The oft-repeated story of “Al Andalus” as a Multicultural Utopia is as empty as an archeological dig in Cordova

Cordova which was supposed to have been the Paris of its day, with a population of as many as a million people, yields up only desolation. Try as they might, archeologists have found hardly anything, hardly a brick or inscription, for the two centuries prior to the mid-tenth. From the Tenth Century onward there are archeological remains, but the settlement is absolutely nothing like the conurbation described by the Arab writers. The deeper the geotome probes, as it seems, the more deeply the investigator finds himself in a Twilight Zone of pseudo-theses where, as the title of an old Firesign Theatre comedy album put it, everything you know is wrong.

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