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."
SCIENCE AND HISTORY
PHILOSOPHIC THOUGHTS
(By Averroes)
The first to preach the resurrection were the prophets of Israel after Moses, then the Evangelical Christians, then the Sabians, whose religion has been called by Ibn-Hazm the oldest in the world. The reason so many founders of religion established this dogma was because they supposed this belief would moralize men and induce them to be virtuous in their own interests. I do not quarrel with Al Ghazali or Motecallemin for saying that the soul is immortal, but I object to the idea that the soul is a mere accident, and that a man can take again the body which has fallen into decay. No, he may take another, similar to the first, but that which has been dead can not return to life. These two bodies are only one, viewed as a species, but they are two in number. Aristotle has said in the last lines of his "Generation and Corruption": "A body once corrupted can never become the same again; it can never return as an individual whole, but it can return to the specific variety of which it is a part. When air separates from water or water separates from air, each of these substances can not become again the thing it was, but must return to its own species."