Posted on 09/27/2003 1:05:33 PM PDT by quidnunc
Granada, Spain – A dispenser of iced lemonade sits invitingly by the door of the newly whitewashed building — hospitality for summer visitors coming to the first mosque built in Granada in over 500 years.
But looming over the freshly planted garden, seeming to quiver in the furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra, a 14th-century Muslim fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything this mosque is not: ancient, battle-scarred, monumental. It seems at once a reminder of lost glories and a spur for their restoration.
It may also inspire darker sentiments. For it was from the Alhambra's watchtower that Christian conquerors unfurled their flag in 1492, marking the end of almost eight centuries of Islamic rule in Spain. Less than a decade later, forced conversions of Muslims began; by 1609, they were being expelled.
That lost Muslim kingdom — the southern region of Spain the Muslims called al-Andalus and is still called Andalusia — now looms over far more than the new mosque's garden. And variations of "the Moor's last sigh" — the sigh the final ruler of the Alhambra supposedly gave as he gazed backward — abound.
For radical Islamists, the key note is revenge: in one of Osama bin Laden's post-9/11 broadcasts, his deputy invoked "the tragedy of al-Andalus." For Spain, which is destroying Islamic terrorist cells while welcoming a growing Muslim minority (a little over 1 percent of Spain's 40 million citizens), the note yearned for is reconciliation.
The sighs have also included a retrospective utopianism. Islamic Spain has been hailed for its "convivencia" — its spirit of tolerance in which Jews, Christians and Muslims, created a premodern renaissance. Córdoba, in the 10th century, was a center of commerce and scholarship. Arabic was a conduit between classical knowledge and nascent Western science and philosophy. The ecumenical Andalusian spirit was even invoked at this summer's opening ceremony for the new mosque.
That heritage, though, can be difficult to define. Even at the mosque, the facade of liberality gave way: at its conference on "Islam in Europe," one speaker praised al-Andalus not for its openness but for its rigorous fundamentalism. Were similar views also part of the Andalusian past?
-snip-
But as many scholars have argued, this image is distorted. Even the Umayyad dynasty, begun by Abd al-Rahman in 756, was far from enlightened. Issues of succession were often settled by force. One ruler murdered two sons and two brothers. Uprisings in 805 and 818 in Córdoba were answered with mass executions and the destruction of one of the city's suburbs. Wars were accompanied by plunder, kidnappings and ransom. Córdoba itself was finally sacked by Muslim Berbers in 1013, its epochal library destroyed.
Andalusian governance was also based on a religious tribal model. Christians and Jews, who shared Islam's Abrahamic past, had the status of dhimmis — alien minorities. They rose high but remained second-class citizens; one 11th-century legal text called them members of "the devil's party." They were subject to special taxes and, often, dress codes. Violence also erupted, including a massacre of thousands of Jews in Grenada in 1066 and the forced exile of many Christians in 1126.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I've suspected that his conversion may have been a shrewd ploy to tap into a movement that the State had no control over, and once the new and vigorous religion was adapted, all the temples to Jupiter and Hera and the other gods were reconfigured as Christian churches -- but I STRONGLY suspect that the "hierarchy" of priests DID NOT CHANGE!!
In this way, I think the "state-sponsored" Christian churches were corrupted from the beginning -- and much of the original virtues of the Christian church lost in the process...
Was Galileo Jewish? Did he live in "Moorish Spain" or even Spain? Your orignal post advanced the myth of the "Golden Age" in Spain under Islamic rule. When someone advances the notion that things were great for the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition maybe I'll take that on too.
And I don't really know about the caliph. He didn't live in Islamic Spain either. Maybe he got a job from the caliph for the same reason anyone gives someone else a job: maybe the caliph needed his services.
ML/NJ
No matter what we do, they will hate us.
No matter what we say and/or actually believe, they will still play the Crusade Card.
Yes, there will always be the hatred, just as many of any religion hate those of another religion.
They will always play the Crusade card, just as many Christians will play the Jihad card.
It would however, lessen the intensity if we were to move it from the religious to the secular arena. Religious wars have traditionally been far bloodier than purely secular wars, but it is also far easier to recruit people and money in the name of religion. Any little bit would help. Wouldn’t it be worth trying?
The story of the Reconquista is pretty well known by those who trouble to study medieval history for themselves. It's not known in our public schools, because it's politically incorrect.
If you want a good summary of the events, you might look at the opening chapter of Warren H. Carroll, "Isabel of Spain: The Catholic Queen," Christendom Press, 1991. Some of the major events in the Reconquista are familiar in Spanish literature, notably the tales of Pelayo, Alfonso el Sabio, and El Cid Campeador.
Maimonades had studied medicine. The caliph probably needed a doctor. He certainly wasn't interested in the Talmud.
As for why his family headed for Fez, I think you have to remember that there was less than perfect information a thousand years ago. There probably was no commerce between Spain and those countries in Europe not overrun by Islamic Swine. I'm not sure there was any place to go from Spain except Morocco. I don't think that they really thought the political climate would be better there than in Spain, but rather that they would be unknown there and might be left alone. When that didn't work they made their way to Egypt where things were relatively better for the dhimmis.
ML/NJ
How about Christian Asia Minor (Byzantine Empire), the Levantine states, North Africa (home of St augustine), Armenia etc. etc.??....rogator
Constantinople, now called Istanbul....WaterDragon
As I noted in my prior posts, "Visigothic Spain" was a blend of the much larger Hispano-Roman civilization (that had grown militarily soft over the course of 900 years) with the small military ruling elite of the Visigoths (that took a much shorter time to become militarilly soft in comparison to the invading Moors).
When the Moors invaded in 711 A.D., they swiftly conquered the Iberian peninsular except for northern regions of Galicia and Asturias where the Christian remnants hunkered down behind their Cantabrian mountain strongholds. These two regions were also the last regions in Spain to be conquered by the Romans. Although the Roman conquest of Spain began during the Second Punic War that ended in 202 B.C., the regions of Galicia and Asturias were not subdued until the Cantabrian Wars during the reign of Augustus.
So, the Moors did not "destroy Visigothic Spain". They failed to destroy Galicia and Asturias and that ultimately proved fatal for them. From these two remnants of Visogothic Christian Spain, the slow Reconquista of Iberia began to progress southwards.
By necessity, the descendants of the once soft and decadent late Roman Empire and the once soft and decadent Visigothic Kingdom in Spain became quite warlike in their Crusade to reconquer the land of their ancestors.
The Reconquista south of Galicia became the future Portugal. The Galician language is the mother tongue of modern Portuguese. The Reconquista south of Asturias became the future Castile.
As to the Visigoths, they were bred into oblivion by the much larger Hispano-Roman society they had once militarily defeated. They survived only as a few linguistic quirks and by the fact that future Spanish Kings had the affection of claiming descent from them as the origin of their kingly rights.
Although it took until 1492, the Reconquista that began with unconquered Galicia and Asturias eventually reconquered every square inch of Spanish soil from the Moors.
Such was not the case in the Islamic conquests of Asia minor. The Christian lands of Anatolia, Egypt and the Holy Land itself fell to the Muslim sword. European Crusades to bring these lands back into Christendom ultimately ended in failure. After the failure of the Crusades, the Muslim invasions spread to Europe itself destroying the Byzantine Empire and eventually reaching the gates of Vienna. Although the tide was eventually turned, to this very day, the ancient Christian city of Constantinople still has it's European side under the Turkish flag.
"Visigothic Spain" was never destroyed. It survived in Galicia and Asturias and evolved itself out of the Visigothic label and simply into Christian Spain. After surving a knock down and a nine-count, Christian Spain picked itself back up and then fought back for 781 years to eventually achieve a knockout victory over Islam in the Iberian Peninsula.
Far from being a destroyed failure, Spain succeeded in waging the only European Crusade against the Muslim invasions that was totally successful.
Before you keep claiming that Islam invented irrigation, you should do a little bit more research into the subject.
Like in any society, more irrigation was built as the centuries of Moorish rule passed just as more roads are built in America as the decades pass. As exdperience is gained, newer innovations and techniques come about.
However, irrigation was well known to the Roman Empire which included Hispania, one of it's oldest provinces.
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