Black Hawk Down and Islamic Spain, Movie Review Example

Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and Islamic Spain 711 – 1492

Someone seeing the title of this essay might think it is a joke. What serious connection could link these two subjects? After all, they are very far distant from each other in time and place. Yet I think there is an odd kind of link, worth thinking about. It hides in plain sight, so I think everyone reading this will be surprised to learn what it is.

First, I enjoyed Black Hawk Down because it’s really just a classic war-movie, but one with a real-world twist. It has good guys and bad guys. The good guys are Americans. The bad guys are foreigners who are basically pirates and terrorists. The plot of the movie is the good guys’ attempt to kill or capture one of the bad guys’ leaders. But because the movie is based on a real event, it doesn’t end in victory for the good guys’ cause. At best, the good guys still left alive escape to freedom. In Somalia’s capital city of Mogadishu where the movie takes place, the wars and chaos just go on and on.

Today Somalia is called a failed state, while Islamic Spain is called a Golden Age, with religious tolerance between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. (Some historians disagree about how much tolerance there really was but admit it did exist.) And yet Mogadishu was once also called “The White Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” and was a haven for tourists from around the world. It’s like Mogadishu had its own Golden Age.

The link between the movie and Islamic Spain is that Morocco was part of the empire that ruled Spain at that time, and Morocco is where most of Black Hawk Down was filmed. The only place to film today’s failed Islamic state was to cross the African continent to a functioning Islamic state still living by at least some of the qualities that made Islamic Spain what it was, qualities long gone from Mogadishu. Islamic Spain reached out through Morocco and rescued the making of Black Hawk Down.