Islam and the West… for a better world @
The Spanish Gate of Contact Muslims, led by Tariq b. Ziyad and Musa b. Nusayr, conquered Spain between 711 and 714, reaching the sub-Pyrenean region as far as Galicia. During the next few years, the conquerors established garrisons in the major towns of the Iberian Peninsula while increasing numbers of the Hispano- Romans were converting to Islam. Known as the muwalads , these converts are believed to have been the great majority of the population of Islamic Spain. Besides acquiring Arab-Islamic culture, the muwalads preserved vital elements of their native culture and their Romance language. The muzarabic communities, those who did not embrace Islam but chose to live under Islamic rule, also spoke Romance. Early Arab settlers in Muslim Spain descended mainly from Qaysi and Kalbi tribal origins, but soon Yemeni Arabs and North African Berbers followed them. Alongside this mosaic of peoples there existed a substantial Jewish community and late Umayyad princes would recruit large numbers of soldiers into their armies, mainly of Slavic origins. 15 During the era of cultural efflorescence, Muslim Spain became a magnet for large numbers of European scholars and students who came from as far away as England. This demographic diversity became a breeding ground for both political instability and cultural affluence. Certainly not Rome, and may be not even the Baghdad of the Abbasids, ever experienced the level of ethnic and cultural diversity that shaped life in the chief Andalusian cities. During the first hundred years after the Islamic conquest, Muslim Spain lived through a continuous state of political uncertainty with short periods of stability. Muslims of Spain, despite the strong wave of conversion, failed to 15 For the early history of Islam in Spain, see Ambroxio Huici Mirand, “The Iberian Peninsula and Sicily,” in P. M. Holt, Ann Lambton and Bernard Lewis (eds.), The Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), vol. 2A, 406- 39. For the later period, see L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain 1250 To 1500 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990); Mark Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) .
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