I lost yesterday; I don't condone the health care bill as passed, and was at best ambivalent to its passage. And what did I get as a consolation prize? Among other things, a guarantee that children can get health insurance — even if they have a pre-existing illness — and a measure that would let young adults stay on their parents' policies until they turn 26 - the guarantee that anyone can buy insurance - and the government subsidies to help pay for it.
I wonder if this is how the early Mozarabs felt.
In the 2nd/8th (Muslim/Common Era) century, the Muslim caliphate conquered most of spain. The Christians who stayed there were called the Mozarabs until about the 6th/12th, when they were returned to Christian feudalism. The name is a mispronunciation of the Arabic word musta'rab, meaning variously "one who falsely claims to be an Arab", or "one who has been made an Arab" - the provenance is unclear, as in the voluminous annals of Arabic literature, it isn't used - it is predominantly used by Christians of the time, as a pejorative. The expanding Caliphate didn't call people names - instead, they most commonly called non-Muslim citizens ahl al-dhimma, "people under protection".
the rapid advance of the Caliphate is usually attributed to its tolerance
When the Caliphate conquered nations, they, with very few exceptions, did not forcibly convert, commit genocide against, or ethnically cleanse peoples whom they conquered, as long as the peoples were willing to pay a tax, jizya. Jizya was regressive in that it was only assessed against non-Muslims. It was progressive in that it was only assessed against healthy adult male non-slaves, and it was calibrated against one's profession, charging people more who made more money. Their conquest was bloody imperialism - but the ecumenical tolerance they evinced in the 8th century was in many instances superior to that practiced by the British Empire a thousand years later.
Nothing good lasts forever though. After about three hundred years, something changed in Muslim poetry. It became less 'sumptuous', 'whimsical', and 'arbitrary' (or as we might say, it was no longer 'LOLrandom') in the words of contemporary Arab historians, and moved to "reflect life, and press human experience into art" (Jayyusi & Marin, 1992, p.373) - 'human experience' before the germ theory of disease mostly sucked; the most durable form of popular media from the ethnocultural moment became depressing. I know - what does that have to do with anything?
Well, its a good question. Right about the same time, the Mozarabs started to complain loudly and violently that they were being discriminated against like never before. Though it'd been true for centuries, they began to complain that they couldn't ring church bells during the muezzin's call to prayer, and they were excluded from most administrative positions in politics and the military (note that the overwhelming majority of the Mozarabs had been feudal peons - they had no control over their profession, period). Modern scholars writing in Arabic tend to downplay these concerns, and claim the reason for the Christian riots as fanatical Christian ideologues who had been infiltrating the Iberian peninsula ahead of the Christian Reconquista movement - while modern scholars writing in Spanish, portray this as a civil rights issue whose time had come (Mozarabs, Hispanics, and the Cross by Gomez-Ruiz is a good example of this line of argument for English readers).
No one really knows what happened to Arabic poetry at the end of the golden age at the end of the first common millennium, though Jayyusi & Marin manage a poetic attempt:
The greatest, most perfected, most revered art of the Arabs, the propaganda weapon of caliphs and princes, the register of the annals of history, the vehicle of the whole wisdom of the race, celebrant of heroes and battles, medium for the expression of the erotic, the passionate, the dolorous and the festive, and for the delineation of the ideals of feminine beauty and male perfection was alive, and as such open to pervasive influences that were not immediately perceived - we should bear in mind that the basic Weltanschauung of the poets themselves underwent radical change over the centuries.
Remember that Arabic culture was well-integrated throughout the Caliphate - what happened on the Iberian peninsula resonated. The voices of the Caliphate saw what they were doing to keep their empire, and it stripped the joy from their song.
E. Levi-Provencal suggests an alternative; noting that the Mozarabs "interest in poetry and poets was as serious and widespread as in the East", "constantly infiltrated the Caliphate's deterritorialised literature", and that this "alien influence" led to the "crisis of identity". I suspect Levi-Provencal doesn't seem to approve of culture flowing up from the colonized to the colonizer - but I know I'm thankful for it. If it weren't for the arts of the oppressed, the U.S. would be greatly impoverished.
If you've read this far, I hope you're thinking about historical analogies; though history never repeats itself, we can all hear it rhyming. One in particular that strikes me is the undemocratic evidence that a group can be governed without its consent, for centuries even - as long as the benevolent dictatorship is a substantial improvement from the previous state. In fact, if the Caliphate had continually liberalized and allowed the Mozarabs to more thoroughly assimilate, perhaps this could have continued forever.