The Al-Andalus story was not so rosy as it is often portrayed.http://www.centerforinquiry.net/isis/articles_and_books/the_corrosive_hagiography_of_muslim_spain/ :”Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.:“No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to accost them with the greeting, ‘Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!’ (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]). A DISTINCTIVE SIGN MUST BE IMPOSED UPON THEM IN ORDER THAT THEY MAY BE RECOGNIZED AND THIS WILL BE FOR THEM A FORM OF DISGRACE.”In addition to a small minority of privileged Christian notables, Muslim Spain was populated by tens of thousands of Christian slaves, and humiliated and oppressed Christian dhimmis. The muwallads (neo-converts to Islam) were in nearly perpetual revolt against the Arab immigrants who had claimed large estates for themselves, farmed by Christian serfs or slaves. Expropriations and fiscal extortions ignited the flames of continual rebellion by both muwallads and mozarabs (Christian dhimmis) throughout the Iberian peninsula. Leaders of these rebellions were crucified, and their insurgent followers were put to the sword. These bloody conflicts, which occurred throughout the Hispano-Umayyad emirate until the tenth century, fueled endemic religious hatred. An 828 C.E. letter from Louis the Pious to the Christians of Merida summarized their plight under Abd al-Rahman II, and during the preceeding reign: confiscation of their property, unfair increase of their exacted tribute, removal of their freedom (probably meaning slavery), and oppression by excessive taxes15.In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela, and his son Joseph, who protected a once flourishing Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslim community. At least three thousand Jews perished in an uprising surrounding the 1066 assassination, alone16. The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation- massacre, captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators17. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordova with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez- disguised as a Muslim- before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt. Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Muslim Spain, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews:”..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us…Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they..”18The eminent historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, observed 35 years ago that nineteenth-century “Pro-Islamic” Jews promoted a utopian view of the egalitarian nature of Islamic rule, particularly in Muslim Spain. Not surprisingly, Muslims eventually also picked up on this romantic Jewish myth about Islam, which became a standard part of their own self-image. However, Lewis concludes,”…The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam.”An accurate assessment of interfaith relationships in Muslim Spain, and the contemporary currents responsible for obfuscating that history, can be found in Richard Fletcher’s very engaging “Moorish Spain”. Mr. Fletcher offers these sobering, unassailable observations:”The witness of those who lived through the horrors of the Berber conquest, of the Andalusian fitnah in the early eleventh century, of the Almoravid invasion- to mention only a few disruptive episodes- must give it [i.e., the roseate view of Muslim Spain] the lie. The simple and verifiable historical truth is that Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was of tranquility…Tolerance? Ask the Jews of Granada who were massacred in 1066, or the Christians who were deported by the Almoravids to Morocco in 1126 (like the Moriscos five centuries later)…In the second half of the twentieth century a new agent of obfuscation makes its appearance: the guilt of the liberal conscience, which sees the evils of colonialism- assumed rather than demonstrated-foreshadowed in the Christian conquest of al-Andalus and the persecution of the Moriscos (but not, oddly, in the Moorish conquest and colonization). Stir the mix well together and issue it free to credulous academics and media persons throughout the western world. Then pour it generously over the truth…in the cultural conditions that prevail in the west today the past has to be marketed, and to be successfully marketed it has to be attractively packaged. Medieval Spain in a state of nature lacks wide appeal. Self-indulgent fantasies of glamour…do wonders for sharpening up its image. But Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”20Finally, even if deemed “tolerant” for Medieval civilization, dhimmitude is completely incompatible with modern notions of equality between individuals, regardless of religious faith. At the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist that Muslims in the West adopt post-Enlightenment societal standards of equality, not “tolerance”, abandoning forever their hagiography of the repressive, discriminatory standards practiced by the classical Maliki jurists of “enlightened” Muslim Spain.”