The exports from Seville, which was one of the greatest river-ports in Spain, were cotton, oil, olives and other local produce. It was peopled, as we have seen, mainly by renegades, who by devotion to business had amassed large fortunes. During the emirate of 'Abdallāh, when Ibn Ḥajjāj held the sovereignty in Seville, the port was filled with vessels laden with Egyptian cloth, slaves, and singing girls from every part of Europe and Asia. The most important exports from Jaen and Málaga were saffron, figs, wine, marble and sugar. Spanish exports went to Africa, Egypt and Constantinople, and thence they were forwarded to India and Central Asia. Trade was kept up not only with Constantinople, but with the East generally, especially Mecca, Bagdad and Damascus. The Caliphs organised a regular postal service for the government. The necessities of government and of commerce compelled the Arabs to issue a coinage, which, though at first copied from Oriental models, took on later a character of its own. The gold unit was the dīnār, and they also used half dīnārs and one-third dīnārs. The silver unit was the dirham, and the copper the fals (Latin, follis). In time, however, these coins went down considerably in weight and value.
The official language for the government service of Muslim Spain was classical Arabic, the language of the Koran. But the speech of everyday life was a vulgar Arabic dialect, which contained a mixture of various Latin or Romance tongues of the conquered races, and was scarcely understood in the East. Ribera, in his study of the Song Book of Ibn Ḳuzmān, has proved that, even at the court of the Caliphs in Cordova, a vulgar Romance dialect was spoken, which was understood by the cadis and the other officials. He explains the existence of this Romance dialect by the probability that the Arabs, who formed the backbone of the army, must have married Spanish woment. Ibn Bashkuwāl, Ibn al-Abbār and other Muslim biographers always praise highly scholars who know Arabic. Thus among the Muslims, as among all the European peoples of that date, there was both a literary language and a language of daily speech. Just as the Mozarabs used Latin and Arabic, so the Spaniards of the North employed Latin in their documents and Romance dialects in their everyday life.
There was no regular system of education, and it is only in 1065 that the first university appears at Bagdad. Up till the reign of Ḥakam government interest in education, according to Ribera, was limited to "maintaining freedom of instruction in opposition to the narrowness of the Mālikite clergy who attempted to monopolise the teaching." Ḥakam II, who was unable to travel to the East, invited Oriental scholars to Cordova, where they gave lectures but received no official recognition. At the end of his life he set aside legacies for the payment of professors in Cordova with an eye to poor students. But this only applied to religious education. The authorities intervened to test the orthodoxy of the teaching, and at first a great impulse was given to the spread of
