Umayyad Muslim Spain Research

Moreover, Spain's nearness to North African nations and its minor land bordering with the Moroccan Kingdom made the presence of Muslims in Spain possible. Muslims in Morocco played an important role in Spain’s Civil War in the year 1936-1939 where they were fighting on the National side. Lieutenant General Mohamed Meziane, a friend of General Francisco Franco, was included. He later became Captain General of Galicia, the Canary and Ceuta Islands all through his post-war livelihood. Moroccans did not require a visa to go into Spain until 1985. After the murder of Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, a group known as the Umayyad came to reign and they chose Mu’awiya as the fifth caliph. He governed in a time when Muslim groups battled about their government’s nature and about how secular or religious it should be.

Mu’awiya stressed the latter, then relocated his capital to Damascus and started reforming the new empire’s bureaucracy. He shaped his administration’s organization like the Byzantine Empire that had lately governed the area, where he also hired Christian bureaucrats. He further reformed traditional Muslim supremacy by ignoring the elders of the community and choosing his son, Yazid, as his heir. Also throughout his rule, the Vault of the Rock, with its unique, beautiful calligraphy and golden dome, was built in Jerusalem by 691. Abd al-Malik’s successors finalized the extension of the Umayyad dynasty, spreading its boundaries to a distance of about 6000 in the west of River Indus. The Umayyad extension into Europe was terminated in the western parts by Charles Martel at the Combat of Tours in 732.

Umayyad ascendancy in the east was confronted by a rising group, the Abbasids, who united with others differing the dynasty’s secular prominence. The Abbasids fetched down the Umayyads in 750 and wanted to kill numerous Umayyad family affiliates as possible to evade its next renaissance. In 929, he benefited from the religious strife in the Middle East where he named himself caliph, a name of both political and religious. He avowed Umayyad rule in North Africa contrary to an Egyptian empire known as the Fatimids. Cordoba was the biggest metropolitan in Europe at the time. It had a population of about half a million citizens. Most of its roads were lit and paved. He subsisted in North Africa and Spain and lastly passed on in Egypt in 1204.

The highest architectural accomplishment of this later era is a palace in Granada known as the Alhambra that instigated in the 11th century but entirely completed and ornamented in the 14th century. There were forty eight Christian martyrs of Cordoba who were executed during the reign of Muslim vanquishers in what is currently southern Spain. During this time the region was known as Al-Andalus. Kenneth Baxter Wolf in his book about the Christian martyrs of Muslim Spain designates in detail the killing of the martyrs for capital abuses of Muslim law, including blasphemy and apostasy. An example of its incorporation in the nation are attitudes directed to intermarriages, to which just fourteen percent of the Spaniards were divergent as of 2010. Fifty-nine percent of Muslims said that there is no specific aggression to their public within the state.