The Jewel of the World

It was 750 A.D. that the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus was overthrown by the Abbasid family and accession of the Abbasids to the caliphate was signalised by a ruthless slaughter of every member of the defeated house on whom the victors could lay their hands. Among the very few who escaped was a youth of twenty, Abd-al-Rahman, a striking young man, tall, lean, with sharp aquiline features and red hair. He was a youth of exceptional nerve and ability. It was he who made his way to Spain, fought his way to mastery, and kept in power there the Umayyad dynasty which was wiped out in the East.

The story of his escape is dramatic. He was in a Bedouin camp on the left bank of the Euphrates river one day when horsemen carrying the black standards of the Abbasids suddenly appeared. With his thirteen-year-old brother, Abd-al-Rahman dashed into the river. The younger brother, evidently a poor swimmer, became frightened, heeded the reassurances shouted from the bank that he would be unharmed if he returned, and swam back. He was killed. The older boy kept on and gained the opposite bank. Afoot, penniless and fugitive, he made his way to Palestine, found one friend there and set off again toward the west. In North Africa he barely escaped assassination at the hands of the governor of the province. Wandering from tribe to tribe, always pursued by the spies of the new dynasty, he finally reached Ceuta, five years later. His maternal uncles were Berbers from that district of North Africa. They offered him refuge.

In the south of Spain, across the strait from Ceuta, were stationed Syrian troops from Damascus. He made his way to them and they accepted him as leader. One southern city after another opened its gates to him. It took him some years more to bring all of Spain to subjection, but he persisted. The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad appointed a governor of Spain to contest his rule; two years later that caliph received a gift from Abd-al-Rahman: the head of his governor, preserved in salt and camphor and wrapped in a black flag and in the letter of appointment. "Thanks be to Allah for having placed the sea between us and such a foe!" was the caliph's fervent rejoinder.

In the process of subduing his adversaries, Abd-al-Rahman developed a highly trained army of 40,000 or more Berbers. He knew how to keep their loyalty by generous pay. In 773, he discontinued the Friday sermon hitherto delivered in the name of the Abbasid caliph, but did not assume the caliph title himself. He and his successors down to Abd-al-Rahman III contented themselves with the title "amir". Under Abd-al-Rahman I, Spain had thus been the first province to shake off the authority of the recognized caliph in Islam. With his realm consolidated, Abd-al-Rahman turned to the arts of peace in which he showed himself as great as in the art of war. He beautified the cities of his domain, built an aqueduct for the supply of pure water to the capital, ordered the construction of a wall round it and erected for himself a palace and garden outside Cordova in imitation of the palace built by an ancestor in northeastern Syria. To his villa he brought water and introduced exotic plants, such as peaches and pomegranates. To a lonely palm tree in his garden, said to be the first imported from Syria, he addressed some tender verses of his own composition. Two years before his death in 788 Abd-al-Rahman founded the great Mosque of Cordova as a rival to the two mosques of Islam in Jerusalem and Makkah. Completed and enlarged by his successors, it soon became the shrine of western Islam. With its forest of columns and its spacious outer court, this noble structure, transformed into a Christian cathedral in 1236, has survived to the present day under the popular name "La Mezquita", the mosque. Besides the great mosque the capital could already boast a bridge, over the Guadalquivir river, built by a Roman governor and enlarged to seventeen arches. Nor were the interests of the founder of the Umayyad regime limited to the material welfare of his people. In more than one sense he initiated the intellectual movement which made Islamic Spain from the ninth to the eleventh centuries one of the two centers of world culture.

Caliph Abd-al-Rahman's court was one of the most glorious in all Europe. It received envoys from the Byzantine emperor as well as from the monarchs of Germany, Italy and France. Its seat, Cordova, with half a million inhabitants, seven hundred mosques and three hundred public baths, yielded in magnificence only to Baghdad and Constantinople. The royal palace, named al-Zahra, with four hundred rooms and apartments housing thousands of slaves and guards, stood northwest of the town overlooking the Guadalquivir River. Abd-al-Rahman III started its construction in 936. Marble was brought from Numidia and Carthage; columns as well as basins with golden statues were imported or received as presents from Constantinople; 10,000 workmen with 1,500 beasts of burden laboured on it for a score of years. Enlarged and beautified by later caliphs, al-Zahra became the nucleus of a royal suburb whose remains, partly excavated in and after 1910, can still be seen.

In al-Zahra the caliph surrounded himself with a bodyguard of "Slaves" which numbered 3,750 and headed his standing army of a hundred thousand men. With their aid the caliph not only kept treason and brigandage in check but reduced the influence of the old Arab aristocracy. Commerce and agriculture flourished and the sources of income for the state were multiplied. The royal revenue amounted to 6,245,000 dinars, a third of which sufficed for the army and a third for public works while the balance was placed in reserve. Never before was Cordova so prosperous, Andalusia so rich and the state so triumphant. All this was achieved through the genius of one man. He died at the ripe age of seventy-three. And he left a statement, we are told, which said that he had known only fourteen days of happiness.

As always, under any dynasty, the success of the ruler depends on his personal qualifications. In the Spanish branch of the Umayyad dynasty, the nominal role for a time was kept. Abd-al-Rahman I was succeeded by his son Hisham I, and he by his son Al-Hakam I. But by the time of the accession of the grandson, Abd-al-Rahman III, in the year 912, civil disturbances and tribal revolts had reduced the Muslim state of Spain to the city of Cordova and its neighbourhood. The third Abd-al-Rahman, like his illustrious predecessor, was a young man when he took office, being only twenty-three; and like him also was a youth of intelligence and determination. One by one he reconquered the lost provinces, reduced them to order and administered them with sagacity and ability. His reign lasted for fifty years, from 912 to 961, an exceptionally long time for those days. It was signalised politically by the proclamation by the amir of himself as caliph. With him the Umayyad caliphate in Spain begins. His reign and that of his two immediate successors mark the height of Muslim rule in the West. In this period, roughly the tenth century, the Umayyad capital of Cordova took its place as the most cultured city in Europe and, with Constantinople and Baghdad, as one of the three cultural centres of the world.

The real glory of this period, however, lies in fields other than political. Al-Hakam, Abd-al-Rahman III's successor, was himself a scholar and patronized learning. He was generous to scholars and established twenty-seven free schools in the capital. Under him the University of Cordova, founded in the principal mosque by Abd-al-Rahman III, rose to a place of pre-eminence among the educational institutions of the world. It preceded both Al-Azhar at Cairo and the Nizamiyah of Baghdad, and attracted students, Christian and Muslim, not only from Spain but from other parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. Al-Hakam enlarged the mosque which housed the university, conducted water to it in lead pipes and decorated it with mosaics brought by Byzantine artists. He invited professors from the East to the university and set aside endowments for their salaries. In addition to the university, the capital housed a library of first magnitude. Al-Hakam was a lover of books; his agents ransacked the bookshops of Alexandria, Damascus and Baghdad with a view to buying or copying manuscripts. The books thus gathered are said to have numbered 400,000, their titles filling a catalogue of forty-four volumes, in each one of which twenty sheets were devoted to poetical works alone. Al-Hakam, probably the best scholar among Muslim caliphs, personally used several of these works; his notes on certain manuscripts rendered them highly prized by later collectors. In Christian Europe only the rudiments of learning were known, and that chiefly by churchmen.