(INTRODUCTION)
The name "Moor" is used loosely to describe all those peoples who
sprang from the mingling of the Berber, or Hamitic, stock of North
Africa, with the Arabs or Semitic stock who swept over the region in
the Mohammedan conquest. The chief achievement of this mixed or Moorish
race was the establishment of their brilliant kingdom and independent
caliphate in Spain. Under the most powerful of these Spanish caliphs,
Ahderrahman III. (A.D. 912-961), their capital Cordova had six hundred
mosques, including its still celebrated chief mosque, the most
beautiful building of that age in Europe. The Moorish kingdom of Spain
had then seventeen universities and over seventy large libraries. It
was the most cultured land of Europe, the goal of scholars from less
peaceful and less learned Christendom.
The Moorish kingdom in the course of the twelfth century broke
up into many tiny States. These soon fought among themselves and
plunged each other into a common ruin. African Moors, of far more
ignorant and fanatic type, came to aid their Spanish brethren; and
under the pressure of these barbarians, culture rapidly declined.
The universities were broken up. The great scholar Averroes, who had
been the pride of his nation, was accused of heresy. His teachings
were found not sufficiently subservient to the Koran; and finally, in
1195, he was driven into exile. This event, or Averroes' death soon
afterward, may be reckoned as marking the downfall of the Moorish
leadership in science and philosophy.
In our volume we give some of Averroes' most celebrated commentaries,
as typifying the culmination of Moorish culture. We give also, as
its opening note, the speech with which Tarik, the first conqueror
of Spain, in the year A.D. 711 led his army to cross the Straits of
Gibraltar and began the attack upon the earlier Christian inhabitants.
This speech does not, however, preserve the actual words of Tarik;
it only presents the tradition of them as preserved by the Moorish
historian Al Maggari, who wrote in Africa long after the last of
the Moors had been driven out of Spain. In Al Maggari's day the
older Arabic traditions of exact service had quite faded. The Moors
had become poets and dreamers instead of scientists and critical
historians. The very name of Al Maggari's history may be accepted as
typifying its character. He called it "Breath of Perfumes."