Another hoary and persistent myth issued by Muslims, academics, 'experts' and chattering media talking-heads, is that Islam and the Greater Arabian empire had 'golden' epochs of multi-cult, inter-faith harmony. All was light and wonderment apparently, during this Arab golden age. 9^th century Abbasid Spain is usually cited as the epitome of multi-cultural grandeur with pious, peaceful, tolerant Muslims, Berbers and Arabs enjoined in improving civilization, side by side with Jews, Christians and assorted infidels. This lie is perniciously amusing – and entirely untrue. 

 The Muslim-Arab conquest of Spain during the 8^h century was not one of genial courtesy, imparted with civilized countenance. It was a jihad with all the blood, destruction, and enslavement that a Muslim jihad demands.

 It is an absurd fantasy that a large-scale Muslim-Arab invasion of a rich Christian state, during the 8^th century AD, would not have ended up as a conquest, replete with massacres, deportations, coerced conversions and extraordinary bloodletting. It is equally insane to suppose that a society built around the intolerant fascism of the Koran would suddenly and quite magically become a multi-cult potpourri of goodwill, hope, faith and brotherly love. Al Andalus was never recognised until recently as the medieval name for Spain.  It was always Hispania, but academics, 'experts' and 'those who know' are keen to destroy the Christian legacy which created European civilisation and the modern world.  They therefore Arabicise the Romano-Christian civilisation of the Visigoths and Hispania. 

Spain represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.

Occupied Spain was hardly a peaceful, academically-inclined society. War and violence were endemic. Slave trading prominent. The rape of women common. Jews and Christians along with other slaves were tolerated only for their usefulness. The Muslims regarded them as little better than trained monkeys who might improve either the profits or the efficacy of the Arab controlled state. They certainly were not considered the equals of Arabs and would therefore have had little real contact in any area of importance. As in all Islamic societies, the dhimmis would have been shunned by their masters.  Glorious cooperation between the 'faiths' in Al-Andalus is a bold faced lie. 

Two writers amongst many who know that real historical legacy of the Arab subjugation and eradication of Christian Spain are Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom. Both are respected experts on Islamic history, including the destruction which ensues once a state such as Christian Spain becomes Islamicized:

 “We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed ‘Euro-Islam’ fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values. Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.” 

“In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis – like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings....  The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.”

 Arab controlled Spain was thus not an example of shining, benign multiculturalism. Jews and Christians were hunted, killed, forced into Islam, or perhaps deported. Jews and Christians who accepted Muslim overlordship and their dhimmitude were allowed to work, pay taxes, invent, conduct trade and generally engage in activities which benefited their Muslim masters. This is true of any slave society. Saying that Jews were at times 'tolerated' in Muslim Spain and than extrapolating their tolerated slave status to create a mythical world of heroic inter-faith cooperation is to put it mildly, insane. It would be as if the slave society of the Roman empire, where Gallic, Greek, Berber, Jewish and other assorted slave nationalities worked for the profit and the power of their Roman masters, was for some reason declared the great exemplar of multiculturalism.

Absurd.

When Muslims take over a state they eviscerate any non-Islamic culture and heritage. This is a historical rule. Muslims need the conquered population to be subservient to the Meccan moon deity ali-ilah. Those who don't accord themselves to the Islamic cult are either killed, deported or reduced to 'dhimmi' or slave status. As Bat Yeor writes:

 “The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers. A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (zimma, or ‘dhimma’) with the State: for the life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation money. In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.”

 Islam demands the creation of the communal and the castration of the individual. All resources are directed and commanded by the Islamic state. The Muslim state has the power and the means to appropriate any and everything for the glory of Allah. The individual matters not. The communal world of Allah and Islamic doctrine is the ideal condition for a Muslim state.

But in the la-la land of today's political correctness fantasy replaces reality. Islamic barbarism in Spain which over 700 years murdered tens if not hundreds of thousands of Christians and Jews; and which extinguished what was once an advanced and precocious state; is now recreated as a multi-cult version of a John Lennon song. All matter of nonsense about inventions, art and public architecture are put forward to support the rather insidious notion that Islamic jihad can suddenly become a reincarnation of Augustinian Rome. Arab jihad and Muslim conquest always leads to the eradication of culture, civilization, rights, life and hope. That is the barren reality of the Islamic program and ideology - a set of facts supported by 1400 years of blood-letting. Ignoring it, or worse, celebrating such a travesty of violence, hate and racism, is a sure method to kill your own civilization.