Sources — The Caliphate of Córdoba

General works

Kennedy, Hugh. Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus. London: Longman, 1996. The standard political narrative in English, and the one to read first.
Fierro, Maribel. Abd al-Rahman III: The First Cordoban Caliph. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. Short, authoritative, and the best single book on the caliphate as such.
Catlos, Brian A. Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. New York: Basic Books, 2018. The best recent one-volume history, and unusually clear-headed about the convivencia argument in both directions.
Menocal, María Rosa. The Ornament of the World. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Beautifully written, influential, and the most articulate statement of the optimistic case. Read it and then read Fernández-Morera against it.
Fernández-Morera, Darío. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2016. The polemical counter-case. Its criticisms of the convivencia literature land; its own framing is at least as tendentious as what it attacks. Included because a reader should see both.
Collins, Roger. Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Sceptical, source-critical, and very good on how little we actually know about the ninth century.

Chapters I–IV

Collins, Roger. The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Manzano Moreno, Eduardo. Conquistadores, emires y califas: Los omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus. Barcelona: Crítica, 2006. In Spanish. The standard modern account of Umayyad state formation.
Bulliet, Richard W. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. The source of the conversion chronology that everything in this volume's chapter on the people of al-Andalus rests on. The method is contested and nothing better has replaced it.
Wasserstein, David. The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Safran, Janina M. The Second Umayyad Caliphate: The Articulation of Caliphal Legitimacy in al-Andalus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. On why Abd al-Rahman III claimed the title in 929 and what it was meant to answer.
Anderson, Glaire D. The Islamic Villa in Early Medieval Iberia. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

Society

Safran, Janina M. Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. How the legal and social lines between communities were drawn and policed in practice. The single most useful book on the coexistence question.
Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. On the martyrs of Córdoba, and the best treatment of an episode that both sides of the argument use badly.
Ashtor, Eliyahu. The Jews of Moslem Spain. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973–84.
Ray, Jonathan. The Sephardic Frontier. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Scales, Peter C. The Fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba: Berbers and Andalusis in Conflict. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
Meouak, Mohamed. Ṣaqāliba, eunuques et esclaves à la conquête du pouvoir. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. In French. On the slave elite, which most general accounts leave out entirely.
Constable, Olivia Remie. Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Culture

Watson, Andrew M. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. The Arab agricultural revolution thesis. Challenged since — see Michael Decker's critique — and still the starting point.
Glick, Thomas F. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill, 2005. On irrigation, technology transfer and social structure. Outstanding, and freely available online.
Dodds, Jerrilynn D., ed. Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. The catalogue of the great exhibition, and still the best illustrated survey of the material culture.
Khoury, Nuha N. N. “The Meaning of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the Tenth Century.” Muqarnas 13 (1996): 80–98.
Burnett, Charles. “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo.” Science in Context 14 (2001): 249–88. On how the transmission actually worked, and on the limits of the Toledo School as a concept.
Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London: Routledge, 1998. The Abbasid translation movement, and the necessary corrective to the preservation myth.
Reynolds, Dwight F. The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus. London: Routledge, 2021. What can and cannot be established about the descent of the North African Andalusi repertoires.

After

O'Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Harvey, L. P. Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. The Nasrid centuries, and the standard work.
Harvey, L. P. Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. The Moriscos, from forced conversion to expulsion.
Carr, Matthew. Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain. New York: New Press, 2009.
Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. The book that established the modern figures, against both the black legend and its apologist mirror.
García-Arenal, Mercedes, and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano. The Orient in Spain. Leiden: Brill, 2013. On how Spain subsequently handled — and forged — its own Arabic past.
Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. How the memory of al-Andalus was used by Spanish colonialism in Morocco and then by Moroccan nationalism. The best book on the afterlife.

Contemporary sources

Ibn Hayyan. al-Muqtabis. Partial editions and Spanish translations, various. The great Cordoban historian of the eleventh century, and the principal narrative source for the caliphate. Survives incomplete.
Ibn Hazm. The Ring of the Dove (Tawq al-hamama). Trans. A. J. Arberry. London: Luzac, 1953. A treatise on love written in Játiva around 1022 by a man who had just watched his city and his caliphate destroyed. The finest piece of Andalusi prose that survives.
Ibn Abd al-Hakam and others, in Christians and Moors in Spain, ed. and trans. Colin Smith. 3 vols. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1988–92. Parallel Arabic, Latin and Castilian texts with translations. The most practical source collection for the general reader.
Al-Zahrawi. Kitab al-Tasrif, the surgical sections. Trans. in M. S. Spink and G. L. Lewis, Albucasis on Surgery and Instruments. London: Wellcome, 1973.
Ibn Rushd (Averroes). The Decisive Treatise. Trans. Charles Butterworth. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2001.
Ibn Jubayr. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr. Trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952. A Valencian's journey east in the 1180s, with observations on Christian Sicily that bear directly on the coexistence question.
The Chronicle of 754 and the Chronicle of Alfonso III, in Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990. The earliest Latin accounts of the conquest, written by Christians under Muslim rule.