Abdulrahman I
731 A.D. – 788 A.D.
1ST UMAYYAD EMIR OF CORDOBA
Imagine a young Muslim man of twenty, of noble lineage, at towering yet thin stature, with somewhat good looks. He comes from dozens of generations of his people stretching out from his royal family to antiquity, his mother a foreign concubine from a land far away. This man’s family which had ruled millions of square miles for generations as kings, after a steady but decadent decline ranging from inverted values to petty tribalist quibbling, is overrun and thrown out of power through a coup by a rival family.
This young man’s family is defeated, and their enemies invite them to a feast as a show of good will. At the feast, almost all of his male relatives are clubbed to death while he escapes, fleeing with what remains of his family; including his brother and young son. They must now flee, pursued by ruthless assassins on horseback hoping for a hefty sum of coin from the new ruling dynasty in exchange for their heads. They make it over the Euphrates river, then around the entirety of their homeland to the south until he must abandon them in an unknown village, taking no one but his single freed servant with him.
He decides to travel to the land of his mother – neighboring a still-newly conquered peninsula across the Mediterranean of vast riches and fertile land on the verge of political collapse. It’s ruler is greedy and wants independence from his new overlords. Years pass of being on the run, changing names and bribing tribal leaders, eventually making it over to the peninsula and reviving old bonds of loyalty with what remains of your family’s reputation. With no battle experience, all odds against him, he goes to war against his unruly rivals for power under the flag of Islam and a newly proclaimed emirate. He conquers any resisting territories with ease as his support among local leaders grows due to his lavish charisma and strength of will. Soon his emirate becomes absolute in the country, and rules for many decades before dying a natural death as a content old man, leaving his kingdom behind to his favorite son. His renewed dynasty rules for centuries, until deposed by another after a time of great prosperity and luxury.
Such was the life of Abd al-Rahman ibn Muawiya, founder of the Cordoba Caliphate in Al-Andalus, what we know historically as former Islamic Spain. This was a man who, in the face of certain defeat and death, rose not only to survive, but conquer and rule another land he knew nothing about. Before him, no other Umayyad had stepped foot in Al-Andalus. Abdulrahman, known from his actions within his lifetime as the Falcon of Quraysh, was the last in a line of a family that had once attained infinite glory through their victories in the name of Islam, the latter descendants of whom were then degraded by their neglect, abuse, and disrespect for Islamic law, custom, and the mandate to rule that Allah provides the righteous. They lost their dynasty because as Allah tells us: He gives and takes kingship (Al-Mulk) to and from whomever He wishes. When you fail His religion and the legacy of His Prophet ﷺ, you’re setting yourself on the path of acceleration to have it all snatched from you, and as we saw with the last Umayyads at the dinner table of their enemies; as brutally as possible.
Yet, after generations of decline at the end of his family legacy, Abd al-Rahman renewed his dynasty in another form – a thunderous kingdom of artistic and cultural glory; where he earned the mandate to rule once again and allowed his progeny to flourish for another civilizational cycle rather than go extinct immediately. And even more remarkable than that, he did it coming to a land that was not only alien, but being torn apart at the seams due to idiotic tribal resentments and differences which nearly cost the Muslims one of their grandest achievements in our history, the rule of Spain under La Ilaha Illa Allah, Muhammadan Rasulullah, the cultural and scientific achievements from it requiring several books to fully detail the later historical importance of, to both Orient and Occident.