A SMALL ARMY Of North African tribesmen led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Arab governor of Tangier, crossed the narrow strait separating Morocco from the Iberian peninsula in a fragile armada of wooden boats in the year 711 and then quickly overtook the scattered coastal Visigoth settlements they encountered. To the great limestone monolith that commanded the north side of the strait where the invaders came ashore they gave his name, Jebel Tariq, “the Rock of Tariq” — Gibraltar — and so began a Muslim conquest of southern Europe that would endure for seven centuries and alter forever the western world.
Tariq’s forces defeated Rodrigo, the peninsula’s final Visigoth king, in 712, then soon captured the capital city of Toledo, and in only a few more years the whole of the peninsula — which clung to the far western edge of the then-known world — lay in Muslim hands. From the perspective of those who lived in the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo far to the east — where the new religion founded less than a century before by a Arabian orphan named Muhammad already had taken dramatic hold — the Maghrib, the “Far West,” was a remote and utterly desolate land, as was all of western Europe, a squalid, uncultured continent where dozens of backwater feudal societies struggled merely to survive. Yet it was to the Maghrib nonetheless that a teenager named Abd al-Rahman fled in 755 after the rest of his family — the ruling Umayyads of Damascus — had been slaughtered by members of the rival Muslim dynasty known as the Abbasids. Although the young prince’s appearance in the frontier province was initially shocking — he had been presumed murdered with the rest of his family — he soon was welcomed and allowed to assume rule of the tri-cultural territory that Iberian Christians knew as Hispania, Jews (who had lived on the peninsula since the first century) called Sefarad, and that the Muslim immigrants had begun to call al-Andalus, the land of the vandals.
The Umayyad tradition in the Middle East had been one that enthusiastically embraced Islam but also prized dialogue and interaction with other cultures, and — three-thousand miles removed from the fierce, fundamentalist, and always suspicious Abassinian rule of the House of Islam in Baghdad — Abd al-Rahman was similarly at ease leading an often-fractious society in al-Andalus that nonetheless became increasingly tolerant.
Christians and Jews who did not convert to Islam — and there were many who did — were forced to pay special taxes in order to keep their beliefs but otherwise were unfettered. They were free to build churches and synagogues, to move and live where they chose, and as dhimmis, “people of the book” — believers in the God of Abraham — they were protected from the constant threat of persecution and death suffered by pagans and non-believers.
By the beginning of the tenth century, at a time when the muddy streets of medieval London and Paris still ran wet with sewage and refuse, the decades of cultural interaction in al-Andalus had brought to the region not only religious tolerance but a florescence of engineering, agriculture, arts and letters, and economic advancement as well. Cordoba, the city on the banks of the Guadalquivir River that Abd al-Rahman had made his capital, contained half a million inhabitants in 929, the year in which his descendant, Abd al-Rahman III, declared himself the true defender of the Muslim faith and caliph of all the Islamic world, dramatically severing Andalusian ties with Arabia, Persia, and Palestine. Cordoba was a city brilliantly lit by gas-lamps and heated by an elaborate series of underground forced-air ducts, one that boasted seven hundred mosques, half as many churches and synagogues, and three hundred public baths. Irrigation systems, imported from Syria, had transformed the dry Andalusian plains that flanked the river into oases where oranges, lemons, bananas, sugar-cane, saffron, rice, and cotton flourished — all brought west to the far edge of the earth by Muslim immigrants.
Even more importantly, Muslims by now had introduced to Iberian Europe the lunar calendar, the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, the concept and use of the zero, the horizontal fraction bar, and the various algorithms of the algebra — which revolutionized both science and finance — as well as the astrolabe, an instrument that made viable the navigation of world’s oceans and the heavens beyond. Muslim scholars brought to the West the philosophical learning of the Greeks, and throughout al-Andalus people of every class made use of an informational marvel — paper — still unknown elsewhere in Europe.
At a time when the largest library in Paris contained perhaps four hundred manuscripts, Cordoba was home to seventy libraries, the largest of which contained more than 600,000 volumes. Among the arts, architecture, and lyric poetry flourished in particular; imposing, magnificent mosques were constructed in Cordoba, Seville, Toledo, and Granada — houses of worship that today remain among the world’s most aesthetically important buildings — and both Latin and Hebrew were re-energized by the sonorous cadences and remarkable versatility of Arabic — the best poets writing in each of the three languages and winning huge renown for their abilities to chronicle the major events of the day and the complex emotions of the heart.
Cordoba had become the world’s foremost city by the end of the first millennium, out-shining even Baghdad, and medieval scholars traveled to it from neighboring Christian kingdoms to work in concert with Sefardic Jewish clerics, intellectuals, and translators to bring Muslim enlightenment north into darkened Europe. The Andalusian culture was one that had become significantly secularized — based more fundamentally on information, intellectualism, and the pursuit of pleasure than on religion — one that was urbane, multifaceted, and rich with creative energy that spurred stunning advancements in agriculture, commerce, science, the arts, and philosophy.
Yet it also was a culture that sparked jealousy, resentment, mistrust, and condemnation, and by 1013 it was a culture in crisis. In that year the great Cordoba library was destroyed by invaders from across the Straits of Gibraltar, members of a fundamentalist North African Muslim sect who long had been scornful of the Ummayad’s easy acceptance of Christians and Jews in their midst and who hated their humane and far less restrictive interpretation of Islamic law. The invading Almoravids succeeded in breaking the Umayyad kingdom into a collection of taifas or factional city-states, and although the Muslim hold on the southern half of the Iberian peninsula remained strong, Christian kingdoms in the north had begun to form alliances specifically aimed at expelling the people they derisively knew as Moors from all of Hispania.
In 1085, the city of Toledo fell to Christian forces led by Alfonso VI of Castile, and that single event, perhaps more than any other, allowed the great sea of Islamic learning to flood into Christian Europe and begin to waken it out of its long sleep. In Toledo, the Muslims had amassed great libraries, just as they had in the cities to the south, and the intellectual plunder of Toledo soon made it an irresistible destination for scholars from far to the north. Christians and Jews, working closely in concert, began a massive dissemination project, translating hundreds of thousands of volumes from Arabic into Latin, including all the major works of Greek science and philosophy as well as invaluable original texts in Arabic devoted to subjects that included medicine, pharmacology, psychology, physiology, mathematics, music, hydrostatics, geography, navigation, and history.
But the more European Christians learned from the Moors, somehow the more intent they became on destroying their culture and driving them entirely out of Hispania. The reconquests of Toledo and Madrid were followed by the sacking of Cordoba in 1236, its fall precipitated not only by the determination of the invaders but also by the increasing disarray of political and cultural life in al-Andalus. It was a society that became ever more at war with itself, and those who clung to the Umayyad tradition of secularism, tolerance, and diversity increasingly were targeted as infidels. Jews and Christians whose families had lived in al-Andalus for centuries now feared both capricious Islamic rule and the barbarity of the Christian invaders. Seville fell in 1248 and soon all of al-Andalus save the isolated taifa of Granada had been reclaimed in the names of Christ and a host of Hispanic kings. Granada survived — and even thrived — into the fifteenth century, until it was overrun by the united armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, whose marriage had conjoined the powerful kingdoms of Aragon and Castile.
On January 2, 1492, the king and queen, each dressed in Islamic costume, ceremonially entered Granada to sign a declaration officially guaranteeing the region’s population the freedom of its religion in turn for its surrender. But, to the Muslims’ shock and lament, the monarchs reneged on that promise almost immediately, and in August of that year also expelled all Jews from the peninsula. It was during their sojourn in Granada as well that the king and queen met with and subsequently agreed to fund a persuasive Italian seafarer named Cristoforo Colombo, Christopher Columbus, a man who had lived in the conquered regions of al-Andalus since his youth. Columbus hoped to set out from his adopted homeland with a small fleet of Hispanic ships and their Hispanic crews — as well as a trusted Jewish translator — and sail far beyond the edge of the world and around it, all the way to India. He believed in that audacious possibility solely because the notion that the world was round was one that had had its genesis in the great library of Cordoba.
In only eight hundred years, Muslims had fought their way onto the Iberian peninsula, made it the locus of their greatest cultural achievements, then had retreated south and east again as European Christians reconquered them in turn. Never again would Islam flourish in Europe to such a degree, but its impact would remain enormous over time.
Without the Arabian astrolabe, Columbus could not have ventured into the western unknown. Without the introduction of mathematics via Muslim Spain, Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion and the discovery of calculus would have been impossible. Without the ideas of Aristotle — translated from Greek to Arabic to Latin in al-Andalus — the employment of logic and reason would not have spurred the renaissance. From cooking utensils to the keyboard, the flute, and the concept of musical harmony, the gifts of the Iberian Muslims dramatically altered the western world. So, too, did the rise and fall of that Islamic golden age set in motion a cyclical pattern in Spain of the acceptance of religious, cultural, and political diversity, followed by the florescence it encouraged, and followed finally by fear, fundamentalist backlash, and repression — a pattern that is remarkably and tragically visible in Spanish history, but one that repeatedly plays itself out in virtually every age, including our own.
The certainty that societies necessarily thrive and fail over time, as well as the tragic inevitability that we are compelled to wage war with those whose beliefs and aspirations are different from our own — as people have throughout time — is perhaps an elemental facet of the human condition. For many millennia, west has been the direction of promise, of the creation of worlds both new and enlightened, and it is difficult to ignore the irony that is was from the ruins of Spain’s multicultural golden age that Columbus set out, spurring into motion new and brutal conquests and, ultimately, new hope for a wise and tolerant and enduring society, one that emerged in North America, but which is fragile and is by no means certain to endure.
This story of the creation long ago of a great multi-cultural society on the far and shining edge of the earth is one that’s populated by fascinating individuals whose lives and deeds bring both humanity and pathos to the tale. Among them are Abd al-Rahman, the boy prince who found his way to the far outpost and whose personal respect for diversity set the stage for the renaissance that followed; his namesake descendant, two centuries later, who audaciously declared al-Andalus the center of the Muslim world and who ruled over a technological and intellectual florescence the world had never seen before; Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the many talented man who was at once the spiritual leader of Cordoba’s Jews, the trusted foreign minister and political advisor of Abd al-Rahman, and the chief translator from Greek into Arabic of Dioscordies’s seminal On Medicine; the Muslim philosopher Averroes, whose summaries and commentaries on the works of Aristotle ushered in the western age of reason, and his fellow Cordoban Moses Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher and physician whose Guide for the Perplexed remains one of the world’s most elegant arguments in defense of religious humanism.
And there are many more: the Christian abbot who commissioned the first translation of the Quran, the convert from Judaism to Christianity who sparked the first fascination with Arabic scholarship in northern Europe; the renowned Jewish translator who responded to the expulsion of Jews from Spain by setting sail with Columbus.
And, of course, there is Columbus himself, who witnessed the slaughter of innocents during the fall of Granada and who, in a profoundly moving chronicle of those events, deeply lamented the inability of Spain’s peoples to coexist. Yet this was the same Columbus who, in less than a year, would begin the slaughtering again on a continent that Muslims, Christians, and Jews only just then began to know existed — and who had only begun to imagine making their own.
Russell Martin is a nonfiction author, filmmaker, novelist, and screenwriter, and the principal of Say Yes Quickly Productions.
Copyright © 2022 Russell Martin. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this essay may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the author.