The secret Muslim history of Spanish Culture

in the year 376 this is what the Roman Empire looked like a stretched from Turkey in the East to Spain and the west and even as far north as England and even though they were able to conquer So Many Nations there was always a line that they never dared to cross and that happened to be the Danube River because beyond that River lay a place with dark and densed forests hidden there lived the most fiercest and terrifying barbarians you can imagine they were called the Goths and one day it just so happened that these barbarians decided to show up at the Roman border and there were 50 000 of them and they just started smashing [Applause] it was a brutal Conquest that went a thousand miles deep into the Roman territory burning and killing all the way through until they finally reached the end with Spain and Portugal and thus began the 300 years of rule of Spain and Portugal by the Visigoths and that was until the year 711. at the time a new Force had been rising from the middle of the desert it was called the Islamic caliphate it was growing rapidly and expanding out of the Arabian Heartland until it finally reached the end of the known world and there was one man in particular watching the Muslim expansion with great interest his name was Julian of cueta and he was a Christian Chief under the Visigoths he went to the Muslims to ask for help Against The Barbarians and even provided them with ships to cross the Mediterranean Sea so the Muslims responded by sending torik IBN Ziad with 7 000 soldiers and together they crossed the gates of Hercules defeated the barbarians with very little resistance actually from the local population and the Muslims managed to bring almost the entire Peninsula under their rule within only nine years they called it El andalus let me quote you something from the BBC's website the Muslim period of Spain is often described as the Golden Age of learning where libraries colleges public baths were established and literature poetry and architecture flourished both Muslims and non-muslims made major contributions to this flowering culture and I think it's that last sentence that tends to surprise people the most al-endelus like the rest of the caliphate did not actually force people to convert to Islam Christian and Jewish communities thrived in Muslim Spain with countless people becoming wealthy doing trade between the Muslim and Christian lands there were also many famous Christian and Jewish Scholars who studied there including Pope Sylvester II and maimonides who is often considered one of the greatest scholars in Jewish history and while it's true that Christians and Jews had to pay a tax called jizier to the government they were also exempt from paying the tax that Muslims had to pay called zeket and on top of that if they were part of the clergy a minority disabled a woman or poor then they didn't have to pay the gizia anyway they were also not required to serve in the Army like the Muslims were and they did not have to abide and follow the Islamic prohibitions on things like alcohol and pork in fact aside from the jizya Christians and Jews were generally free to follow their own laws and be judged by their own judges separate from Islamic laws and it's because of this religious tolerance there were virtually no religious revolts in the first 300 years of Muslim rule the Christians and Jews that lived in Spain and Portugal during this time are often called the mozarims or the mustard which means the arabized and that's because while they were not actually Muslim they often adopted the culture of the Muslims and mixed it in with their own they started taking on Muslim names adopted and used Arabic words in their day-to-day conversations and some of them even learned to speak Arabic to the level of fluency now eventually because of all of this influence of Islam in al-endelus and because the locals had already adopted so much of the Muslim culture many of them actually ended up becoming Muslims themselves but this was a process that happened over hundreds of years and often in waves time and time again a village leader or a church father or some other important figure in society would convert to Islam and with them their followers would convert as well it's hard to actually get any statistics on how many people converted because there are none there were just no censuses taken at the time an example estimate by professor of history at Columbia University Richard boulier was that by the year 1200 90 of the people in Al andalus were Muslims with the vast majority of them being locals who had actually converted and while this statistic is often disputed because it's impossible to know how accurate his estimates are most historians do agree that Islam was undeniably the dominant religion in the region where at times the majority of people were Muslim and even though it's not the case today if you look close enough you can still see small hints of that Muslim influence hidden throughout modern Spanish culture I once spent three months traveling through Latin America and while I was there I picked up some Spanish along the way and what was most interesting to me was how much of the Spanish language I already knew from my studies of Arabic for example the word hasta in hasta la vista baby comes from the Arabic meaning until so the meaning of the phrases until next time baby another word for example is the word which is used all the time and it means I hope so but most people don't actually know is that it comes from the Arabic insha Allah meaning if God wills it but it's not just that you have a ton of Arabic words like and pretty much any word that starts with a l and we haven't even gotten started yet in fact eight percent of the Spanish dictionary is made up of words derived from Arabic that's one out of every 12 words and what about those places with Spanish names Guadalajara is the second biggest city in Mexico comes from the Arabic meaning Valley of rocks another city Guadalupe is a mix of the Arabic wedi again meaning Valley and the Latin lupum meaning wolf so Valley of the wolf Gibraltar then comes from jebelitor meaning the mountain of torik which is landed and my absolute favorite one of all California that's right the Golden State itself California was named by Spanish explorers after a fictitious island in the popular fantasy book called Las Vegas the esplan Diane it was written by a man called Garcia Rodriguez de Montalvo in that book the island of California was said to be ruled by Queen califia which is the female version of the word Khalifa or Khalifa in Arabic and this was well this was before they knew California was a peninsula and not actually an island and what about all the Muslim names that are still used in Spain and Latin America names like Omar yes just to name a few and then you have the Spanish cuisine when the Muslims came to Spain they brought new agricultural Technologies such as the water mill and the underground canals which allowed people to both grow crops in places with hard to reach water and crops that needed a lot of water it was called the revolucion Agricola Del Islam medieval and then on top of that the Muslims introduced all sorts of new foods to the Spanish that they had never known about I'm talking about oranges lemons apricots spinach eggplants carrots bananas sugar cane almonds and of course the biggest one rice and I'm not even mentioning all the spices that the Muslims had brought over from places like Persia and India and now because of the Islamic Agricultural Revolution they can actually grow a lot of these Foods locally instead of importing them and needless to say Spanish cuisine became very rich very fast and then you have olive oil this was known by the Spanish since the time of the Romans but because all of trees were so hard to grow in Spain people usually cooked with lard instead well the Islamic Agricultural Revolution fixed that too now the Spanish were able to grow olive trees in mass and olive oil became a staple of Spanish cooking the Muslims even taught the Spanish how to coat fish and meats in flour before frying it in oil something that's still done all over Spain today I mean can you imagine spanish cuisine without the Muslims foods like paella gazpacho Sal more none of these would exist no olive oil no rice no spices I think you get the idea and it's around this time during in the process of researching this video or I started to see political motivations in some of the academic literature many academics who see southern Spain as having a different identity to the rest of Spain will often try to overuse Islamic Heritage to show how different that region is compared to the rest of Spain on the other hand you have academics who believe in all of Spain as one unified identity and also those who are more Conservative Catholics these academics often try to downplay Spain's Islamic Heritage so when you have elements of Spanish culture that have an unknown origin you often find arguments in Academia about whether it comes from the Muslims or not a good example of this is the word Olay one of the leading theories is that this comes from Allah or Wallah in some Social Circles they would say Allah when an artist or a dancer gave an outstanding performance something that a lot of people in the Arab world still do today and the theory is that eventually the word Olay lost this connection with Allah and it evolved into a word that people just started to chant to give encouragement to dancers or athletes and this is a nice Theory but linguists have a difficult time understanding how the a sound in Allah evolved into an o sound in Olay and on the other side you have arguments that are also unconfirmed and sometimes even ridiculous theories to completely deny any Islamic Heritage remaining in Spain I found the same issue when I tried researching the origin of other cultural elements such as the flamenco dance or some of the popular Spanish folk songs that exist but but if Spain was essentially under Muslim rule for nearly 800 years which is three times as long as the entire history of the US why is it that their impact is so controversial well I think a lot of it has to do with the way an andalus ended you see al-andalus didn't fall overnight and there wasn't a single decisive battle or event that caused it since day one there were constant struggles to maintain the borders of the caliphate against attacks from the north and over a few hundred years they managed to Chip Away much of the peninsula from Muslim control and it didn't help that around the year 1000 there was a long Civil War that fractured the caliphate into many tiny kingdoms which made it even easier for the Christians to swallow these little kingdoms one by one the Muslims did manage to unite temporarily a few times but in 1491 the last Muslim city fell and 800 years of Muslim rule came to an end under the new Christian Kings all mosques were closed or converted into churches and Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity anyone who didn't convert was either killed or exiled and many of the Muslims who didn't want to lose their religion would only put tend to be Christians on the outside but secretly continue to practice Islam in their homes and their communities eventually they too were exiled and they could only take whatever they could carry in their hands property their wealth their land all of it was stolen by the state were completely destroyed there were even calls from within the Catholic Church to forcibly separate the children of these Muslims from their parents and have them raised in Spain as Christians the Jewish Community also had the same fate and most of them fled to Muslim lands places like the Ottoman Empire by 1614 Spain and Portugal had completely erased the last indigenous Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula and 900 years after it All Began there was nothing left I find the Islamic history of Spain to be something truly amazing the Muslims came in defeated the Goths in battle and established a Muslim state that lasted and lived for 800 years and and even though that history was erased and much of the world has forgotten that era of Spanish history it's amazing that you can still see hints of it throughout the Spanish culture even today there's still so much we don't know about an andalus and the effect that it's had on Modern Spanish culture and who knows maybe one day Spain will be able to set aside its identity politics and actually be able to solve some of these Mysteries if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up and share it with your friends And subscribe for more videos about Muslim history and culture from around the world the sheer ignorance that exists in this country about Islam and about the Islamic past I mean that's uh and that's a Pity and it's surprising to which extent people ignore the richness of the Islamic civilization in this country people want to somehow stress these busy Gothic Heritage but obviously the basically Heritage is I mean it's pretty it's pretty difficult to work out what it is

Channel: Omar of the Orient

Views: 31,232

Keywords: spain, muslim, islam, alandalus, andalus, history, culture, food, cuisine

Id: I114iWNpDTs

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022