Recently, media attention has focused on Spain because of the public protests against its left-wing government. Widespread disapproval of the government is hardly surprising given the government’s unpopular policies regarding the economy, mass immigration, the constitution, education, and other important issues.

Furthermore, with the mass influx of illegal Muslim migrants into Spain and the severe decline in Spanish birth rates, the nation finds itself at a crossroads, with its future far from certain.A major problem that prevents many people from understanding Spain’s history with Islam is the false historiography, or even propaganda, that rewrites the history of Muslim-occupied medieval Spain and tries to portray it as a ‘bastion of peace and multiculturalism.’

After Islam’s emergence in Arabia during the 7th century, one of the first objectives of invading Arabs was the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. Parts of Spain and Portugal (which the Muslims called ‘al-Andalus’) were occupied and ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties for almost 800 years, beginning in the 8th century. With the expansion of Islam, the Muslims seized almost the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula in less than a decade, from 711 to 718. The Visigothic Christian kingdom was defeated, and its last king, Rodrigo, was slain by the invaders.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute notes:

Scholars, journalists, and politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—’al-Andalus’—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. But this widely accepted account is simply false, as Northwestern University scholar (and Modern Age editorial adviser) Darío Fernández-Morera reveals in his new book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.

Some excerpts from the book include:

Al-Kardabus and another Muslim historian, Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi, write that the Arab leader Musa Ibn Nusayr sacked, enslaved, and spent three years waging jihad—holy war—against the Spanish infidels. Along with al-Kardabus, al-Marrakushi and al-Maqqari say that Musa spent as much time ‘pillaging’ as ‘organizing’ the conquered land.

These sources also mention that several members of the tabi’un (a generation of pious Muslims who were direct disciples of Muhammad’s Companions) entered Spain to direct the jihad and the conversion of the land. The presence of these members of the tabi’un underlines the fundamentally religious motivation of the invasion—a jihad.

If Christians resisted, a massacre would follow after a Muslim victory. Near Orihuela, the defeated Christians were punished with extermination.

After the Muslims took Córdoba in a furious assault, the remaining Christian defenders retreated to a church to continue fighting. According to al-Maqqari, the Muslims put the building to the torch and the Christians inside died, without surrendering; according to al-Kardabus, when the Christians surrendered, the Muslim commander had them beheaded.

The history of Muslim-occupied Spain was largely marked by a severe persecution of Christians and Jews that included several expulsions and pogroms. In 1013, for instance, Muslims expelled the Jews from Cordoba and confiscated their wealth. In 1066, Muslims massacred almost the entire Jewish population of Granada in a pogrom that destroyed the city.

Al-Andalus was a slave state that included eunuchs and the widespread sexual slavery of non-Muslim women. Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, has documented the vast extent of jihad slavery in al-Andalus, including the aptly named ‘hideous trade’ of eunuch slavery. Bostom quotes Evariste Levi-Provencal (1894-1956), who was an influential modern scholar of Muslim-occupied Spain: