When the Cid Shattered the Teeth of Jihad
Mon Jun 20, 2022
Raymond Ibrahim
A ferocity not captured by Charlton Heston’s 1961 film, 'El Cid.'
This week in history witnessed one of the most remarkable feats in the long war between Islam and Christianity: the capitulation of the great kingdom of Valencia, which had been under Muslim control since the eighth century Islamic invasion of Spain, to the warlord Roderick (or Rodrigo) Díaz of Vivar — better known to posterity as "the Cid" (from the Arabic honorific al-sayyid, "the lord").
In the late eleventh century, the Almoravids, a semi-civilized Berber group committed to jihadist teaching, began to pour into Spain from Africa to aid their Spanish counterparts, the Moors, against the Reconquista—the Christian attempt to liberate Spain from Islam. The Cid's premiere modern biographer, Professor Ramón Menéndez Pidal (d. 1968), summarized the mood and stakes:
With the Almoravid invasion, the struggle between the two civilizations had reached its height…. [W]ith the invasion of the desert races and the recrudescence of Islamic fanaticism, a new chasm opened out between the two. And, on the Christian side, it was the Cid who, as the leader of the resistance against the victorious invaders, showed himself the most determined to carry on the war without giving or seeking quarter….
t was upon the Cid that the task devolved of resisting, unaided, the whole might of Islam.
More at
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/when-cid-shattered-teeth-jihad-raymond-ibrahim/
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