You might have gotten a confused impression of the history from the famous Mel Brooks sketch. The monks doing song-and-dance numbers, the nuns doing synchronized swimming -- they got all of that right . . . but . . . thing was, the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over Jews or Muslims as Jews or Muslims -- those were infidels, not heretics. But after the 1492 decree, many converted to avoid deportation -- and it then became the Inquisition's business to make sure they were sincere converts, and not practicing the old faith in secret.
Nnnnnobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Taking over a bird sanctuary. Perhaps the silliest deed in the annals of political terrorism. Not even the Symbionese Liberation Army ever got that clownish.
No shit. There are certain cultures/belief systems that are immiscible with Western culture. Islamic theological philosophy is still stuck in the 11th century. There are so many stuck in the notion, pushed by certain politicians that "they are just like us." No, they aren't. Islam will have to reform itself or die.
Islam can't reform. It's the nature of the religion. It's fixed in time, and to deviate from it is blasphemy. It's just incompatible with western civilization, full stop. The Chinese are about the only non-Islamic country that deals with it effectively, and there approach is to eliminate it completely.
The Islamic Caliphate was the most brilliant civilization west of China when there was scarcely such thing as a town in England or a literate person in Germany.
Do you also realize that The Inquisition drove all Jews from Spain?
India.
From that point, it was only 96 years until 1588 when Sir Francis Drake defeated the Spanish Armada, and that for sure marked Spain's slow decline. However, it did set the stage for Miguel Cervantes to write Don Quixote, in which the conversos (Jews) figured significantly in the story. I don't know if that's the first time the term "brain drain" could have been coined, but it was true enough.
Propaganda. Valuable services were performed and there were some advances in the sciences. But their contributions were incremental AND those contributions were made by a sect of Islam that no longer exists, as a matter of fact they are labeled as apostates.
And way over rated. A great deal of Islamic history is written by latter day politically correct historians in Reader's Digest format and by the Islamist's themselves to magnify their part in history.
Islam has remained civilized at all times from Mohammed to the present. That civilization never fell. They never descended to the level of subhuman savages like the Chinese.
The only thing overrated is its originality -- the Muslims got a lot of their civilization from classical Greek sources. But at least they did preserve those books after they were entirely lost in Europe -- we would not have a single volume of Plato without the Muslims.
