The emir with blue eyes
It is said that ‘Abd al-Rahman, the first emir of Al-Andalus, who unified the country under his rule and established his capital in Cordoba, in whose mosque he was enthroned in 755, was the only survivor of the very prominent Umayyad family, exterminated by the Abbasids. The Muslim chronicles call him El Emigrado (The Emigrate), a strange nickname when all the Arabs of Spain were equally emigrated. It is not known how this young man came to the peninsula or how he acquired his high status, which he defended with arms for the last 30 years of his life. Although he was of pure Semitic origin, he is described as a Germanic: tall, white-skinned, red-haired and blue-eyed, physical characteristics that would be inherited by his descendants. Ibn Hazam of Cordoba speaks of this in his work The Necklace of the Dove, written around 1030: <
Nothing is known of Sigisbetrtus IV. He may still have been alive when ‘Abd al-Rahman was fighting in al-Andalus, which included part of southern France. Several historians claim that ‘Abd al-Rahman was not descended from the Umayyads. This ancestry would have been a later invention to legitimise the dynasty in Spain. From whom then was El Emigrado descended and where did he actually come from? Genealogical fiction has two causes which sometimes coincide: to conceal one’s true identity or to ennoble oneself. At that time, surnames were altered or coats of arms were faked. Any deception was enough to appear to be a nobleman, the son of a Goth. Or quite the opposite, because in Islamic Spain the genealogical craze was to take surnames that had roots in the Prophet or his relatives, as proof of ethnic and religious purity. Emilio García Gómez suggests that the poet Ibn Hazam was a Christian convert to Islam. Translators of Ibn Arabi, considered by Muslims to be the master of masters, suspect that noble surnames were invented for him afterwards to cover up the fact that he was not an Arab. Some say that during his lifetime he was called Khalil ha-Arabi: Friend of the Arabs. In Al-Andalus, with the change of culture and language, confusion, whether intentional or not, was inevitable. Thus, we find Hebrew authors quoted in Latin chronicles with Christian names and Christian names Arabised in Muslim chronicles.
The reconquest, another myth
“A reconquest of six centuries is not a reconquest”. With this phrase Ortega y Gasset settles the question in his España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain). Nor did the attempt last six centuries. Menéndez Pidal writes in Realismo de la epopeya española, that this ideal of the reconquest had not yet taken root in the thirteenth century in the minds of the northern warlords. “Not even in Sancho el Mayor, such a powerful king of Navarre, was there any idea of reconquest”, concludes our erudite historian.
Further information
– The Islamic revolution in the West. Ignacio Olagüe. Publications of the Fundación j. March Foundation – Editorial Guadarrama. Madrid 1985.
– The Enigma of Solomon’s Table. Juan Eslava Galán. Editorial Osuna, Granada 1998
The mythe of the muslim invasion, part4: The emir with blue eyes
