What was the life like in Umayyad controlled Spain?
Let me make it clear that this is not a bait post, I am geniunely curious.
>>353791
Everyone was super happy and enlightened and tolerant all the time.
>>353791
It was ok. It wasn't a theocratic hellhole like /pol/ thinks it is nor was it a utopia like idealists and Muslim nationalists like to think.
Basically you'd be ruled by decent-ish Muslims and live as a sort-of second class citizen if you were a Christian/Jew, but you'd have a pretty decent and stable life compared to most religious minorities in medieval europe.
>>353806
This. Also, it's the last time Iberians were clean and smelled nice.
>>353806
More or less this, but people tend to forget that we're talking about a long period of time, which saw periods of despotism as well as of relative tolerance
Umayyads were shit, the Abbasids were the only decent Caliphate
>>353806
This basically. Being a non-muslim in the Caliphate was tolerated as long as you were 'people of the book', i.e christian or jew, but you were a sort of second class citizen who had to pay special taxes and do some duties and that incited conversion to Islam for many.
The arab Caliphate of Cordoba, then the largest and most sophisticated city in Europe after Constantinople, introduced to Spain all of the inventions of Islam and revitalized the economy, the cultivation with watermills and intensive irrigation systems, developed urbanism and built magnificent buildings, protected ancient classical greek and roman knowledge and patronized it. The most famous example is the School of translator of Toledo, with a fine library of classic books in which muslims, jews and christian would work together studying this books and translating them. Most of the knowledge of the greeks and romans went to Europe via Toledo during the High Middle Ages.
It was extremely pleasant.
As we all know, Islam is the religion of love, pace and tolerance.
Homosexuals could openly walk around on the street and be affectionate, women could dress in whatever they wanted to, everyone regardless of religion had the same rights.
No deaths, no oppression.
>>354275
0/10
Not gr8 m8
>>353806
It wasn't a 21 century liberal democracy kind of toleration, but it was kinda tolerant for its time. In that it was more tolerant of different religions than any contemporary Christian state.
>>353791
Umayyads were good followers of Islam so they obeyed Mohammed's treatment of abrahamics. If you paid your taxes you were alright.
Of course taxes in medieval Europe where a thing of life or death, and Christians would rather live elsewhere, but the rulers weren't bad administrators by any margin.
It was kinda okay.
As a general statement about history, it is better to live within a stable pseudo hegemon than live in a place that's constantly at war (like the whole rest of Europe). Stability brings better living standards, peace brings stability, and massive strength brings peace.
>>353800
t. Corbyn
>>353806
The ruling I believe was that one could be a practicing Christian/Jew but not in public.
How much of it remained christian and romance speaking?
>>354617
Arab was the language of poetry, administration, culture and refined elites, it coexisted with the mozarab romance spoken by the plebs.
Unstable.
Despite maps showing everthing as under the firm control of the Emir/Caliph, most of the new rulers began their campaigns agaisnt their own supposed subject lands cause they rebelled a fuckton.
Peripheric areas escaped from central gobernment, when returned to the obedience they just awaited to some weakness to flee again, rebells spawned even in Andalusia and cities like Toledo shown great stubborness agaisnt Cordoba´s will.
Taking that into account, it was a fairly centralized state with great riches.
Umayyads seem to have been fairly good rulers, harsh when needed but competent overall. Till Almanzor take all the power from the Caliph and ruined the Caliphate in the mid run.
>>354260
>The most famous example is the School of translator of Toledo, with a fine library of classic books in which muslims, jews and christian would work together studying this books and translating them. Most of the knowledge of the greeks and romans went to Europe via Toledo during the High Middle Ages.
Thats was during the Castilian dominated Toledo though.
>>354719
>Though they comprise only a fraction of the corpus of extant kharjas, it is the Romance kharjas that have attracted the greatest scholarly interest. With examples dating back to the 11th century, this genre of poetry is believed to be among the oldest in any Romance language, and certainly the earliest recorded form of lyric poetry in Ibero-Romance.
>The Romance kharjas are thematically comparatively restricted, being almost entirely about love. Approximately three quarters of them are put into the mouths of women, while the proportion for Arabic kharjas is nearer one fifth.[5]
Vayse meu corachón de mib:
ya Rab, si me tornarád?
Tan mal meu doler li-l-habib!
Enfermo yed, cuánd sanarád?
>My heart has left me,
>Oh sir, will it return to me? (Alternate >translation: Oh Lord, will you transform me?)
>So great is my pain for my beloved!
>It is sick, when will it be cured?,
>>354719
Apparently it got to the point where priests of the Church were required to translate their liturgies to Arabic, as the knowledge of Latin was nearly nonexistent.
>>353791
The Umayyads themselves were decent rulers, but their vassals and such weren't exactly as benevolent.
The Islamic invasions and incursions in the area took advantage of the decentralized newly founded visigothic (and other germanic) kingdoms in the area.
It is kind of silly to compare them to Christian kingdoms so often, since it isn't exactly hard for a wealthy/powerful group to displace and outperform the relatively new decentralized kingdoms.
>>355451
It wasn't 'newly founded', it was over 2 centuries old by then, and the muslims didn't take advantage of decentralization, but were called upon by Witiza's party to help them in the war against Rodrigo, who was actually the usurper King.
The thing is the last ~70 years of the Visigothic kingdom were about nobility murdering the King/nobiliar factions waging war against the nobiliar faction supporting the King. Because the Visigothic Monarchy was elective and whereas in previous period the King would keep things under control and the nobility behave, in the later period it was all a massive clusterfuck of internal strifes for power, and the plebs had learnt not to care.
