Islam's Myth of Andalusian Glory

[JM]

Of the Arabs resident in the British Palestine Mandate as of 1937,
Churchhill said, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the
final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a
very long time."

By this, he makes reference to a Fable of Aesop, paraphrased
here . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dog_in_the_Manger

"The Dog in the Manger is a fable attributed to Aesop, concerning a
dog who one afternoon lay down to sleep in the manger. On being
awoken, he ferociously kept the cattle in the farm from eating the hay
on which he chose to sleep, even though he was unable to eat it
himself, leading an ox to mutter the moral of the fable: People often
begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves."

I do not quote here the remainder of Churchill's pronouncement due to
the manner in which it veers off into racial distinctions which are
never right and always come to be expressed at the expense of what are
the real anthropological and sociological distinctions about culture--
not race. People these days do try to blur those lines, however, as
they would, against all principles of social science, speak of "racist
attitudes toward other cultures." Nothing can be more irrational,
anti-scientific and morally reprehensible, for certainly you can hate
all the primitive, savage and anti-egalitarian aspects of a culture
without hating the people who are by birth under subjugation to it, as
by the same token, you make no judgment according to the race of that
people.

So, it only remains to replace the word "race" in Churchill's
remaining comments with "culture", as we might well imagine he would
have done, were he still speaking today . . .

"I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great
wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people
of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these
people by the fact that a stronger [culture], a higher-grade
[culture], a more worldly wise [culture] to put it that way, has come
in and taken their place."

Darwin called it "Survival of the Fittest". It's a fact of biology.
It rules the world of living things. Nothing can change it, nothing
can stop or resist it--and yet liberal intellectuals, postmodern multi-
culturalists find their ideals continually pitted against it, in none
but the most absurd futility, despite any advantage they take by
Darwin otherwise, to find in him the view that survival of the fittest
was not God's idea, not his Law, but something apes worked out for
themselves in the struggle to become humankind.

So liberals will just never be brought around to the understanding
that before it was Darwin's theory, it was God's Law, survival of the
fittest. And that is why there is so much blood on pages of Torah. It
was never pretty, and not often nice, the way Joshua felt commanded to
execute the essential's of Darwin's theory, by the edge of the sword,
carving the dictates of God's Law to the bodies and necks of every
man, woman, child and ox that stood in the way between the Children of
Israel on their return to the land of their fathers, and we all know
how that Song of Moses really went . . .

"Ain't goin' to let nobody turn me round,
Turn me round,
Turn me round,
Ain't goin' to let nobody turn me round,
Goin' to keep on walkin' . . ."

So, no. It would not seem very nice to speak, with Aesop and
Churchill, of the Islamic 'dog' in the Judaeo-Christian manger, just
as there are so many things about survival of the fittest and
evolution (whether biological or cultural) that are not nice. It is
NOT nice every time that man at the packing house takes the knife to
the neck of a bull and rips it round to give you your life's
sustenance--but that IS life. It's a real bloody business. And there
is no sense in asking "Is it right", when Nature herself demands it.
That's what both Aesop and Churchill were talking about. Who is by
Nature and Evolution MEANT to benefit by that straw in the manger, the
dog or the cattle?

But will you ask, "How can we know who are the dogs and who the
cattle?" You will know them by what they do with the hay. If all they
can do is lay in it, clearly it was not meant for them. All one need
do to find out who was laying around in the hay instead of planting it
and mowing it and feeding it to the cattle is to read Mark Twain's
account of his visit to Palestine and what he saw there, as things
were before the Children of Israel toward the end of that century
began streaming back home, to transform it once again into the Land of
Milk and Honey.

No one has a "right" to anything in this world, if he will not be a
good steward to what comes under his hand. And how can a band of
aliens in the land give that land the proper respect of husbandry it
demands, if all the while they know it is really not their land to
own, that the land given to the people of their tongue is far away,
many days journey beyond Jordan to the east. It's like the tenant
living on a farm to which he holds no title, and everywhere he looks,
the names given to everything are the names written by the owner and
original dweller, Hebron, Shiloh, Jezreel, Galilee, Bethlehem,
Jerusalem, Sharon. And where there is no pride of certain ownership by
title of those names, names not of his own fathers and mothers, there
is no will, no vision to build and thrive and to survive as the
fittest husbandman to that land.

Of course there will be some who will think to refute that by saying
what's good for the Arabian "dog in the manger" is good for the mixed
breed brood of mutt puppies in the American hay loft. But no, not if
we are to keep our thread of logic coming from that spool in the hands
of Churchill and Darwin. Ah, but then we shall hear them say, "What
then of the glorious civilization of Andalusian Spain, the Caliphate
of Córdoba, the Muslim Kingdom of Granada, the beauties of the
Alhambra? What of it, indeed!

The question that never arises is to ask just how much of these
ostensible "glories" are attributable to the influence of Islam and
how much to the Iberian civilization that was there before the
conquest? Who indeed were these pre-Islamic people of the Iberian
peninsula who had been brought to conversion at the edge of the
Islamic scimitar, or to a drastically reduced status of serfdom under
burdensome taxes and disenfranchisement so onerous that no legal
recourse for a right of property was permitted to any but the Muslim
subjects of the caliphate? Let us look to the facts of History for
once, rather than to the myths lately spun of whole goat's wool cloth
by the fork-tongued purveyors of contemporary Islamic propaganda.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain . . .

"Medieval Spain was the scene of almost constant warfare between
Muslims and Christians. The Almohads, who had taken control of the
Almoravids' Maghribi and Andalusian territories by 1147, far surpassed
the Almoravides in fundamentalist outlook, and they treated the
dhimmis [non-Muslim subjects] harshly. Faced with the choice of death,
conversion, or emigration, many Jews and Christians left.[19] By the
mid-13th century Emirate of Granada was the only independent Muslim
realm in Spain, which would last until 1492."

But what of the Spaniards, themselves? Who were they, where were they?
Under the Visigoths they were slaves, or they were peasants, newly
made, having fled from the Teutonic invader of their cities to the
country, doing their best to keep out of the way of their oppressors.
But who were they before the Visigoths? The were citizens of Rome!
They were the most Romanized population of all Europe. They spoke
Latin, they were Christians and Jews, doing their best to preserve
their culture and carry it forth amidst the rubble of the fallen
Empire. As according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Spain
. . .

"[A]fter the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD) the Teutonic
tribe of Visigoths ended up ruling the whole peninsula until the
Islamic conquest . . . It is frequently stated in historical sources
that Spain was one of the former Roman provinces where the Latin
language and culture grew deep roots. After the fall of the Empire the
Visigoths continued the tradition by becoming probably the most
Romanized of all Teutonic tribes."

Spain thus became a crucible into which three cultures, all Romanized
were poured but which would not mix, the Hispanic, the Jewish and the
Teutonic. The Hispanic was orthodox Catholic, the Teutonic was
gnostic, Aryan, both Christian.

The Visigoths, fresh from their conquest of Rome, made logical
extension of that into the most Romanized territory of Europe, the
Iberian peninsula, expelling the Huns and Vandals who had come before
them. Read all about it, Extra! Extra! Hot off the press. All about
the pre-Islamic Iberian civiliation that arose. Here you have it, for
less than one thin dime, right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Spain
. . .

"The Visigothic Kingdom shifted its capital to Toledo and reached a
high point during the reign of Leovigild. Importantly, Spain never saw
a decline in interest in classical culture to the degree observable in
Britain, Gaul, Lombardy and Germany. The Visigoths tended to maintain
more of the old Roman institutions, and they had a unique respect for
legal codes that resulted in continuous frameworks and historical
records for most of the period between 415, when Visigothic rule in
Spain began, and 711, when it is traditionally said to end. The
proximity of the Visigothic kingdoms to the Mediterranean and the
continuity of western Mediterranean trade, though in reduced quantity,
supported Visigothic culture. Arian Visigothic nobility kept apart
from the local Catholic population. The Visigothic ruling class looked
to Constantinople for style and technology while the rivals of
Visigothic power and culture were the Catholic bishops— and a brief
incursion of Byzantine power in Cordoba."

And there you have it. When Islam made conquest of these peoples, they
took full advantage of the culture they found ALREADY THERE, and the
degree of Holy Roman, Jewish and Romanized Teutonic civilization that
came into their hands, by this they were now able to see their own
culture, to the degree it were possible, become refined even to the
extent that what they then came to build in Andalusia, bore not the
least resemblance to what their own Islamic culture amounted to on the
northern coast of Africa.

Where Islam was able to take advantage of Roman and Byzantine culture,
it took advancement by those cultures and prospered, but where there
was little or no influence of that culture, it was strictly from the
dust and the dung of the Casbah. And as to Damascus, Cairo and
Baghdad? Same story! The parasitic nature of Islam has always
managed to thrive on the blood it sucks from the civilizations all
over the world that had preceded it.
--
JM