This year, the program celebrates the time beginning almost 1,300 years ago when Islamic forces occupied most of Spain, Portugal and a large piece of southern France. They called their territory "al-Andalus."

Sorry but they never occupied a large piece of southern France

Sure, they raided occasionely southern countryside during the low middle ages but never succeeded to settle permanently

>>Sorry but they never occupied a large piece of southern France

A shortcoming which, if populations predictions are correct, they'll correct by the year 2020 at which Muslims will be the dominant religion in France.

Maria Rosa Menocal's fantasy, The Ornament of the World, is a perfect compendium of all the nonsense that has been passed off as history about Andalucia. Her bibliography, incidentally, fails to mention any of the authoritative sources on the history of Muslim Spain -- in particular, it does not even list (much less give any sign of her having actually read it) Levi-Provencal. Instead, her notions of Spain are right out of the works of romantic fiction -- Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (tales indeed) and Chateaubriand's Le Dernier des Abencerages. What is fine for Chateaubriand -- I mean, for god's sake, some of his best passages in the Memoires d'Outre-tombe are entirely fictional (see his sonorous sentences about his visit to "les champs de Lexington" where he never was). For the purposes of fiction it is acceptable; you know, il sospiro del Moro, the nobility of those Muslims, the wonderful way Maimonides was treated (why, then, did he flee Moorish Spain)?

The failure to list, or even be aware of, the most authoritative studies of Moorish Spain would be disturbing in a high school paper. What makes it more worrisome, and perhaps representative of the age in which we live, is that Menocal, in her dreamy desire to emphasize convivencia and to ignore the realities of Muslim rule and the real status of non-Muslims subjugated to that rule (she has not the slightest idea of what dhimmitude entailed, or why a Jew could be a court doctor or even high-ranking official, while all of his co-religionists would still be subject to humiliation, degradation, and the permanent insecurity that was apparent, for example, in the massacre of Grenada's Jews in 1066 -- and he himself could in a New York or Cordova minute be thrust down himself) ) is no goofy armchair historian, without access to a library. No, she is presented to us as the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale. Yale, as I understand it, likes to think of itself as having some standards. Where are they?

Yes, there was so much religious harmony in Muslim Spain that the Christians fought for 800 years to get them out. Now, imagine how much hatred you must have for a group of people to devote 800 years to getting rid of them?

Do they think the Christians just woke up one day and say, "Hey we don't like the Muslims, let's get rid of them?" Obviously there were reasons they disliked the Muslims -- big reasons. Like for instance, the fact that no Christian could proclaim publicly that Mo was not a prophet without incurring a death sentence.

and just think, the new Golden Age in Spain is slowly being once again awakened! Imagine all the beauty and peace that there will be in Spain in 20 years within the Second Golden Age where all Muslims, Jews and Christians will no doubt live in harmony once again!
puke!@

jihan

Peace will be had when we once again choose to live as dhimmis UNDER our proper muslim masters. That's why it's called the Religion of Peace.

The "Golden Age" of "el-Andalus" is as whoppping big a fiction as the tales of sweeping tolerance, brother/sisterhood and harmony in the fabled "Palestine"* of yore, when Moslems were in control, fostering "sweetness and light".

The PLO's most fond of pushing this drivel, the Europeans and Western Leftists and "liberals" can't wait to lap it up, but that hardly makes their purblind, saccharine lies into the truth (despite the dictum of the late, vile Edward Saïd's dictum that "there are no facts, just opinions").

Alas, the UN and EU & all the rest of the myopic suckers (led by the nose by the Islamo-fascists' overt, covert and tacit quislings and running-dogs) could be on a short, one-way trip to discover that this impression is totally wrong in truth - only, tragically, terminally, too late to reverse the rot.

They'll gladly swallow the Arabs' poison, earnestly pretending (against the evidence of their own nostrils and taste-buds) that it's the elixir of life itself - as endlessly retailed to their willing ears by the rabid Arabs and Moslems and their hired and deceivers in the press, academia, politics, churches, NGOs, etc).

After all, if "Old Palestine" had been such a nirvana (like, without demur, they accept Moorish Spain had been), then selling Israel down the river to Islamo-fascism - in an act of grand appeasement, at the earliest opportunity - would be something they could rationalize as the loftiest boon to all humanity.

*Never in history has any entity of "Palestine" ever existed, except as a Roman province, a League of Nations-mandated territory entrusted to the British Empire or as a basic, geographical expression.

I am sick to death of the daily rhetoric about Islam. It is certain that a war will be fought in the near future to once again defend what, I dont know, but to fightfor whats left of what the Western world once was.Only problem is that how can a self loathing population immersed in daily propoganda like the Smithsonian exhibit, muster up the guts to recognize whats happening to them... us and confront it?

Disgusted in Europe.

I'd like to say that muslims didn't even dominate all Spain. For those of you who are not familiar with spanish History, there where a northern resistence in the mountains, in Asturias and Navarra, mainly. Of course, for a decade or so, we had any independence as a kingdom, but before the century ended, the spanish christian realms ruled over all the north.
I want you to remember this because some people may misunderstood than period of time: 800 years. The reconquest was long, very long, hard and bloody, but Spain wasn't dominated by the Islam for 800 years: Spain was the christian, liberated land. Why they lasted in some parts of Spain for so long? That's complex. I invite you to read a book about the history of the reconquest, a one free of that kind of crap that inspire this post, because we can learn there a lot on how to fight Islam. Just an example: every time we adopted an appeasement policy, we failed and suffered the consecuences.
There is no need to say that there were no convivence or tolerance at all... Only those who didn't fight, those who surrendered, were kept alive, without rigths, as second cathegory citezens, marginated and humilliated, most of them without their belongings and states. And those, becouse were necessary. If jews and christian people had important charges it was because there weren't muslims capable of doing their work. And remember that war prissioners were sold as slaves, a great part of them as sexual slaves. Well, you'd better read some book; it take long to get rid of lies...
By the way, the Cid was serving as a general for a moor little king because he was exiled and it was the only way to keep some power and wealth. Unfortunately, these things were common.
Ah, and "Cid" comes from the arab word for "lord" or "master". That's how they called him.

"Islam" means submission.

When it all kicks off in Bosnia again, one can only hope that the US backs the right side.

It won't if the democrats are in power. 1200 year old churches will be lost forever. The serbs will become extict, like the Asian tribe the North Veitnamese wiped out thanks to Kerry's traitorous actions.