As a Spanish language instructor, the cultural focus has been more Western European - Christianity based with its interface with Islam for roughly seven hundred years in the Iberian Peninsula and with the “Reconquista” – the re-taking of the peninsula by Christian forces.

      Sadly, it seems that mankind will often fight with physical weapons to impose the values of one group on another or that “warriors” will attempt to satisfy rough and selfish ambitions to dominate.

The Abbasid Dynasty video re-enforced these thoughts: One group or figure dominates and then is deposed by another, and the cycle endlessly repeats.

     In thinking about how I would present the history of Islam, I would look for a general, relatively simple narrative to present as an introduction to the geographical areas and major names (Abbasid, Umayyad, etc.) and then try to pull out figures who were not only warriors, but those like Harun al-Rashid who helped foment scholarship, the arts, and organized governmental administrative practices.

    Although learning dates, geography, and political concepts is important, sometimes the human being gets lost in phrases like “And then for the next fifty years…”  Within those fifty years, there were so many daily lives: men, women and children who  performed daily tasks, worked at something to provide food and shelter, enjoyed leisure activities or maybe did not have access to them. This “intrahistoria” a term coined by the Spanish philosopher and author, Unamuno, needs to be recognized along with the big headline news of any time period.

     With the world “on screen,” studying individual human beings within their larger social and geographical context is important to cultivating empathy for, if not agreement with, cultures different in some ways than our own.

Carol Smolen