Book & Author
Professor Dr T. B. Irving: Falcon of Spain
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
“The Sultan Abd-er-Rahman was one of the Heaven-sent rulers of men…”
— Martin Hume in ‘Spanish People’
Spain resembles Syria in her pure air, Yaman for her temperate climate, India for her drugs and perfumes, Persia for her great revenues, China for her metals and precious stones, the Hadramawt for her coasts and harbors and Greece for the wisdom of her sages. — Paraphrasing Abu Ubay-Ullah the Spaniard (as quoted in Maqqari, I, 82).
Al-Andalus akaMuslim Spain refers to Muslim kingdoms (711-1492) of Iberian Peninsula — Umayyads of Cordoba to Emirate of Grenada — located in present day Purtugal and Spain. Falcon of Spain by Professor T.B. Irving is a biography of the 8th Century Umayyad ruler, Abdurrahman I.
Professor Thomas Ballantyne Irving(1914 Preston, ON, Canada – 2002 USA) aka al-Hajj Ta'lim Ali was a prominent American Muslim scholar. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, and later founded the Near Eastern Studies Center at the University of Minnesota. In 1969, he became Professor of Spanish and Arabic at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; he retired as Professor Emeritus in 1980. As a Fulbright Research Fellow, he visited Baghdad, Iraq (1956-57). He also served as the dean of the American Islamic College (1981-1986) in Chicago. He had traveled and lectured widely throughout the Arab world as well as Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, and Brazil.
Dr Irving was a member of many academic societies, including the American Oriental Society, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Middle East Institute. His areas of research interest included the Arab-Islamic period in Spanish History and the contemporary Islamic world. He was a prolific writer and authored numerous research articles and many books on Islam which include Had You Been Born A Muslim, Islam and Its Essence, The Tide of Islam, Islam Resurgent, and Growing up in Islam. He also wrote some books in Spanish which include Nacido como Musulman and Cautiverio Babilonico en Andalusia. He also produced the first American English translation of the Qur’an. For his academic services, the government of Pakistan awarded him Sitara e Imitiaz (Star of Distinction).
Falcon of Spain — A Study of eighth-century Spain, with special emphasis upon the life of the Umayyad ruler Abdurrahman I (756-788), third edition (1973), by Thomas Ballantine Irving, published by Sh Muhammad Ashraf, Kashmiri Bazar, Lahore, Pakistan, is the biography of the 8 th century Arab ruler. Abdurrahman I through his leadership, wisdom and vision created a stable and dynamic Spain which later (during 14 th - 17 th centuries) provided the foundation for the Renaissance — the rebirth of Europe’s cultural, political, economic, scientific and academic domains.
The book surveys the period when the Arabs first held the Iberian peninsula during the eighth century when Islamic power stretched its furthest to the West. In 756 Spain became independent under Abdurrahman I, the Umayyad, who reigned for 32 years. He succeeded in winning for himself a kingdom in which Islamic culture was to reach its finest flowering. Abdurrahman transformed Spain into a great nation, and later, his descendants ruled longer than any Spanish dynasty of any religion. He was a contemporary of Charlemagne. Spain was a modern state when the Muslims ruled her, and later became medieval only when the tolerance they practiced was discarded by unenlightened rulers. Cordoba became the most contemporary city in Western Europe and vied with Constantinople and Baghdad in magnificence, while London and Paris were but provincial capitals.
The author narrates Abdurrahman’s story in twenty-four chapters: Course of empire, Visigothic Spain, The land battle of Trafalgar, Desert feuds, The Caliph's grandson escapes, Five years of exile, The intruder, First advances, Romance and victory, Lord of Andalusia, Organizing Arab Spain, Yusuf starts the Fronde, The Abbasids intervene, More civil war, Government and trade, Distractions from Europe, The song of Roland (Arab version), Cordoba: the bride of Andalus, Umayyad culture, Final campaigns, The Amir’s last years and death, Abdurrahman's posterity, and Falcon of the Qurayah.
Reflecting on the nature and approach of the book, the author states in the preface: “This book is history and not a novel, and as the Arabs do not care to talk about their private lives, I have respected their prejudices in this matter. Indeed, in most instances I have tried to take the Arab point of view, because the European, especially in the attitude toward Charlemagne, is over-abundant. I admit I have sat on the two stools of pedantry and vulgarity. Therefore, I hope that some more gifted writers may someday extract the novelistic elements from this story and make it as popular as it deserves to be. He will find herein practically everything that it is possible to extract from both Arabic and European sources. In fact, I quite realize that the story is overcharged with detail; but so is all history [Minneapolis, February 1960].”
Discussing Abdurrahman’s strategy for organizing Spain, the author observes: “Abdurrahman realized that the peace of his realm depended closely upon his tolerance of his non-Muslim subject's. He already foresaw plenty of trouble with his unruly Arab nobles, and the Amir could never have controlled Spain if he had antagonized the Christians or Jews. Moreover, such a course would have been contrary to his tolerant nature. He therefore confirmed the Christians in their previous liberties and guaranteed them against being molested so long as they paid their taxes. As another instance of his broadminded treatment, he granted them permission to rebuild their ruined churches…as for the Jews, the best description of their position is to be found in Hume's Spanish People: ‘Side by side with the new rulers lived the Christians and Jews in peace. The latter, rich with commerce and industry’…By the next century, the synagogue of Cordoba had attained an outstanding reputation in the Jewish World.”`
Commenting on Muslim cultural shift from the East to West, the author states: “When the seat of Islamic culture was to shift from Baghdad to Cordoba because of political disturbance in the East and the relative freedom of Spanish society under the Umayyads and their immediate successors, the writings of Aristotle, which had been salvaged from the wreck of Hellenistic civilization, would accompany it, and with them there was to arrive a new and very modern spirit. This in many ways was the real fountainhead of the European renaissance. The Arabs’ greatness lay in their ability to assimilate the best intellectual features of whatever peoples they met. They seized the mathematical and medical knowledge of ancient Greece which the Romans had overlooked or scorned and which the Christians had rejected almost completely, and patiently set to work to adopt this heritage to their own life. From India they imported those essentials to modern thought, the ‘Arabic’ numerals and algebra, without which modern man would never have been able to improve upon the Greeks. From as far afield as China they gathered industrial processes such as silk culture and papermaking and transplanted them to Europe. In Spain itself, they assimilated and improved upon the ruins of Roman and Visigothic civilization, especially in architecture and poetry.”
Referring to promotion of culture by Muslim rulers, the author cites Hume from his book on Spanish Influence on English Literature: "And so, in Christian Spain, as in the rest of Europe, overrun by the rough Teutons, all cultures slept where it had not deliberately destroyed. But not so in Moorish Spain. There one Caliph of Cordoba, after another, polished, enlightened, and learned, gathered around them all that money, taste, knowledge could obtain of the culture of the ancient peoples.”
Highlighting the scientific and academic outlook of Arabs in Spain, the author observes: “Finally, by the tenth century, the Arabs in Spain had been able to develop an outlook in which science had ceased to be mere lore and was applied to the arts and crafts of everyday life. Here in the midst of the European middle ages we find one European people who typify the scientific attitude and industrial life for which we pride ourselves. Unlike the Greeks, they did not disdain laboratory research and patient experimentation; and, in medicine, mechanics, and the arts, they seem, as if by instinct, to have bent science to the immediate service of humanity instead of preserving it as a strange museum piece. It was from Spanish Arabs and their pupils like Roger Bacon, Michael Scott, William Oakham, and Peter Abelard, the Europe received the spirit which has enabled man to dominate the world and utilize it to its own ends.”
Discussing the growth of universities in Europe and how their intellectual heritage was linked to Arab institutions, the author writes: “Thus when the first truly modern universities would grow in the rest of Europe. Even though they might not be aware of their intellectual heritage, it is nonetheless certain they had their forerunners in the Nizamiyyah University and Bayt al-Hikmah of Baghdad and in the Academy of Cordoba and the [Al-] Qarawiyyin of Fas. I am not making a brief [claim] that all that development was due to Abdurrahman I; yet if he had not established a stable government in Spain during the eight centuries, it would have [been] an impossible achievement.”
Commenting on the development of cosmopolitan Cordoba and its impact on other parts of Europe and the world, the author states: “Few cities in the world have fostered so many illustrious men over so long a period of time; and almost all were men of letters. Cordoba gave Rome the two Senecas and Lucan; the Arab city produced a galaxy that included such famous names as Ibn Masarrah, Ibn Rushd (or Averroes…), Maimonides, and Ibn Hazm, the sweet poet of woman's delights; while modern Cordoba gave birth to Juan de Mena, Gongora, and the Duke of Rivas. In the new world she has bequeathed her name to cities in Mexico and the Argentine…. Thus, Abdurrahman would try to forge a nation out of Arabians, Franks, Slavs, Syrians, Berbers and Greeks, Negroes, Hispano-Romans and Goths; and out of aristocrats and slaves, artisans and peasants, merchants and lawyers, students and doctors. 0ne could hear in her streets the Christian bell, the Jewish trumpet, and the Muslim call to prayer. Her markets displayed goods from every quarter of the globe and to meet every taste.”
Referring to Abdurrahman’s efforts for developing Cordoba, the author states: “The Amir, now set about embellishing his capital. He took the Damascus of his youth as a model and implanted Syrians forms upon the Romanesque remains he found in the peninsula…First of all, he assured the city has adequate supply of water from the mountains through a new aqueduct whose building he himself superintended. The city had seven gates, either named after the city toward which it led or trade that was carried on their vicinity…Cordoba was the first city of modern Europe to have street lighting and to see a revival of public baths, for the Islamic faith makes cleanliness not merely a pious wish but also a religious duty.”
Commenting on the construction of the great mosque of Cordoba, the author observes: “The Intruder's glory was the Great. Mosque… In the year 726, the prince started work on the new Mosque. The original plan was traced by Abdurrahman’s own hand, and his Concept remained the basic idea although the building was enlarged even more later on …The cost in Abdurrahman’s own time was about 100,000 gold doblas or 80,000 dinars. The mosque gives one, the effect of a forest of pillars ‘where the eye is lost amid the marvels,’ to quote Victor Hugo: The style is an improvement upon Roman and Visigothic models on the one hand, and Byzantine and Persian on the other. The graceful lines are achieved, in part by the use of the double or superimposed arch…People came from great distances not only to see the Mosque, but also to visit the city, just as nowadays they go to marvel at Paris or New York. In the tenth century, the German nun Hrotsvitha heard of the city in her distant convent of Gandersheim, and spoke of ‘Cordoba, the jewel of the world!’”
Referring to the rise and fall of Cordoba, the author observes: “There were finally over 200,000 houses in the city, along with six hundred mosques and schools, nine hundred public baths, fifty hospitals, and countless mills for light and heavy industry. There were many villas and suburban estates, outside the walls, especially up towards the cooler mountains, in the manner of ancient Rome or of modern Philadelphia and New York. Closer in, there were truck gardens to supply the markets with food. The aqueducts were continually improved, and the bridges kept in repair…Cordoba reached her greatest glory under Abdurrahman III and with Mansur in the ninth century. In 1013 she was pillaged by the Berbers, when the Umayyad dynasty was in its decline. She revived to give birth to some great men, and then once more declined after the conquest of the city in 1216 by Fernando of Castile.”
Discussing the leadership of Abdurrahman, the author states: “The Abbasid emperor always maintained a healthy respect for his Umayyad rival, distant as he was … Abdurrahman proved a wise administrator, profiting from the education his grandfather Hisham had given him in Syria. And to secure Spain from the nobles' fronde, he used much the same tactics as would be used by the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century kings of Europe who had to contend with this same problem. As Martin Hume has said in his Spanish People: ‘The Sultan Abd-er-Rahman was one of the Heaven-sent rulers of Men. Prompt, yet cautious in council and in war, unscrupulous, overbearing and proud, he was as ready to wreak terrible vengeance as he was politic to forgive ,when it suited him. Berber and Yamanite alike acknowledged that at last they had found their master... He ruled until his death, in 788, with the tempered severity, wisdom, and justice which made his dominion the best organized in Europe, and 'his capital the most splendid in the world.' Thus, Abdurrahman as a historical personage can quite fittingly be compared with both his contemporaries, Charlemagne and Mansur whom he defeated both in the field of battle and in diplomacy. Yet both the Frank and the Abbasid had inherited their kingdoms, whereas the Spaniard had had to hew his out of the raw material of chaos.”
Continuing on the leadership of Abdurrahman, the author further notes: “From that amorphous tendency which has always plagued Spain as a nation he transformed the country into a modern state in the midst of medievalism. Cordoba became a cosmopolitan center rivalling Constantinople and Baghdad, and was worlds ahead of Paris, Aix, or Rome. The historian Ulick Burks tells us: ‘When the great Amir died, in 788, the kingdom of Cordoba was already one of the most powerful, and certainly the most enlightened Commonwealth in Europe.’ The Umayyads of Spain founded a kingdom which proved to be secure for several centuries, and whose glory continued even when that dynasty was extinct. The Catholic monarchs, and the Hapsburgs allowed a greater opportunity to slip out of their fingers within a very few decades and their expulsion of the Jewish and Arab middle class which started to flourish under Abdurrahman was only one of the ways in which their policy ran counter to the great Umayyad’s leadership.”
The author sums up the dynamic and visionary leadership of Abdurrahman by citing the quaint words of the Encyclopedia of Islam: “ ‘we find that Abdurrahman’s statesmanlike cunning and restless energy, which with all his determination and strength of character yet for the most part never degenerated into the often so useless cruelty and blind revengefulness of the Arabs.' In plainer terms, Abdurrahman was the most cultured and civilized of Europe’s rulers during the eighth century, notwithstanding the great Charles himself.”
Professor T.B. Irving had written a well-researched book on the life and accomplishments of Abdurrahman I. Falcon of Spain is an interesting read for all book lovers and students of history. It is an important historical document; it sheds light on the leadership traits of Abdurrahman I, the great Umayyad ruler whose dynamic and visionary leadership transformed Spain into a modern state, and hence provided the foundation for the Renaissance — the rebirth of Europe’s cultural, political, economic, scientific and academic domains.
(Dr Ahmed S. Khan ( dr.a.s.khan@ieee.org ) is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar - 2017-2022)
