The Moors who Conquered and Civilized W. Europe

Well that is your assumption that this painting is representing an 8th century Moorish army coming into Spain. I never stated that this painting was representing that army in 711. We do know however that firearms came into Europe through these African Muslims during this almost 800 year domination of Europe. We know that this African domination of Europe occurred despite in your own words the lack firearms for the Muslims.

In fact the first army to ever fully utilize firearms as a main weapon were the Brits who subdued their enemies in the British Isles (which included many native black Europeans who had been there since the Neolithic). It was from the technology (like the compass, ships, regular bathing etc) brought into Europe by the Moors that the Brits got the launching pad that gave them their imperialistic name. 

A European scholar sympathetic to the Spaniards remembered the conquest in this way: a. [T]he reins of their (Moors) horses were as fire, their faces black as pitch, their eyes shone like burning candles, their horses were swift as leopards and the riders fiercer than a wolf in a sheepfold at night . . . (nothing in here about good gunman). The noble Goths [the German rulers of Spain to whom Roderick belonged] were broken in an hour, quicker than tongue can tell. Oh luckless Spain! Quoted in Edward Scobie, The Moors and Portugal's Global Expansion, in Golden Age of the Moor, ed Ivan Van Sertima, US, Transaction Publishers, 1992, p.336 Nothing is bi

The European Legacy of the Moors.

The Drake jewel of Sir Francis Drake honoring his family's African-Moorish ancestry

The arrival of the first Portuguese shown below arriving into Japan..Hence the Moors taught Caucasian Europeans how and where to navigate.

 

The story of the Moors is never told in full truth by most Western scholars. The Moors are often represented as beginning something other than the black African Muslims that they were. The acknowledgement of the legacy of the Moors in Europe will completely shatter the concept of white superiority and black inferiority myth that the West in particular the U.S. is apparently emotionally attached to. That is why whenever the Moors are mentioned the narrators always emphasize that they were "Muslims" while never stating that they were also African or even showing one of the thousands of depictions of these black Moors (and their like their earlier black European predecessors or their descendants) that line the streets and halls of Europe to this day.

These African Muslims literally civilized the wild tribes from the Caucus who had ran rampant throughout Western Europe after being pushed into this region by the invading Huns. These wild warring Caucasian tribes did not establish any civilization to pick up after they brought down the Western Roman Empire. As a result of there being little to no intellectual stimulation in Europe the continent fell into the Dark Ages until the 8th century C.E. when the Moors arrived into Europe from Africa. The European "Renaissance" was only possible through this African Muslim cultural domination for 700 years in which highly advanced and civilized cultures (based largely on the recollection of the advanced knowledge from ancient Kemet or "Egypt" that the Greeks stole/plagiarized and Westerners blatantly ignore the fact that they did just to attribute those contributions to a late Indo-European people) permeated throughout Western Europe via what was Muslim controlled Spain. 

In Iberia (Spain and Portugal), the Berbers, now known as Moors, created a highly advanced civilization and culture, famous for it’s art, architecture, and centers of learning. While having rule over Spain: The Berbers, who themselves fifty years earlier had been forced to accept Islam, now sometimes forced the inhabitants of Iberia to do the same. Though the number of original "Moors" remained small, many native Iberian inhabitants converted to Islam. According to Ronald Segal, some 5.6 million of Iberia's 7 million inhabitants were Muslim by 1200 A.D, virtually all of them native inhabitants. According to historian Richard A. Fletcher, the number of Arabs who settled in Iberia was very small. There were about 900,000 Berbers and about 90,000 Arabs in Iberia.

Dean Derhak

When you think of European culture, one of the first things that may come to your mind is the renaissance. Many of the roots of European culture can be traced back to that glorious time of art, science, commerce and architecture. But did you know that long before the renaissance there was a place of humanistic beauty in Muslim Spain? Not only was it artistic, scientific and commercial, but it also exhibited incredible tolerance, imagination and poetry. Moors, as the Spaniards call the Muslims, populated Spain for nearly 700 years. As you'll see, it was their civilization that enlightened Europe and brought it out of the dark ages to usher in the renaissance. Many of their cultural and intellectual influences still live with us today.

Way back during the eighth century, Europe was still knee-deep in the Medieval period. That's not the only thing they were knee-deep in. In his book, "The Day The Universe Changed," the historian James Burke describes how the typical European townspeople lived:

"The inhabitants threw all their refuse into the drains in the center of the narrow streets. The stench must have been overwhelming, though it appears to have gone virtually unnoticed. Mixed with excrement and urine would be the soiled reeds and straw used to cover the dirt floors. This squalid society was organized under a feudal system and had little that would resemble a commercial economy. Along with other restrictions, the Catholic Church forbade the lending of money - which didn't help get things booming much. "Anti-Semitism, previously rare, began to increase. Money lending, which was forbidden by the Church, was permitted under Jewish law." (Burke, 1985, p. 32) Jews worked to develop a currency although they were heavily persecuted for it. Medieval Europe was a miserable lot, which ran high in illiteracy, superstition, barbarism and filth.

During this same time, Arabs entered Europe from the South. ABD AL-RAHMAN I, a survivor of a family of caliphs of the Arab empire, reached Spain in the mid-700's. He became the first Caliph of Al-Andalus, the Moorish part of Spain, which occupied most of the Iberian Peninsula. He also set up the UMAYYAD Dynasty that ruled Al-Andalus for over three-hundred years. (Grolier, History of Spain). Al Andalus means, "the land of the Vandals," from which comes the modern name Andalusia.

At first, the land resembled the rest of Europe in all its squalor. But within two-hundred years the Moors had turned Al-Andalus into a bastion of culture, commerce and beauty. "Irrigation systems imported from Syria and Arabia turned the dry plains... into an agricultural cornucopia. Olives and wheat had always grown there. The Arabs added pomegranates, oranges, lemons, aubergines, artichokes, cumin, coriander, bananas, almonds, pams, henna, woad, madder, saffron, sugar-cane, cotton, rice, figs, grapes, peaches, apricots and rice." (Burke, 1985, p. 37)

An interesting fact to note about the Islamic conquest of Northern Africa, was that while previously Roman controlled "Egypt" was conquered by the invading Arabs, these Arabs were repelled not once but twice by the Christian Nubians further south into Africa (Sudan). The only reason that Arabs and Islam came south of the Sahara was through the peace treaty that the Arabs came with the third time, which was the longest lasting peace treaty in recorded history. This treaty allowed Islam into the area where it became it's own power over time. Understand that these religious invaders got checked at the front door when they came into Africa.