My recent trip to Spain shocked me into a number of facts of history. Tariq ibn-Ziyad brought most of the Iberian Peninsula under Islam in a seven-year campaign. He also crossed the Pyrenees and occupied parts of southern France for 20 years stopping short only 200 hundred miles from Paris. The most intriguing part of this conquest was the people who undertook it, Tariq ibn Ziyad was not an Arab and had until the conquest of Spain never been to Hijaz. Under Umar ibn Khattab Northern Africa came under Islam and the Berbers who were considered wild bandits became Muslims and then carried Islam to the next lands, something even the US and Britain can never attest to achieving.

Under Islam Spain become a regional power, and a centre of learning second only to Abbasid Baghdad. Muslims and non-Muslims often came from abroad to study in the famous libraries and universities of al-Andalus after the reconquista of Toledo in 1085. The most noted of these was Michael Scot (c. 1175 to c. 1235), who took the works of Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”) and Ibn Sina (“Avicenna”) to Italy. This transmission was to have a significant impact on the formation of the European Renaissance.

In the 10th century, the city of Cordoba had 700 mosques, 60,000 palaces, and 70 libraries, the largest of which had up to 600,000 books. In comparison, the largest library in Christian Europe at the time had no more than 400 manuscripts, while the University of Paris library still had only 2,000 books later in the 14th century.

However my return from Spain made me concerned about one particular issue, that being the fact that Islamic Spain has all but been forgotten in the Minds of ummah. Today any discussion of the Muslims world is usually in reference to North Africa, the Middle East, the Asian Subcontinent and Indonesia and Malaysia. Lands such as Western China, Greece, Southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Malta, Cyprus, Ukraine, the Canary Islands, parts of Iceland, the largest island of the Bristol waters in England – Lundy, Croatia, the island of Rhodes, Southern Russia as well as Portugal have all but been forgotten by many in Islamic history. All of these lands were once under Islam with some of them remaining for hundreds of years.

The destruction of the Khilafah led to the establishment of many nation states some of which are less then 60 years old. The unfortunate affect of this is where once Muslims from Spain to Indonesia viewed each other as one ummah today national boundaries define many. Islamic Spain was for nearly 800 years the intellectual centre of Europe, where Europe stood in awe at its marvels. The implementation of Islam saw the development of many fields and disciplines which Europe owes a great debt to. 

Currently East Timor, Kashmir, Chechnya may be heading in the same direction.