe lost, Nietzsche invoked the memory of Moorish Spain, calling it “a wonderful culture … nearer to us and appealing more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece.” For him, al-Andalus was the model of a life-affirming civilization — one that “said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life.” 

Its achievements were not metaphors but monuments. By the 10th century, Córdoba housed over 400,000 manuscripts, far surpassing any European city. Scholars like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) preserved and expanded Aristotle, pioneering rationalism centuries before René Descartes. 

As historian Charles Burnett notes, translators in Toledo transmitted Arabic philosophy, optics and medicine into Latin, laying the intellectual foundations of the European university. This pluralism extended beyond knowledge. The architecture of the Alhambra, studied by María Rosa Menocal, fused geometry, calligraphy and poetry into a sensual celebration of beauty. 

To Nietzsche, such refinement born of strength exemplified what he called “noble and manly instincts” — not patriarchal domination but the courage to live without guilt, to turn instinct into art. In contrasting this Moorish feast with Europe’s Christian famine, Nietzsche was not idealizing Islam; he was diagnosing Europe’s amnesia. Al-Andalus, he believed, was a mirror of what Europe could have been: confident, worldly and joyous in its creation.

Orientalism and Nietzsche’s mirror

Nietzsche’s admiration, however, came filtered through Orientalist romanticism. Scholar Ian Almond describes it as “rhetorical Islamophilia” — a fascination less with Islam itself than with what it symbolized: vitality, sensuality and affirmation. Nietzsche’s Islam was drawn not from theology or travel but from the same 19th-century sources that nourished German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West–Eastern Divan and French philosopher Ernest Renan’s racialized Orientalism.

Like many Romantics, Nietzsche saw “the East” as everything Europe was not: instinctive where Europe was cerebral, passionate where it was ascetic. The difference was that Nietzsche inverted moral polarity. For him, the “sensuous East” was not decadent but noble — the antithesis of Christian weakness. In that inversion, he both challenged and reproduced Orientalism: the East remained Europe’s reflection, not its equal.

Yet this mirror cracked the old binary. When Nietzsche could say the Moorish world was “nearer to us,” he implicitly questioned the idea of a pure, bounded Europe. His rhetoric of life-affirmation became, unintentionally, a bridge toward what post-colonial thinkers would later call entanglement. Nietzsche’s mirror may have been distorted, but it reflected a Europe uneasy with its own reflection — a civilization that could admire the vitality of the Other only after destroying it.

The irony Nietzsche intuited has since unfolded with eerie precision. The very civilization he saw as “life-affirming” came to be branded as “fanatical”, while the Europe he described as spiritually impoverished reinvented itself as the bastion of liberal reason. 

In the 19th century, Romantic writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Renan turned the Muslim world from a landscape of sensual freedom into one of moral excess and irrationality. After the colonial encounters of the 20th century and the geopolitics of the 21st, this image hardened into the stereotype of “Islamic fanaticism.” 

Meanwhile, Europe’s Christian famine — its moral rigidity and guilt — was secularized into a liberal order that prized tolerance yet struggled to embrace the vitality it once condemned. AsTalal Asad argues in Formations of the Secular, secularism did not erase the Christian inheritance; it refined its moral discipline under new banners. The result is an inversion Nietzsche would have recognized: the “lively, free” Muslim world recast as repressed, and a “life-denying” Christendom reborn as the world’s moral guide.

From inheritance to entanglement

Post-Orientalist scholars have since redrawn the map Nietzsche glimpsed only dimly. Said showed that “the Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” Historians like Jens Hanssen and philosophers such as P. S. Groff trace how Nietzsche’s writings later circulated through Arab intellectual networks, influencing debates about modernity and secularism.

These exchanges reveal that knowledge never moved in one direction; it was reciprocal, sustained by translation and critique. The city of Toledo — where Muslims, Jews and Christians once translated each other’s books — embodies this truth. 

Civilization advanced not through isolation but through contact zones: Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikma, Sicily under Frederick II and Córdoba’s academies. Each was a site where languages met, and worldviews merged. The myth of a self-contained Europe collapses when viewed from these crossroads. Nietzsche’s “life-affirming” Moorish Spain thus prefigures the post-Orientalist insight that vitality arises from mixture. His “life-denying” Europe warns what happens when cultures mistake purity for power. 

Today, as Europe grapples with pluralism, migration and memory, the philosopher’s metaphor acquires new urgency: civilizations survive only by affirming the fullness of their entanglements. When they forget, the feast turns once again to famine.

[Natalie Sorlie edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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