"Indeed it was the Moors who brought Jews to Al-Andalus, Spain and Portugal and frequently welcomed them when they suffered persecution elsewhere. Morocco has an ancient Jewish population which dates back to at least the dissolution of the Jewish state by the Romans around 70 AD." --- Dáithaí C (Image: Jewish women in Morocco)
"As a result of his (Cardinal Ximenes' coercive) endeavours, it is reported that on 18th December 1499 about three thousand Moors were baptized by him and a leading mosque in Granada was converted into a church. 'Converts' were encouraged to surrender their Islamic books, several thousands of which were destroyed by Ximenes in a public bonfire. A few rare books on medicine were kept aside for the University of Alcala [...] (Ximenes) claimed [...] the Moors had forfeited all their rights under the terms of capitulation (of Granada). They should therefore be given the choice between baptism and expulsion [...]. At Andarax the principal mosque, in which the women and children had taken refuge, was blown up with gun-powder [...] all books in Arabic, especially the Qur'an, were collected to be burnt [...] Cardinal Ximenes [...] was reported during his conversion campaign among the Granada Moors in 1500 to have burnt in the public square of Vivarrambla over 1,005,000 volumes including unique works of Moorish culture." --- H. Kamen (Image: Tilework at the Feather Palace, Sintra, Portugal. Photograph by Toobaa.)
"The land deprived of skillful irrigation of the Moors, grew improvished and neglected, the richest and most fertile valleys languished and were deserted, and most of the populous cities which had filled every district in Andalusia, fell into ruinous decay; and beggars, friars, and bandits took the place of scholars, merchants and knights. So low fell Spain when she had driven away the Moors. Such is the melancholy contrast offered by her history." --- Stanley Lane-Poole (Image: A small water fountain of Islamic design in Sintra, Portugal. Photograph by Toobaa.)
"The centuries-long wars with the Saracen, when everything of the East was the enemy, and the subsequent, now over, era of Western imperialism, when Eastern cultures were despised by us, have caused a block in European thinking, making it hard for us to acknowledge what we all owe to the East. Two great religions have influenced Europe, we say: Christianity and Judaism, but we scarcely mention Islam, which has been the third. We are the heirs, we claim proudly, of Greece and Rome, but seldom think of the Arabs, the Persians, the Moors, who, through Spain, fed culture into a Europe that was considered a poor and backward place, with a culture far below the dazzling civilizations of the cities of North Africa, Spain, the Middle East, India." --- Doris Lessing (b. 1919), British novelist
تثقپف - tathqīf - cultivation of the mind