The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization 39
advance of the barbarous condition of contemporary Paris or
London, and was the cultural metropolis for the Christian rulers of
the petty states of Northern Spain. Nevertheless, the intellectual
tone in Muslim Spain was still one of rigid orthodoxy and strict
conservatism. There was scant sympathy with the rationalist in-
novations of some of the Abbasid caliphs, and little evidence yet of
intellectual originality. Both Muslims and Jews wishing to com-
plete their education went to the Eastern Mediterranean and on to
Iraq. In the first half of the ninth century, however, the Umayyad
Abd ur-Rahman II sent a scholar to Iraq to obtain copies of trans-
lations of Greek and Persian scientific works, and surrounded him-
self with a group of astronomers.1 A century later the University
of Cordoba was founded by Abd ur-Rahman III, who proclaimed
himself Caliph independently of the Abbasids. His successor in-
vited professors to Cordoba from the East, established twenty-
nine free schools in the city, and employed agents to buy learned
manuscripts in the eastern cities. At the same time the centre of
Jewish scholarship began to be transferred from Iraq to Spain.
Early in the eleventh century the Umayyad dynasty collapsed, and
for eighty years Spain was torn by civil wars, with Muslim military
commanders playing the same role as they had done in the East
when the Abbasid dynasty fell into decline. But just as in the East,
the partitioning of the caliphate among provincial rulers led to the
diffusion of the culture of the metropolis over a number of pro-
vincial capitals, such as Seville, Toledo, and Granada. And as the
Christian kingdoms of Northern Spain seized the opportunity to
invade the disunited Muslim state, so they began increasingly to
absorb Muslim cultural influences.
The Muslims, finding themselves hard-pressed by the aggressive
Christians in the north, appealed for help to the Berbers of North-
West Africa, who had been united for the last fifty years in a mili-
tant Muslim brotherhood, al-Murabitun (whence their Spanish
name of Almoravides). At the end of the eleventh century these
defeated the Christians under their legendary leader the Cid, but
remained in Spain as the ruling Muslim dynasty, only to succumb
to its luxuries. Meanwhile another Puritan movement, al-Muwah-
hidun (Almohades in Spanish) had arisen among the Berbers.
These overthrew the Almoravides in the middle of the twelfth
century and replaced them as rulers of an empire extending from
1 E. Levi-Proven£al, La Civilisation arabe enEspagne (Cairo, 1938), 65.
D