D. Calatayud
Today we risk falling into the topic and even let ourselves slip towards him, deliberately, From time to time this task must be made to get rid of an excess of literary asepsis about this programming.
There are those who suppose politics is writing history, Move the present to the future, the past to the present, As if the course of small and vulgar events could record the transcendental living of the peoples. The ground flight does not break the blue uniformity of the heavens, How the slight rumor of the laborious walk of the ant is heard.
It will be necessary to distinguish between the events that alter the course of history and those others that due to their trifle or insignificance in collective value just leave another impact than a legend or brief episodic and inconsequential lines, that according to historical-religious mentalities or conveniences, They are increased, They load from lexicon according to interests of the time or are canceled in the same sense.
If history in the broadest registration sense is the true and orderly narration of the past events and memorable events that concern the general interests of a country in all its facets and reflexes, either dominated or defeated, Dominators The winners, Under a war trajectory of conquest, evolutionary PASO that of politics.
The àrabes also have their black legend; The origin may be his war of conquest, to which they covered with the helpless mantle of holiness, It is a very human defect to discredit enemies in all terrain and more in the spiritual; Very wrong are those who, perhaps influenced by the partiality of teachers, Teachers and textbooks, They think that 800 Years of your stay in the Peninsula, They were a continuous and fierce combat between the civilization embodied in the Christians and the barbarism, In the Mohammedans, nothing is further from reality in one version and another.
Since Muhammad's time, àrabes culture and civilization, Far from being antagonistic of Christians, They are analogous, They have identical sources, They run parallel channels and at some times theirs exceed our.
A foreign and generalizing diverse on the history of Spain, maintains that the Spanish people are of lower quality, and adduces the secular resistance to be paid first and arabizar later., Within the two great conquest cycles. But nevertheless, Ignore that there is an obvious difference between the bellicose resistance due to autonomy and independence and resistance or disgust towards culture, The prolonged resistance that warms warrior virtues, It has never been like ethnic inferiority, The fighting for centuries for existence, Personality and independence, It is not an obstacle for an inferiority and inept for culture.
The àrabe invasion, which had to mean for Spain a valuable ethnic and cultural contribution, It was in his initial conquest the most tragic and disastrous roof that could suffer a nation; But without the serious drama that many historians want to channel in the image and likeness of Troy Jerusalem and Rome.
The invaders àrabes advanced as a overflowing torrent until the entire Iberian Peninsula; But it was only an occupation army, that did not come to colonize, but to conquer. Came to Spain without women, Well, I did not have the purpose of repopulating; also, nor name to the conquered earth; but nevertheless, The àrabes absorbed when crossing with the natives, They gave birth to a Hispanic culture, that by the mathematical law of large numbers, had more from Celtibera than àrabe.
The culture that emerged from the historical phenomenon of the reconquest, which determined eight centuries of vital coexistence between the two races, He gave birth to a superior culture so firm and so noble, What was universal astonishment, deserving of providence to give him his grace, To discover, conquer and civilize a continent, leaving their residents, As a gift, its great characteristics, that retain enduring in twenty new nations under the name of Hispania, closing the cultural cycle of almost a millennium; The culture that knew how to create the brilliant Hispanic-àrabe civilization.
The passing of the years ends by denying all the unfair legends, And to the àrabes we must do justice thanking them for the cooperation they lent to the growth and development of civilization and western culture; But we do not mistakenly believe that it was the growing Christian potential that overwhelmed and undone the groups, increasingly brittle and unstable, of the taifas, but quite the opposite, the congenital weakness of these, the one he prepared, The reconquering fact raided and channeled, we enter, Thus, In a period of renewal of values very suggestive, that is not even desperate briefly, We can review its characteristics and its internal process.
Supremacy in the peninsular field, that we have seen move from Muslim invaders to Christian reconquences, produced a strange phenomenon, For the latter, who has not given due attention and dissemination over the centuries, Truly disconcerting thing.
The coexistence of Muslims under Christians could become so broad and generous in this new historical period, If the painful political error had not been given when he was thrown from his homeland, The misfortunes of Moorish, in the year 1609 decreed by Felipe III. Unfortunately, The historical evolution of peoples makes a historical stage always the repetition of the previous, new elements from outside, exogenous, They transformed the easy coexistence of Hispanics from different religions, as had previously that of the Christians Mozàrabes, under emirs, Caliphs and taifas.
The Mozàrabes, Like Mudejares and Moriscos, They were above all and above all, Spaniards and children of each other, Affirmation perhaps a bit surprising, but that can be done safely, although we do not ignore the important demographic contributions that àrabes and Berberes represented in the formation of our Hispanic racial type; Contributions, on the other hand, that were rapidly assimilated by superior vitality, numerical and spiritual of the invaded country.
For the successive intermediate stages of Islamization, Mozarabismo and then the new Mudejar-Morisco sense, In some moments even - it is the equality of the facts that follow each other- that the clock that gives the measure of time has stopped, It was said that the happening of the centuries are suspended, And yet, They were times of strong functional evolution. The Church, royalty, The nobility, They were looking for new government formulas and new readjustment of their interior problems in remarkable imbalance. The old Visigothic legislation, that until then had suffered to conveniently channel development, Not a hurried, of the Christian kingdoms, And that he continued to rule in the captive Mozàrab communities, It began to be a close path for the broad life of the new Hispanic state conceptions.
The repressions raised by both reformers will have more than anything a religious spirit that was strange and exotic, by fanaticism and dogmatic intransigence, For some historians and commentators, For others it was the innumerable reciprocal inheritance of our respective feelings of political-religious unity, throughout the millenary endearing story made of common life; a fine, which would be for our petulant part comment and describe.
This was the final dislocation, the disarticulation of its different monarchies disseminated to the thrust of their initial effort in many powers that came to lose the meaning of that unitary shadow that had been representing the imperial-islamic ideal, depositing in our hands a pledge of friendship that the people àrabes could not find in any other country in the West and that we Spaniards, We also want to believe that no other country in the West can find in the world àrabe.
