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Ingratitude Was All These People Got For Doing the Right Thing

Khalid Elhassan August 28, 2023 32 min

Ingratitude - Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in chlorinated lime water before operating — Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in chlorinated lime water before operating. NPR

A Master’s Ingratitude Towards a Slave Who Led an Army on His Behalf

Tariq ibn Ziyad (died circa 720) was a Berber general who led the Muslim conquest of Visigothic Hispania, or the Iberian Peninsula. His reward was a massive dose of ingratitude. Tariq was a slave of the Muslim governor of North Africa, Musa bin Nusayr, who appointed Tariq governor of Tangier in 710. There, he was approached by a Visigoth nobleman from nearby Ceuta, out for revenge because the Visigoth King Roderic had raped his daughter. He allied with Tariq, and in 711 arranged to ship him and a small army of about 7000 men to Spain.

There, Tariq secured a beachhead in today’s Gibraltar – a Spanish derivation of “Jabal Tariq“, or “the Mountain of Tariq” – which is named after him. Tariq reportedly burned his fleet to drive home to his men that there was no possibility of retreat, and it was either victory or death. From Gibraltar as a base of operations, Traiq proceeded to subjugate the territory of today’s Spain and Portugal, which he sought to conquer on behalf of the Umayyad Caliphate.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.