The Moor’s Last High
The Third Flowering of Muslim Intellectual Life
This is Part 3 of a three-part series. Go here for Part 1, and here for Part 2.
Background
The Iberian Peninsula was first conquered by Muslim forces in AD 711, when an Umayyad force from present day Morocco crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and conquered most of the peninsula over an eight-year period, establishing an outpost of the Umayyad Caliphate in Europe, with its capital at Cordoba.
Over the next two decades, the gains were consolidated, with slower expansion and conquest, until further northward expansion was stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in modern day France in 732.
Around this time, as we saw in Part 1, the Umayyads were facing their own difficulties, which resulted in their overthrow by 750, with power passing to the Abbasids. Only one member of the Umayyads, Abdul Rahman, survived the subsequent massacre of the Umayyad princes.
In a tale worthy of a Hollywood movie, he made his way across North Africa to the Berber homeland of his mother, more than once coming close to death at the hands of the Abbasid pursuers sent to kill him.
In September 755, he crossed over to Spain, or Al-Andalus as it was then known, and within a few months, had gained control of most of this province, establishing himself as the Emir of Cordoba, and breaking away from Abbasid control.
Al-Andalus
The subsequent history of Al-Andalus was a checkered one; in 1031, the kingdom split into a number of small fiefdoms, which competed with each other not only militarily but also in terms of the patronage of art and sciences, so that the spirit of intellectual openness and flowering of talent, that had started under the Emirate, was not significantly impaired.
Between 1086 and 1092, a dynasty from Morocco, the Almoravids, took control of Al-Andalus, uniting the fragmented polity once again, and preventing the Christian re-conquest of the province.
The Almoravids in turn were replaced by another Moroccan based dynasty, the Almohads, in 1172. However, they could not hold the province against Christian forces for very long, and by 1248 most of the Iberian Peninsula was back under Christian control, with the exception of the southern part, known as the Emirate of Granada.
This Emirate remained under Muslim control for another 250 years, albeit as a tributary state to the Christian Crown of Castile. However, with the union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1469, Granada’s days as a semi-independent Muslim polity in a sea of Christianity were numbered.
Over a grinding ten-year period starting from 1482, Granada was slowly conquered, and on 2 January 1492, the last Muslim ruler in the Iberian Peninsula was deposed and allowed to leave, ending almost eight hundred years of Muslim rule on the Peninsula.
Intellectual Life
The period of the Emirate of Cordoba was the high point of Islamic Spain, as a range of open minded and tolerant rulers encouraged learning and intellectual pursuits without getting bogged down in dogma. This tolerance was not restricted to Muslims, but also extended to Christians and Jews, who flocked to Islamic Spain, fleeing the narrow-mindedness that was typical of Europe at that time.
In an age when the biggest library in Europe had 36 volumes, that of Cordoba had half a million, and Arabic became the language of science and culture to such an extent that the ninth century Bishop Alvaro of Cordoba complained, in the words of the nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Bouterwek, that “out of a thousand Spanish Christians, scarcely one was to be found capable of repeating the Latin forms of prayer, while many could express themselves in Arabic with rhetorical elegance, and compose Arabic verses.”
While the pace of scientific and philosophical enquiry diminished with the rise of the Almoravids and Almohads, the later Emirate of Granada, small though it was in area, was more artistically and culturally inclined, almost decadent in nature, but equally tolerant for the most part.
Rewriting of History
Incidentally, in the last few decades, there has been an attempt made by non-Muslim historians to downplay this age of tolerance, arguing that it has been exaggerated for political reasons. Now it is true that Muslims in Islamic Spain occupied a more privileged position than Christians or Jews, but the valid point of comparison is Islamic Spain against the rest of Europe at that time, not Islamic Spain against modern day Europe.
Moreover, given that the Muslims were in Spain for eight hundred years, it will always be possible to identify historical events that validate just about any viewpoint, whether it is one of tolerance or intolerance. It is also true that the Almoravid and Almohad periods, given the puritanical nature of these regimes, were much more difficult for Jews and Christians, as compared to the earlier Emirate of Cordoba, or the later one of Granada.
In any event, there must have been some attraction about Spain under the Muslims, if only relative to the other available options, because it had the largest and most prosperous Jewish community in Europe by 1400 — numbers do not lie, whatever re-interpretations we may like to carry out today.
Expulsions
However, the lessons that Spain has to offer to Muslims today come not only from its Islamic period, but also from the period after the Muslims had been thrown out of power.
1492 not only represents the end of Muslim rule in Spain, it was also the year in which all Jews were expelled from Spain, leaving behind their property and capital, because they were not allowed to take any precious metals or gemstones with them.
In almost every country that they went to, whether it was Portugal or other parts of Europe or North Africa, these refugees were murdered, enslaved, or exploited; the only ones who did well, relatively speaking, were the ones who went to the Ottoman Empire, where they were given land and allowed to settle down.
The Muslims did not fare much better. Starting from 1502, they were given the choice of conversion or exile, and the ones who chose conversion, known as Moriscos, came under the close scrutiny of the Inquisition, with all the torture and wealth expropriation that inevitably followed.
In 1567, the use of Arabic language or dress was made illegal, and any books written in Arabic were burnt; finally, in 1614, the Moriscos were expelled from Spain.
Intolerance in Spain was not just reserved for Muslims and Jews — Spanish society as a whole also became narrow-minded and dogmatic. For instance, in 1558, an index of prohibited books was set up, and study abroad was severely restricted.
So completely did Spain close itself off from philosophical and intellectual enquiry that, even in the nineteenth century, its intellectuals preferred to stay in England and France rather than in their own country.
Wealth from America
Part of the wealth expropriated from the Jews was used to finance another seminal event in 1492, the voyage of Christopher Columbus. The path laid by Columbus was followed by Spanish conquistadores such as Cortes, who invaded Mexico and destroyed the Aztec empire in 1521, and Pizarro, who destroyed the Inca kingdom in Peru in 1533. Over the next three centuries, Spain ruthlessly and savagely exploited the wealth of South America.
Looking at just one aspect of this exploitation, it is estimated that Spain extracted at least 100,000 metric tons of silver from South American mines located in places as diverse as Potosi in Bolivia, and Zacatecas in Mexico.
For comparison purposes, and to get a sense of what this amount of wealth meant in relative terms, it has been estimated by David Zurbuchen that all the silver that had been extracted in the whole world, from pre-historical times until 1492, amounted to around 215,000 metric tons.
The Spanish used a significant portion of this silver for importation of manufactured goods from Ming China, which needed the silver because it had shifted its currency from a paper based one to one backed by silver. The volume of this trade was so high that in some years almost half of the silver mined from South America did not even reach Europe, but was shipped straight to China.
The Rise of Capitalism
However, that still left huge amounts that flowed back into Spain, and from there into the rest of the European economy, whether by trade or by piracy, facilitating revival of international trade from the rest of Europe.
It is difficult to draw an exact correlation, but given that there had been a shortage of precious metals in Europe prior to the fifteenth century, which was now reversed, it has been argued that this increase of easily tradable capital made an important if not essential contribution to the rise of capitalism in Europe.
Yet mercantile capitalism was spearheaded by the Dutch, and industrialization occurred not in Spain, but in England. The Spanish had the wealth, but their dogmatic stance, which led to the closing of the Spanish mind, ensured that it was other countries which benefited from this windfall.
There is an eerie parallel within the Islamic world today, where some countries have vast amounts of wealth due to the oil windfall, but have been unable to make effective use of that capital.
Conclusion
But all that was still in the future. In 1492, as far as the world of Islam was concerned, the fall of a small Islamic emirate in Spain was not considered to be a significant setback. After all, Mughal India and Safavid Iran were still in their heyday, while the Ottomans, who still had not reached the peak of their power, appeared to be virtually unstoppable.
However, this was an illusion. For while the Islamic world was militarily still powerful, a kind of dogma and narrow-mindedness, similar in concept to what had been adopted by the Spanish, had already tightened its grip on most of the Islamic world.
If you go through a list of major discoveries and inventions made by Muslims, there is nothing on the list after 1492, unless you count the spread and popularization of coffee as a major discovery.
The end of the Emirate of Granada signifies a lot more than the end of a little state in Spain — it was the end of the era of Muslim intellectual dominance. The torch had now shifted to Europe, where a combination of two things — intellectual openness and the rise of capitalism — fueled industrialization, which in turn resulted in increasing technological and military dominance.
Western Europe had entered a uniquely different phase of human development, for which there was no historical precedent. Unfortunately, it took the Islamic world three centuries to realize this, and by that time, it was too late.
