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Moors Rescued Europe: 711-1492 AD

When the Romans burned the legendary Library of Alexandria in Egypt where the Greeks had studied with Egyptian priests for 700 years Europe fell into the Dark Ages for centuries. So, there was a 99% illiteracy rate and disease was rampant until the Moors introduced civilization to Spain in 711AD. The book Stolen Legacy: Egyptian Origins of Western Civilization by George G. M. James shows that the Moors had retained the Egyptian knowledge that the Greeks and Romans had lost.

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The list of changes the Moors brought is enormous -- including paper, the Arabic numbering system we use today instead of clumsy Roman numerals, algebra, algorithms, public baths, irrigation, many new fruits and vegetables, agriculture, trade, heated and air-conditioned homes, medicine, eye glasses, shipbuilding, navigational tools, sails, gun powder, ammunition, etc. The Moors established 70 public libraries. To Europe's two universities, the Moors added 17 universities that drew students from France, Germany, England, and Portugal.

 

While the kings of England were still living in huts, 100,000 people who lived in Cordoba (the largest European settlement) had air-conditioned and heated homes with running water and paved streets with lights.  Spain became a great maritime power that conquered the Western hemisphere. However, it fell when it expelled the Moors in 1492 and has never recovered.


The book The African Unconscious: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology points out:

"The Islamic empire, of which the Moors were its Western expression, stretched from Spain to India. They brought in a new mathematical language -- the zero from India -- new foods, arts, sciences, and agriculture and the process laid the foundations of the Renaissance, or the second rise of Europe.
When they were expelled in 1492, they left behind a new civilization. Also, the Jews were no longer protected by the Moors of Islam and were quickly persecuted, killed, or driven out of Spain. Arabic, the language of science and medicine for 700 years, had been banned by the Christian curtain.

 

Public baths were outlawed. Soon large numbers of slaves began to be sucked out of the northwest and coast regionsof West Africa and sent to the New World. World history arched in a new direction. One can only speculate on the history fo the world if the Moors had not been turned back in a little battle in the small west-central French town of Tours in 732 C.E. by Charles Martel and the army of the Franks. In essence, civilization did not move from north to south, but from south to north."

The Amazon Description for The Story of the Moors in Spain says:

"The story of the Moors in Spain “reads like a dream.” Under their rule, thrift and prosperity prevailed throughout the country. “Palatial cities rose under their hand. Aqueducts, rivaling those of the Roman Campagna, brought the streams from the mountains to city and field. Great districts, naturally sunburnt and barren, were made by skilful irrigation to blossom into wonderful fertility. Under their rule, Spain was a rich, a prosperous, and, to a great degree, a happy land.

Ample revenue of their monarchs enabled them to undertake and complete works of regal splendor, of which the admired Alhambra and the Mosque—now the Cathedral—of Cordova, with its thousand pillars of variegated marble, yet remaining after the desolations of centuries, are striking examples. . . . Their universities were of such celebrity that students from all Christian lands eagerly repaired to them. . . . In poetry and elegant literature, they attained no inconsiderable success.” This book is very skilful and interesting presentation of that brilliant and adventurous tale
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The Amazon Description adds:

"The true memorial of the Moors is seen," he says, "in desolate tracts of utter barrenness, where once the Moslem grew luxuriant vines and olives and yellow ears of corn; in a stupid, ignorant population, where once wit and learning nourished; in the general stagnation and degradation of a people which has hopelessly fallen in the scale of nations, and has deserved its humiliation."

 

The book furnishes a fine combination of solid knowledge and literary grace.Lane-Poole writes: "THE history of Spain offers us a melancholy contrast. Twelve hundred years ago, Tarik the Moor added the land of the Visigoths to the long catalogue of kingdoms subdued by the Moslems. For nearly eight centuries, under her Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilized and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the Guadelquivir and the Guadiana, whose names, and names only, still commemorate the vanished glories of their past. Art, literature, and science prospered, as they then prospered nowhere else in Europe.

 

Students flocked from France and Germany and England to drink  from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science: women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study, and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history, philosophy and jurisprudence were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's trowel, were brought to perfection by the Spanish Moors."

Moors and European Renaissance

The book
The African Unconscious: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology says of the Moors:

"They are largely responsible for setting the Renaissance foundation for the second rise of Europe after the Roman fall and ensuing Dark Ages. Many inventions usually credited to the Renaissance, including a more sophisticated science of map making for navigation, higher mathematics, architectural revival, new machines, new foods and agricultural methods, the nearly forgotten works of the classical scholars Aristotle, Plato, and others, plus much more were introduced. This had a tremendous influence on Europe's university system as it reawakened to this grandeur of antiquity and the birth of the newer medieval sciences. The Christian Church had banned many of these areas of study from Europe's two universities, but they flourished in the 14 Moorish universities.

Interestingly enough, in the world of antiquity, the Greeks had looked very much to ancient Egypt in both science and religion. Much of Egyptian science and philosophy was beautifully "transmitted" to Europe by the Greeks and later the Romans, who admired them both. After the fall of Rome , the light of learning was kept alive in the West by African and Arab scholars and afew isolated anctuaries of Irish monks, the great Celtic spiritual tradition. When Europe rose again in its Renaissance, it initially, again, looked to its brother and sister of African antiquity, Egypt, for inspiration. By the 16th and 17th centuries, Egypt was again the ancient model. Hermeticism and Rosicrusianism were strong again, as was the imitation of ancient architecture. There were expeditions to Egypt, a great revival of the rites of antiquity.

 

This stopped, however, under the 'pyschological' pressure of the slave trade. The financial success of African slavery in the Americas fueled an emerging racial imagery crisis for Europeans. The Europeans could not enslave a race that they also felt was one of the primary sources of the rise of their own civilization. A psychological shift occurred. Soon Blacks were psychologically erased from Egyptian history as anything other than slaves. Blacks were 'scientifically' lowered to the level of simpleton, sensuous, inferior, brutish, bodily, etc., etc. etc., and therefore 'naturally' suited to slavery'....Eventually, it became almost inconceivable in the West that Africans could have accomplished or created anything, let alone a great science, art, and civilization."

 

Beginning of 500+ Years of Colonialism

 

When the Moors introduced navigational skills, ship building, sails, and guns to the Spanish, Spain became the most powerful maritime nation in Europe. Beginning with Columbus and followed by many "conquistadors", the Spanish used that knowledge not to spread Enlightenment -- but to claim they had "discovered"  the lands of the Western hemisphere where millions of people in civilizations higher than those of Europe had been living for tens of thousands of years. The Spanish (followed by the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Belgians) committed genocide throughout the hemisphere, stole the lands, and began a slave trade that resulted in the more most brutal system of slavery every devised.

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The first people the Spanish enslaved were the Moors who had brought civilization to them for 700 years!
 

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