Seeking Andalusia - What Happened to Islam?

“It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had once been part of our world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost al-Andalus. No Muslim territory should ever become non-Muslim…. Let the whole world know that we shall never accept the tragedy of Andalusia.”

Osama bin Laden, “Message to the Muslim People,” on Al-Jazeera, in January 2004, lamenting the decline of the Islamic world.

“The death brigades penetrated into the European crusader heartland, and struck a painful blow at one of the foundations of the crusader coalition. This is part of a settling of old accounts with crusader Spain.”

Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades of al-Qaida, claiming responsibility for the March 11, 2004 bombings in Madrid that killed over 200 persons.

Spain just isn’t what it used to be, and in al-Qaida’s view, that’s the problem. The religious zealotry that propels today’s radical Islamists can only be explained within the context of history. The odyssey that has carried the Arab Muslim world from the heights of its ancient glory to its modern day abyss is a story that spans 1,400 years and innumerable humiliations most of which can be traced to its own failings.

There was a time when Europeans, seeking enlightenment and learning, studied at the feet of Islamic scholars. It is a time long past but not forgotten, at least by those who seek to restore their lost empire at any and all costs. Since its Golden Age during the Moorish Empire a millennium ago, Islamic history has been in an steady tailspin that has led to a culture of victimhood and death fueled by religious hatred, sectarian violence, centuries of isolation from Western enlightenment, and an overwhelming almost mystical desire to restore past glories.

Today, the Arab world is constituted by a series of 22 failed states bereft, for the most part, of progressive leaders and unable to produce one single manufactured product that can compete on world markets. Far from being an enlightened civilization, it has become a cultural backwater replete with massive poverty, repressive governments, vast illiteracy, medieval laws, rising Islamist anger and a gross domestic product less than that of (coincidentally) Spain.

But it has not always been this way. Islam arose in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. Like Christianity, it officially condemned forced conversions, but unlike Christianity, Islam instructed its followers to ensure that the world was under the political control of the Faithful. Hence, Islam’s political domination could be, and was, spread by the sword.

Islamic cavalries burst out of Arabia and quickly took control of the Middle East, Byzantium and Persia. The Middle Eastern armies of the Christian Byzantine Empire were defeated and annihilated in 636, and Jerusalem fell in 638. By the early 8th century Arab Islamic forces had conquered North Africa, reached the Straits of Gibraltar and crossed into Visigothic Spain. By 712, they had reached the center of the Iberian Peninsula, and by the 730s, they were raiding deep into the heart of France until defeated by the Frankish leader Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers in 732.

As Paul Crawford, points out in “Crusades: Political and Military Background,” gradually retreating south over a period of centuries, they eventually consolidated their power in southern Spain. There, over the next 800 years, the Arabs managed to develop a majestic civilization on the Iberian Peninsula - a civilization that came to be known as Andalusia. For Muslims, al-Andalus (Andalusia) remains not only a symbol of vanished greatness, but a kind of alternative vision of Islam - a vision sought by Islamists today, but unattainable in the modern era unless Islam itself is reformed.

In “The Age of Faith” historian Will Durant wrote: “For five centuries, from 700 to 1200, Islam led the world in power, in refinement of manners, in standards of living; in humane legislation and religious tolerance; in literature, scholarship, science, medicine, and philosophy.” The Arabs of Andalusia (known as “Moors” meaning “dark” - a negative term referring to the Berbers who came from Morocco) treated Christians and Jews with tolerance, enabling them to live, work and learn together in relative peace and harmony so long as they accepted d’himmitude (or second-class status), paid a head or poll tax, and accepted the superiority of Islam as demanded by the Koran. These restrictions, over the centuries often led to great hardship, examples of which have been documented in the scholarly works of Bat Ye’or.

Nevertheless, as Bernard Lewis has noted, for centuries the worldview and self-view of Arab Muslims seemed entirely justified. The Moorish Empire of Andalusia represented the greatest military and economic power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing slaves, gold and other commodities from Africa, wool from Europe, and exchanging a variety of foodstuffs, materials, and manufactured goods with the civilized nations of Asia.

The Moors improved trade and agriculture, patronized the arts, made valuable contributions to science, and established Cordoba, Seville and Grenada as the most sophisticated cities in Europe while Europe floated on a sea of feudalism. Inheriting and translating the scholarly works of the Greeks and Persians, they added new and important innovations from outside, such as the use and manufacture of paper from China and the decimal system imported from India.

Within the span of 200 years, the Moors had turned Andalusia into a bastion of culture, commerce and beauty. Irrigation systems imported from Syria and Arabia turned the dry plains of the peninsula into an agricultural cornucopia. While Europe descended into feudalism, Andalusian homes featured marble balconies for summer and hot-air ducts under their 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 throughout Andalusia and more than 70 libraries. The great library of Cordova held an estimated 600,000 manuscripts. By the end of the first millennium, Cordoba had become the intellectual well from which Europeans came to drink. Students and scholars alike traveled from France and England to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars to learn philosophy, science and medicine.

It was in Moorish Spain that Muslim mathematicians utilized decimals instead of fractions on a large scale, and Hindu numerals were, for the first time incorporated in the inherited body of mathematical learning. Today, they are known as “Arabic numerals.”

To this rich inheritance, Andalusian scholars and scientists added an immensely important contribution through their own observations, experiments and ideas. In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil and, in a sense, a dependent of the Islamic world, relying on Arabic translations for previously unknown Greek works.

While medieval Europe floated on a sea of superstition, illiteracy and barbarism, Andalusians were busying themselves probing the limits of the arts, the cosmos and the sciences rather than dwelling on victimization as the Arab world does today.

Islamic texts broke new ground in the fields of medicine, astrology, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, physiology, zoology, biology, botany, mineralogy, optics, literature, architecture, sociology, philosophy, metallurgy, animal husbandry, physics, mathematics (notably algebra, geometry and trigonometry), music, meteorology, geography, mechanics, hydrostatics, navigation and history.

But what really caused the intellectual bombshell to explode were the Arabic commentaries on the Greek translations of Aristotle. Most historians of the period agree that these debates and the use of scientific logic sparked what came to be known as the European Renaissance.

Unlike those in the Arab world today who seek to establish a global Islamic caliphate based upon a narrow regressive interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith (its commentaries), the Moors of Spain encouraged free thought, experimentation, discussion and evaluation. Islamic Spain produced scientists and scholars who used the astrolabe not just to determine prayer times, but to serve as an astronomical guide to those who navigated the world’s oceans making it possible to establish both longitude and latitude.

Andalusian scientists advanced the work of the Greeks in the development of the magnetic compass and ascertained the earth’s circumference. They produced books on astronomical tables that were used by European scientists for the next four centuries. Andalusian Arabs coined the term “Algebra” (Al-Jabr-wa-al-Muqabilah) and the basic trigonometric functions of sine, cosine and tangent. And it was from the Andalusian philosophers, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) from whom great Christian scholars like St. Thomas Aquinas (who served as vicar provincial in Andalusia) drew the philosophies and concepts that eventually laid the foundations for the European Renaissance.

The Moors also made great advances in the field of modern surgery. They put the study of medicine on a scientific footing by eliminating superstition, introduced medical codes of conduct, and required the introduction of examinations and the taking of the Hippocratic Oath. In the 9th century, an Andalusian physician was the first to diagnose smallpox and measles and relate them to the concept of “contagious” diseases (which, until that time, had been thought to originate only from within the body itself); and it was an Andalusian physician who pioneered the use of sutures made of animal gut to bind wounds.

Andalusian scientists constructed the first “globe” of the known world; broke new ground in the field of modern chemistry (or alchemy – a derivative of the Arabic word al-Kimiya) - including the development of dosage standards (prescriptions) for patients and the process of chemical preparations for medicines. They developed the tables outlining the “angles of refraction” leading to an explanation of, among other things - twilight, established laboratories for long-term experimentation and pioneered new methods of observation and measurement. Andalusian Arabic scholars also left an intellectual imprint in the heavens as one can readily see when reading the names of the stars on a modern-day celestial globe.

And because of this flood of knowledge flowing from Andalusian scholars, the first universities began to appear. College and university degrees were developed along with corresponding textbooks. The translations continued even as the Moorish Empire broke apart into feuding factions and more regressive interpretations of the Koran began their ascension. In the end, like the other empires of history, Andalusia fell in 1492 to the Catholic princes of Castille and the counts of Barcelona in the Reconquista.

Legend has it that Boabdil (a corruption of the name Abu Abdullah, or, in full, Abu ‘abd Allah Mohammed XII) the last Moorish king of Grenada looked back one final time on his lost kingdom and wept. His mother is said to have mocked him, saying: “It is good that you weep like a woman for what you could not keep as a man” - a bitter reminder of a majestic kingdom lost, and in the minds of today’s radical Islamists, a wrong to be righted one day by a global Islamic caliphate supported by the will of Allah.

The Muslims who were expelled from Andalusia took refuge mainly in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, but the legacy persisted. Some families, it is said, still have the keys to their no longer existent ancient houses in Cordoba and Seville. Today, in mosques from Mecca to Tehran, imams continue to invoke the memory of Andalusia in Friday prayers reminding their flocks of past glories, but failing to blame their decline and descent upon the jihadist Salafists who continue to this day to draw the Islamic world back to the Dark Ages.

The end of the Andalusian Empire has never been forgotten by the Islamic world. Bin Ladin invokes its memory often. For al-Qaida, its restoration is seen as the fulfillment of the will of Allah and as “divine retribution” to the descendants of those who conquered and destroyed Andalus.

To the radical Islamists, U.S. President George W. Bush is simply another infidel in a long line of infidels - from the Byzantine emperors of Constantinople, to the Holy Roman Emperors, to Britain’s Queen Victoria, and to other European imperialists - who represent mere impediments to the divinely ordained expansion of Islam. “Interference” with the will of Allah, they believe, cannot stop the restoration of their new caliphate.

But those who support radical Islam today fail to appreciate how Andalusian society achieved its greatness. In their zeal to exact revenge and to punish infidels for past transgressions (real or imagined), they have placed their faith in an interpretation of the Koran that renders tolerance, independent thought, debate and all creative, scientific experimentation heresy unless carried out solely for the purpose of waging jihad (holy war) against the perceived enemies of Islam.

Bernard Lewis argues with some merit that the success of Mohammed in establishing not merely the Muslim religion, but also a state dominated by that faith (Islam has yet to separate church from state) created a society that was and remains in its essence totalitarian, “bound by rules and strictures that make it too static to adapt and compete with a West [that] does not demand control over the political and economic spheres.” As a result, the radical Islamists of today are caught in a self-imposed religious prison. The kind of society that produced Andalusia – one that encouraged scholarship through the study of science, learning, independent thought, debate and discussion - represents the very antithesis of the kind of society they seek to impose on the world by force and submission. If Taliban Afghanistan is the best they can do, it is a far cry from the glories of their past. Without an Islamic Reformation and Renaissance, their quest to restore the dignity of the Islamic world will fail.

Mark Silverberg is a foreign policy analyst with the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel) and the author of “The Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad.”