The Moors
The Moors & their contribution to Society
The Moors are a group of North African population which conquered and ruled Spain and parts of Portugal for more than 700 years beginning in 711 AD and ending in 1492 AD. It appears from research that even before this period going back into antiquity, this North African tribe has been synonymous with Iberia. The word Ibero-Maurisian culture used by archaeologists and historians to describe a group of pre-historic people that populated Iberia would underline this linkage.
Not many people know that the Moors are Black Africans of Libyan, Moroccan, Nigerien, Nigerian and Senegalese origins. This is due to the deliberate misinformation produced by the Euro-American power establishment, which delights in obfuscating Africa’s contribution to the history of mankind, preferring instead to appropriate to itself the glorious attainment of Africans throughout history. By the strategic control of vocabulary, semantics, nomenclature and grammatical acrobatics the academic establishment of Euro-America & Europe perpetrates its mendacity.
Some say the origin of the people called the Moors can be traced to an African people known as the Garamante. This civilization stood along important trading routes in the Sahara and existed contemporaneously with other great African civilizations including Egypt of the pre-Christian era. Many explain that the Moors must be distinguished from the Berbers who were a mixed race people in North Africa resulting from the intermarriage between Caucasian Libyans and indigenous Africans. Black Africans had been called Maures ('dark') by the Greeks in antiquity and no distinction had been made between The Moorish tribes which would later invade Spain and their Black African kin. There was also to be an Arab component to these peoples and in order for this to be put in context, the racial composition of Arabia in antiquity must be understood. Much of the Arabian Peninsula had originally been populated by Blacks. The area was a colony of the kingdom of Kush. Southern Arabia, in particular, remained black for a considerable period as the Greeks themselves attest.
Agriculture
The Moors of Al Andalu (Spain) introduced advanced numerous crops and methods of soil productivity including irrigation, crop rotation and the use of manure. After harvesting, Moorish preservation and drying know-how meant that foods could endure and be edible for several years.
Universities
There were numerous schools and places of learning in Moorish Al-Andalus (Spain).
Beginning with the University of Cordoba, other great institutions were built in Seville, Valencia, Mallarga and Granada. Like the ancient Greeks under the Egyptians, several of the most prominent European Catholic scholars studied under the African Moors in their institutions in Spain. The Moors translated all great works they could lay their hands on from the ancients into Arabic. This included the knowledge of Egypt, Kush, India, China and the Greece. Western historians point to the Greek component of these documents and attempt to paint the Moors as merely borrowers of Greek intellectual culture. This ignores the fact that Greek knowledge comes directly from Ancient Egypt and that there is convincing evidence that the Moors already possessed similar knowledge of their own from their homelands.
But this was not only limited to higher education. The Moors promoted literacy and the advancement of the general population. Schools were everywhere, many of them free of charge.
Medicine
Again, far in advance of Western Europe, Moorish physicians were specially trained and highly regulated. They practiced surgery and cauterization and understood the importance of cleanliness in the operating environment.
Jose Pimienta Bey notes in Golden Age of the Moor (pg 211):
"Europeans offered no competition with Moorish advances in pathology, aetiology (study of diseases), therapeutics, surgery and pharmacology. Texts were written by Moorish physicians describing surgical technique and instruments that were used; doctors specialized in paediatrics, obstetrics, ophthalmology, and in the treatment of hernias and tumours. Imamuddin tells us that Moorish scientists were even importing monkey skeletons from Africa for use in dissection when conditions prevented the use of cadavers."
For the Andalusan Moor, scholarly endeavour was considered devine. The more one knew of one's self and one's World, the more one was supposed to know of one's Creator. The ancient Kemetic creed "Know Thyself" was very much the creed of Andalus..........Rulers such as the Caliph Abd al-Rahman III, spent almost one-third of the state's income on education. At a time when most Christian monarchs could not even write their own names, the Caliphs of Moorish Spain were often scholars.
The works of a number of Moorish savants were revered, translated and became required texts in the universities which later developed in Europe. These include Generalities on Medicine by Averroes, Solitary Regime by Avempace, Primus Canonis by Avicenna and Al-Tasrif, by Abulcasis, which became the predominant university medical text for Europe's physicians.
Science
It was the Moorish chemists such as Jabir who discovered nitric, nitro-muriatric and sulphuric acid. They were well versed in the science well before Europe.
Jose Pimienta-Bey notes the proximity of the founding dates of the major European universities to the translations of Moorish works by rulers such as Alfonso X of Spain. These centres of learning relied primarily on Moorish texts for centuries.
The following information was produced by and sent out via email by:
Black History Studies (www.blackhistorystudies.com)
| 15 FASCINATING THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE MOORS! |
A European scholar sympathetic to the Spaniards remembered the conquest in this way:
|
Many thanks again to:
Black History Studies
for collating and enlightening the community with this information
More to follow
© 2014 Majority NOT Minority Ltd - All rights reserved.
No republication of this material, in any form or medium, is permitted without express permission of the author