The Great Mosque of Córdoba

Al Andalus

By Joan Acocella
The New Yorker, February 4, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215
By David Levering Lewis
Norton, 384 pages

In 610 CE, Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a forty-year-old man from a prosperous merchant family in Mecca, repaired to a cave to meditate. An angel appeared and seized him, speaking to him the words of God. Muhammad feared for his sanity. As the voice revisited him, he came to believe that it truly issued from God. This God, Allah, proclaimed that he was the only God. He was the same deity that the Jews and the Christians worshipped. Jesus Christ was just a prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament. Their word was now superseded by Muhammad’s, as their creeds were supplanted by this new one, Islam.

When Muhammad started preaching in Mecca, people saw him as a harmless crank, but as he gained followers he began to be regarded as a menace. In 622, Muhammad and his followers were driven out of Mecca. They fled to Medina, and from there they warred with their native city. In the beginning, Muhammad’s treatment of his fellow-monotheists the Jews and the Christians was conciliatory, but the local Jewish tribes conspired against him. After a decisive battle in 627, Muhammad had seven hundred Jews beheaded in Medina’s central market. In 630, he and his men took Mecca. Muhammad ordered the destruction of the three hundred and sixty idols around the city’s great temple, the Kabah. He proclaimed the supremacy of Islam.

Soon after Muhammad’s death, in 632, the record of what God had said to him was collected in the Koran, and his contemporaries’ testimonies about his life were gathered in the Hadith. At the same time, Islam expanded, with a speed unique in history. One of the obligations imposed on the faithful by the Koran was jihad.

Muhammad’s successors conquered Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Anatolia, Iraq, and Persia. By the beginning of the eighth century, Muslim forces stood at the northwest corner of Africa. There, only the Strait of Gibraltar separated them from the Iberian Peninsula. Iberia at that time was ruled by the Visigoths, a Christian people who did their best to wipe out other religions within their territory. There is some evidence that the Iberian Jews invited the Muslims to invade. In 711, they did so. The state that they established in Iberia, and maintained for almost four centuries, is the subject of David Levering Lewis’s book.

The Muslims came to Europe, Lewis writes, as “the forward wave of civilization that was ... incomparably superior” to that of the primitive people they encountered there. Lewis clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating “an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe.” It was “one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

The Muslims took most of Spain in a little over three years. The Visigoths had more men, but the Arabs were very skillful warriors. In 714, they were just short of the Pyrenees. The peninsula was now theirs. They renamed it Al Andalus. Arabs streamed into Iberia. Stability began with the reign of Abd al-Rahman I, from 756 until his death, thirty-two years later. Rahman built the Great Mosque of Córdoba. He also imported to Spain its first date palms, its first lemons, limes, and grapefruit, as well as almonds, apricots, saffron, and henna.

Rahman was the founder of Muslim Spain’s famous convivencia. The word means “living together,” in spite of differences. Iberia was a ragbag of religious and ethnic groups. In the early years, a number of restrictions were placed on Jews and Christians. They had to wear identification badges. They could not proselytize. They had to pay a heavy tax. In time, Jews were allowed to enter public service. The golden age of Al Andalus, Lewis says, was also the golden age of the Sephardic Jews.

The Arabs had never meant to stop at the Pyrenees. In 732, they scaled the great mountains and went down the other side. The kingdom they were invading was Frankland, under the rule of Charles Martel. The Muslims were soon forced to withdraw. In 778, the Franks, under Charlemagne, retaliated. Charlemagne’s neighbors did not submit easily to his rule. After a few months, he received news that the Saxons were in revolt, and he had to go home.

Rahman died in 788, Charlemagne in 814. Less than thirty years after Charlemagne’s death, the empire that he had worked so strenuously to unite was carved up into three parts. By the end of the ninth century, Frankland was a ruin.

Al Andalus died more slowly. Muslim Spain was attacked by North African Berbers. These Africans brought with them a form of Islam far more strict and exclusionary than Iberia had known before. The peninsula was divided among petty kings, who ruled with a new cruelty. At this point, the recapturing of Spain by the Christians began in earnest. Toledo fell to Alfonso VI of León and Castile, a Catholic king, in 1085. Four more centuries passed before the expulsion of the last emir from Granada, in 1492.

It is thanks to Muslim Spain that we no longer have to cope with Roman numerals. Paper-making technology was imported from China. The central library of Córdoba housed four hundred thousand volumes. But Al Andalus’s most lasting cultural achievement was its translation and elaboration of ancient Greek texts. Insofar as Western culture grew out of Greek culture, it did so because the scholars of Al Andalus transmitted Greek thought to western Europe.

Lewis concludes his book in 1215, the year in which Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade, an especially vicious example of the religious fanaticism that, in Lewis’s view, Europe developed in reaction to the Muslims, and inflicted on a bleeding world for many centuries thereafter.
 

Review: God's Crucible

By Eric Ormsby
International Herald Tribune, January 4, 2008

The Umayyad dynasty of Spain, which dominated the Iberian Peninsula for almost 300 years, remained an empire rooted in nostalgia.

Its founder, Abd al-Rahman I, was the sole Umayyad prince to elude the assassins of the victorious Abbasids when they swept to power under their black banners in 749 and overthrew the tottering kingdom of the Syrian Umayyads. Abd al-Rahman crossed the straits into Spain in 755. He went on to reign for 32 years.

David Levering Lewis views Abd al-Rahman's vicissitudes as the source of "a uniting vision of community" that the enlightened young ruler brought to his newly won territories, a principle of "civilized co-existence that might have served as a model for the continent."

Lewis's narrative turns on a constant play of contrasts. In the first sentence, he writes, "Islam rose when Rome fell." Such broad juxtapositions propel his account throughout. In his preface, he urges us "to resist the eschatologies of the cultural and political simplifiers"; yet, despite his best intentions, the story he tells remains one of a long, drawn-out "clash of civilizations," lasting nearly half a millennium.

Lewis has a penchant for awkward turns of phrase. Occasionally he goes even farther astray; in discussing the Prophet's views on women, he writes, "Muhammad's comparatively enlightened ideas (as explained by Allah) about gender roles positively distinguished the Koran from its misogynistic Mosaic and Pauline analogues."

Lewis is not a historian of Islam. This leads him into many surprising errors. In the end, these errors do not seriously mar the powerful thrust of his narrative.
 

AR  We can be grateful for Arab help in recoverng the Greek classics. For our numerals we must thank the Indians. I do not need to read this book.