Mozarabs
Gradually, the population converted to Islam—an estimated 50% by the year 951[2]—and was influenced, in varying degrees, by Arab customs and knowledge, and sometimes acquired greater social status in doing so.
Spanish Christians initially portrayed Muslims primarily as military or political enemies, but with time, Islam came to be seen as a religion and not merely a threat.
Mozarab (Spanish: mozárabes [moˈθaɾaβes]; Portuguese: moçárabes [muˈsaɾɐβɨʃ]; Catalan: mossàrabs [muˈsaɾəps], from Arabic: مُسْتَعْرَب, romanized: musta‘rab, lit.
[4] Contemporary Arabic sources described Christians as naṣārā (نصارى 'Nazarenes'), or imprecisely by their legal-religious status: ahl adh-dhimma (أهل الذمة 'people of the covenant') or mu‘āhidūn (معاهدون 'contractual partners').
Dhimmi were allowed to live within Muslim society, but were legally required to pay the jizya, a personal tax, and abide with a number of religious, social, and economic restrictions that came with their status.
Some of them even held high offices in the Islamic administration under some rulers— a prominent example being that of Recemundus, a palace official, who, sometime between 961 and 976, wrote the famous Calendar of Córdoba [5] for Abd ar-Rahman III, undertook various diplomatic missions in Germania and Byzantium, and was rewarded with the bishopric of Elvira (present-day Granada).
Furthermore, in 1064, Emir Al-Muqtadir of Zaragoza sent Paternus, the Mozarabic bishop of Tortosa, as an envoy to king Ferdinand I of León in Santiago de Compostela, while the Christian Abu Umar ibn Gundisalvus, a Saqaliba (a Slav), served the same taifa ruler as the Wazir (Vizier, or the equivalent to prime minister).
Conversion to Islam also opened up new horizons to the Mozarabs, alleviated their social position, ensured better living conditions, and broadened scope for more technically skilled and advanced work.
The Muslim geographer Ibn Hawqal, who visited the country in the middle of the 10th century, spoke of frequent revolts by Mozarab peasants employed on large estates, probably those of the ruling aristocracy.
There is also substantial evidence that Mozarabs fought in the defense of the thaghr (front line fortress towns), participating in raids against Christian neighbours and struggles between Muslim factions.
This was in stark contrast to the greater respect accorded to merchants in Jewish and Muslim societies, where trade was frequently combined with other callings, such as politics, scholarship, or medicine.
Most traffic between Al-Andalus and Christian regions remained in the hands of Jewish and Muslim traders until the dramatic shifts initiated by European commercial expansion throughout the 11th and 12th centuries.
The level of literary culture among the northern Christians was inferior to that of their Mozarab brethren in the historic cities to the south, due to the prosperity of Al-Andalus.
The Mozarab scholars and clergy eagerly sought manuscripts, relics and traditions from the towns and monasteries of central and southern Iberia that had been the heartland of Visigothic Catholicism.
The American historian, Richard Bulliet, in a work based on the quantitative use of the onomastic data as furnished by scholarly biographical dictionaries, concluded that it was only in the 10th century when the Andalusi emirate was firmly established and developed into the greatest power of the western Mediterranean under Caliph Abd ar-Rahman III, that the numerical ratio of Muslims and Christians in Al-Andalus was reversed in favour of the former.
An apparently still significant Mozarab group, which is the subject of a number of passages in the Arabic chronicles dealing with El Cid's dominion over Valencia, was also to be found there during this same period.
Similarly, the memoirs of the emir of Granada clearly indicate the existence of a relatively large rural Christian population in some parts of the Málaga region towards the end of the 11th century.
Still more executions were recorded in Córdoba in 923 (Eugenia), a boy Pelagius in 925 (for refusal to convert to Islam and submit to the caliph's sexual advances), and Argentea in 931.
By the mid-9th century, as the episode of the Córdoba martyrs reveals, there was a clear Christian opposition against the systematic pressure by a variety of legal and financial instruments of Islam, resisting their conversion and absorption into Muslim culture.
This archaic Romance language is first documented in writing in the Peninsula in the form of choruses (kharjas) in Arabic and Hebrew lyrics called muwashshahs.
[citation needed] In the earliest period of Muslim domination of Iberia, there is evidence of extensive interaction between the two communities attested to by shared cemeteries and churches, bilingual coinage, and the continuity of late Roman pottery types.
The emir of Córdoba, Abd ar-Rahman I's policy of allowing the ethnic Arab politico-military elite to practice agriculture further encouraged economic and cultural contact and cohesion.
Moreover, the interaction of foreign and native elements, fostered by intermarriage and contact in day-to-day commercial and social life rapidly stimulated acculturation between the two groups.
In 1099, the people of Granada, by order of the Almoravid emir, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, acting on the advice of his Ulema, destroyed the main Mozarab church of the Christian community.
[citation needed] In 1080, Pope Gregory VII called the council of Burgos, where it was agreed to unify the Latin liturgical rite in all Christian lands.
A popular legend states that Alfonso VI submitted the Mozarab liturgy and its Roman counterpart to ordeal by fire, putting the fix in for the Catholic rite.
The latter, under the influence of the Benedictine bishop of Cluny Bernard, and the Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, who was himself the principal buyer of Mozarab property in the early 13th century fomented a segregationalist policy under the cloak of religious nationalism.
Jiménez de Rada's bias is symbolized in his coining of the semi-erudite etymology of the word Mozarab from Mixti Arabi, connoting the contamination of this group by overexposure to infidel customs, if not by migration.
Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, aware of the Mozarabic liturgy historical value and liturgical richness, undertook the task of guaranteeing its continuation, and to this end gathered all the codices and texts to be found in the city.
Other historians argue that the work of Simonet and those who preceded him in studying this question did not use sources properly, and that there is no historical evidence that can be used to make a definitive pronouncement on the ethnic composition of Al-Andalus society.
