Comment by NoRelToEmber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoRelToEmber | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Not to mention that the people ruled by the Visigoths invited Tariq bin zayed when he invaded across Gibraltar, so that he would remove king Rodrick.

Per wikipedia [1], it was rival factions of Visigoths, that the Moors expertly divide and conquered. I'm sure otherwise you are correct, and with the minor exception of enslaving the locals, the Moors were able to build a bright example or progress and science and tolerance on the land and backs of those backwards savages, sorry, barbarians.

> The popular thought in Spain on “invasion”

Could you explain the scare quotes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Spain doesn't shy from using "invasion" without scare quotes throughout the text. Passages like

During one of the multiple raids in 710, the Muslims "made several inroads into the mainland, which produced a rich spoil and several captives, who were so handsome that Musa and his companions had never seen the like of them". The natives of Hispania viewed the Berbers in a similar way as the Byzantines viewed the Arabs, as barbarians, and feared an attack by them.

(From [2] we can infer the likely fate of these captives) sure seem to describe a plain invasion to me, no scare quotes needed. It also doesn't look like the people welcoming the Moors as liberators, as you tried to paint them. But perhaps you know something I don't - history is not my forte.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_ibn_Ziyad

[2] The harem could contain thousands of slave concubines; the harem of Abd al-Rahman I consisted of 6,300 women. They were appreciated for their light skin. [presumably not all the slave women ended up somewhere as comfortable as an imperial harem, but wikipedia is very economical in describing that aspect of Al Andalus] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Spain#Slavery_in_Al...

Berbers were considered a different group than Arabs and still today there are distinctions. There is a distinction between the Almohads and later Almoravids who later invaded Al-Andalus and their different ways and culture than the previous Andalusians of the Umayyad Caliphate.

You can check out for yourself, most of the Muslims in Andalusia were from converts from Hispania by the later periods.

>Half of the Christians in Al-Andalus are reported to have converted to Islam by the 10th century, with more than 80% by the 11th century. Many Christians who did not accept Islam as their religion became increasingly Arabized in terms of culture.

[1].

When the emphasis is on the word invasion of Hispania by the Moors, but not on the invasion of the Christian kingdoms to the north (often termed the “Reconquista”), it is part of a politically biased narrative to support the idea that the Kingdoms like Castile, Asturias, Aragon, etc were merely retaking what was theirs. But in reality this was its own invasion and propaganda was used to justify a “Reconquista”. They forged an imaginary connection to the Visigoths in order to create the idea that Iberia was all theirs for the taking.

You can look this up, for a long time the term Reconquista was not even mentioned, it was used as a political tool to grab more land & claim a fight for Christendom. But the truth of Al-Andalus is that it was much more mixed up than this simple dichotomy. Even Castile had a religious edict of tolerance until they chose to revoke it following the establishment of control over Granada.

A lot of Spanish nationalist thought and the historical Catholic narrative constructs the idea that the Moors were merely foreigners. But Al-Andalus featured intermarriage and largely voluntary conversion of natives of the land.

There are even documentaries about the Moriscos who went in hiding in mountains and various ways they worked around the Spanish oppression at the time & attempt to root out their culture and religion.

For more on details of the original entry of the Moors into Iberia and how minorities like Jews welcomed the new rulers, see [2].

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_cultural_exchange...

2: https://hispanicmuslims.com/andalusia-when-it-was/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com