{"id":715,"date":"2012-07-18T11:06:54","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T09:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/web\/?p=715"},"modified":"2012-07-18T11:06:54","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T09:06:54","slug":"history-of-islam-in-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/?p=715","title":{"rendered":"History of Islam in Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Islamstory<\/p>\n

\"\"When you think of European culture, one of the first things that may come to your mind is the renaissance.\u00a0 Many of the roots of European culture can be traced back to that glorious time of art, science, commerce and architecture.\u00a0 But did you know that long before the renaissance there was a place of humanistic beauty in Muslim Spain?\u00a0 Not only was it artistic, scientific and commercial, but it also exhibited incredible tolerance, imagination and poetry.\u00a0 Muslims, as the Spaniards call the Muslims, populated Spain for nearly 700 years.\u00a0 As you\u2019ll see, it was their civilization that enlightened Europe and brought it out of the dark ages to usher in the renaissance.\u00a0 Many of their cultural and intellectual influences still live with us today.<\/p>\n

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Way back during the eighth century, Europe was still knee-deep in the Medieval period.\u00a0 That\u2019s not the only thing they were knee-deep in.\u00a0 In his book, \u201cThe Day The Universe Changed,\u201d the historian James Burke describes how the typical European townspeople lived:<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe inhabitants threw all their refuse into the drains in the center of the narrow streets.\u00a0 The stench must have been overwhelming, though it appears to have gone virtually unnoticed.\u00a0 Mixed with excrement and urine would be the soiled reeds and straw used to cover the dirt floors. (p. 32)<\/p>\n

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This squalid society was organized under a feudal system and had little that would resemble a commercial economy.\u00a0 Along with other restrictions, the Catholic Church forbade the lending of money – which didn\u2019t help get things booming much.\u00a0 \u201cAnti-Semitism, previously rare, began to increase.\u00a0 Money lending, which was forbidden by the Church, was permitted under Jewish law.\u201d (Burke, 1985, p.\u00a0 32) Jews worked to develop a currency although they were heavily persecuted for it.\u00a0 Medieval Europe was a miserable lot, which ran high in illiteracy, superstition, barbarism and filth.<\/p>\n

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During this same time, Muslims entered Europe from the South.\u00a0 Abd al-Rahman I, a survivor of a family of caliphs of the Muslim empire, reached Spain in the mid-700\u2019s.\u00a0 He became the first Caliph of Al-Andalus, the Muslim part of Spain, which occupied most of the Iberian Peninsula.\u00a0 He also set up the Umayyad Dynasty that ruled Al-Andalus for over three-hundred years.\u00a0 (Grolier, History of Spain).\u00a0 Al Andalus means, \u201cthe land of the vandals,\u201d from which comes the modern name Andalusia.<\/p>\n

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At first, the land resembled the rest of Europe in all its squalor.\u00a0 But within two-hundred years the Muslims had turned Al-Andalus into a bastion of culture, commerce and beauty.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIrrigation systems imported from Syria and Muslimia turned the dry plains…\u00a0 into an agricultural cornucopia.\u00a0 Olives and wheat had always grown there.\u00a0 The Muslims added pomegranates, oranges, lemons, aubergines, artichokes, cumin, coriander, bananas, almonds, pams, henna, woad, madder, saffron, sugar-cane, cotton, rice, figs, grapes, peaches, apricots and rice.\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 37)<\/p>\n

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By the beginning of the ninth century, Muslim Spain was the gem of Europe with its capital city, Cordova.\u00a0 With the establishment of Abd al-Rahman III – \u201cthe great caliphate of Cordova\u201d – came the golden age of Al-Andalus.\u00a0 Cordova, in southern Spain, was the intellectual center of Europe.<\/p>\n

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At a time when London was a tiny mud-hut village that \u201ccould not boast of a single streetlamp\u201d (Digest, 1973, p. 622), in Cordova\u2026<\/p>\n

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\u201c\u2026there were half a million inhabitants, living in 113,000 houses.\u00a0 There were 700 mosques and 300 public baths spread throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs.\u00a0 The streets were paved and lit.\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 38)<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe houses had marble balconies for summer and hot-air ducts under the mosaic floors for the winter.\u00a0 They were adorned with gardens with artificial fountains and orchards\u201d.\u00a0 (Digest, 1973, p. 622) \u201cPaper, a material still unknown to the west, was everywhere.\u00a0 There were bookshops and more than seventy libraries.\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 38).<\/p>\n

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In his book titled, \u201cSpain In The Modern World,\u201d James Cleuge explains the significance of Cordova in Medieval Europe:<\/p>\n

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\u201cFor there was nothing like it, at that epoch, in the rest of Europe.\u00a0 The best minds in that continent looked to Spain for everything which most clearly differentiates a human being from a tiger.\u201d (Cleugh, 1953, p. 70)<\/p>\n

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During the end of the first millennium, Cordova was the intellectual well from which European humanity came to drink.\u00a0 Students from France and England traveled there to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars, to learn philosophy, science and medicine (Digest, 1973, p. 622).\u00a0 In the great library of Cordova alone, there were some 600,000 manuscripts (Burke, 1978, p. 122).<\/p>\n

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This rich and sophisticated society took a tolerant view towards other faiths.\u00a0 Tolerance was unheard of in the rest of Europe.\u00a0 But in Muslim Spain, \u201cthousands of Jews and Christians lived in peace and harmony with their Muslim overlords.\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 38)<\/p>\n

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Unfortunately, this period of intellectual and economic prosperity began to decline.\u00a0 Shifting away from the rule of law, there began to be internal rifts in the Muslim power structure.\u00a0 The Muslim harmony began to break up into warring factions.\u00a0 Finally, the caliphs were eliminated and Cordova fell to other Muslim forces.\u00a0 \u201cIn 1013 the great library in Cordova was destroyed.\u00a0 True to their Islamic traditions however, the new rulers permitted the books to be dispersed, together with the Cordovan scholars to the capital towns of small emirates.\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 40) The intellectual properties of the once great Al-Andalus were divided among small towns.<\/p>\n

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\u2026the Christians to the North were doing just the opposite.\u00a0 In Northern Spain the various Christian kingdoms united to expel the Muslims from the European continent.\u00a0 (Grolier, History of Spain) This set the stage for the final act of the Medieval period.<\/p>\n

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In another of James Burke\u2019s works titled \u201cConnections,\u201d he describes how the Muslims thawed out Europe from the Dark Ages.\u00a0 \u201cBut the event that must have done more for the intellectual and scientific revival of Europe was the fall of Toledo in Spain to the Christians, in 1105.\u201d\u00a0 In Toledo the Muslims had huge libraries containing the lost (to Christian Europe) works of the Greeks and Romans along with Muslim philosophy and mathematics.\u00a0 \u201cThe Spanish libraries were opened, revealing a store of classics and Muslim works that staggered Christian Europeans.\u201d (Burke, 1978, p. 123)<\/p>\n

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The intellectual plunder of Toledo brought the scholars of northern Europe like moths to a candle.\u00a0 The Christians set up a giant translating program in Toledo.\u00a0 Using the Jews as interpreters, they translated the Muslim books into Latin.\u00a0 These books included \u201cmost of the major works of Greek science and philosophy…\u00a0 along with many original Muslim works of scholarship.\u201d (Digest, p. 622)<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe intellectual community which the northern scholars found in Spain was so far superior to what they had at home that it left a lasting jealousy of Muslim culture, which was to color Western opinions for centuries\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 41)<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe subjects covered by the texts included medicine, astrology, astronomy pharmacology, psychology, physiology, zoology, biology, botany, mineralogy, optics, chemistry, physics, mathematics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, music, meteorology, geography, mechanics, hydrostatics, navigation and history.\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 42)<\/p>\n

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These works alone however, didn\u2019t kindle the fire that would lead to the renaissance.\u00a0 They added to Europe\u2019s knowledge, but much of it was unappreciated without a change in the way Europeans viewed the world.<\/p>\n

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Remember, Medieval Europe was superstitious and irrational.\u00a0 \u201cWhat caused the intellectual bombshell to explode, however, was the philosophy that came with (the books).\u201d (Burke, 1985, p. 42)<\/p>\n

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Christians continued to re-conquer Spain, leaving a wake of death and destruction in their path.\u00a0 The books were spared, but Moor culture was destroyed and their civilization disintegrated.\u00a0 Ironically, it wasn\u2019t just the strength of the Christians that defeated the Muslims but the disharmony among the Muslims\u2019 own ranks.\u00a0 Like Greece and Rome that proceeded them, the Muslims of Al-Andalus fell into moral decay[1]\u00a0 and wandered from the intellect that had made them great.<\/p>\n

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The translations continued as each Muslim haven fell to the Christians.\u00a0 In 1492, the same year Columbus discovered the New World, Granada, the last Muslim enclave, was taken.\u00a0 Captors of the knowledge were not keepers of its wisdom.\u00a0 Sadly, all Jews and Muslims that would not abandon their beliefs were either killed or exiled (Grolier, History of Spain).\u00a0 Thus ended an epoch of tolerance and all that would remain of the Muslims would be their books.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s fascinating to realize just how much Europe learned from the Muslim texts and even greater to see how much that knowledge has endured.\u00a0 Because of the flood of knowledge, the first Universities started to appear.\u00a0 College and University degrees were developed (Burke, 1985, p. 48).\u00a0 Directly from the Muslims came the numerals we use today.\u00a0 Even the concept of Zero (a Muslim word) came from the translations (Castillo & Bond, 1987, p. 27).\u00a0 It\u2019s also fair to say that renaissance architectural concepts came from the Muslim libraries.\u00a0 Mathematics and architecture explained in the Muslim texts along with Muslim works on optics led to the perspective paintings of the renaissance period (Burke, 1985 p. 72).\u00a0 The first lawyers began their craft using the new translated knowledge as their guide.\u00a0 Even the food utensils we use today come from the Cordova kitchen! (Burke, 1985 p. 44) All of these examples show just some of the ways Europe transformed from the Muslims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Islamstory When you think of European culture, one of the first things that may come to your mind is the renaissance.\u00a0 Many of the roots of European culture can be traced back...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[98,278],"class_list":["post-715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-of-islam","tag-history","tag-history-of-islam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}