Moors

The Moors were Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages.

B

 * The darkness of her Oriental eye Accorded with her Moorish origin (Her blood was not all Spanish, by the by;  In Spain, you know, this is a sort of sin); When proud Granada fell, and, forced to fly,  Boabdil wept, of Donna Julia’s kin Some went to Africa, some stay’d in Spain, Her great-great-grandmamma chose to remain.
 * Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I

C

 * The noble Moor of Spain is anything but a pure Arab of the desert, he is half a Berber (from the Aryan family) and his veins are so full of Gothic blood that even at the present day noble inhabitants of Morocco can trace their descent back to Teutonic ancestors.
 * Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899)


 * Many of the traits on which modern Europe prides itself came to it from Muslim Spain. Diplomacy, free trade, open borders, the techniques of academic research, of anthropology, etiquette, fashion, various types of medicine, hospitals, all came from this great city of cities. Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West. The surprise [...] is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and our present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.
 * King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, "Islam's Contribution To Europe's Renaissance", from a speech at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford (27 October 1993)


 * She’s for the Moores, and Martyrdom.
 * Richard Crashaw, "A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa", Carmen Deo Nostro (1652)

E

 * I want to see the gardens and palace of the Alcazar where the Moorish Kings used to live. It is as perfect an architecture as the Egyptian, Greek or Gothic and just as beautiful, maybe more beautiful and it is well built for it looks as new as if it had just been done. We have to thanks these Moors for our greatest sciences, they did the big work for us, they started them, Algebra, Chemistry, Astronomy. They are our masters.
 * Thomas Eakins, in Vistas de España, Mary Elizabeth Boone, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 77

L

 * But as a Moor, who to her cheeks prefers White spots t’ allure her black idolaters, Methought she look’d all o’er bepatch’d with stars.
 * Richard Lovelace, "A Black Patch on Lucasta’s Face", st. 3, Posthume Poems (1659)

N

 * Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (—I do not say by what sort of feet—) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin—because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! … The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust — a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile".
 * Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888), as translated by H. L. Mencken (Nuvision Publications, 2007), p. 55

V

 * These Moors cultivated the sciences with success, and taught Spain and Italy for five centuries.
 * Voltaire, , translated as A Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 1 (London, 1824), p. 345