When you think of European culture, one of the first things that comes to mind is the renaissance. Many of the roots of European culture can be traced back to that glorious time of art, science, commerce and architecture. But, long before the renaissance there was a place of humanistic beauty in Muslim Spain. Not only was it artistic, scientific and commercial but also tolerant and poetic. Moors, as the Spaniards call the Muslims, populated Spain for nearly 700 years. As youll see, it was their civilization that brought Europe out of the dark ages and ushered in the renaissance. Their influences still live with us today. Back during the eighth century, Europe was still knee-deep in the Medieval period. Thats not the only thing they were knee-deep in. In his book, The Day The Universe Changed, the historian James Burke describes how the typical European townspeople lived: The inhabitants threw all their refuse into the drains in the center of the narrow streets. The stench must have been overwhelming, though it appears to have gone virtually unnoticed. Mixed with excrement and urine would be the soiled reeds and straw used to cover the dirt floors. This squalid society was organized under a feudal system and had little that would resemble a commercial economy. Along with other restrictions, the Catholic Church forbade the lending of money - which didnt help get things booming much. Anti-Semitism, previously rare, began to increase. Money lending, which was forbidden by the Church, was permitted under Jewish law. Jews worked to develop a currency although they were heavily persecuted for it. Medieval Europe was a miserable lot, which ran high in illiteracy, superstition, barbarism and filth. During this same time, Arabs entered Europe from the south. Abd Al-Rahman, a survivor of a family of caliphs of the Arab empire, reached Spain in the mid-700s. He became the first Caliph of Al-Andalus, the Moorish part of Spain. He also set up the Umayyad Dynasty that ruled Al-Andalus for over three-hundred years. Al Andalus means, the land of the vandals, from which comes the modern name Andalusia. At first, the land resembled the rest of Europe in all its squalor. But within two-hundred years the Moors had turned Al-Andalus into a bastion of culture, commerce and beauty. Irrigation systems imported from Syria and Arabia turned the dry plains... into an agricultural cornucopia. Olives and wheat had always grown there. The Arabs 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. By the beginning of the ninth century, Moorish Spain was the gem of Europe with its capital city, Cordova. With the establishment of Abdurrahman III - the great caliphate of Cordova - came the golden age of Al-Andalus. Cordova, in southern Spain, was the intellectual center of Europe. At a time when London was a tiny mud-hut village that could not boast of a single streetlamp, in Cordova there were half a million inhabitants, living in 113,000 houses. There were 700 mosques and 300 public baths spread throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs. The streets were paved and lit. The houses had marble balconies for summer and hot-air ducts under the mosaic floors for the winter. They were adorned with gardens with artificial fountains and orchards. Paper, a material still unknown to the west, was everywhere. There were bookshops and more than seventy libraries. Oh the irony!
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 18:18:49 +0000