It is relatively unusual to read such crass invective from the university Augean stables of objectivity; but so be it: hate blinds. May the All-Seeing, the All-Merciful guide D. F-M.

Clear however is the unwanted – on the part of the author – positive effect for the Muslim reader: Fernández-Morera merely serves to remind the umma of all the life-giving aspects of the deen which have become forgotten or watered down during the last decades by means of the multiple efforts on both sides of the fence to align the deen with the demands of folklore christianity and monetary democracy. Thus the author is accurate in highlighting the recent sugary academic cosiness with Muslim Andalusia but gravely wanting in his understanding of such matters as slavery, jihad, dhimmi status, women and physical punishments within the shariat: his refusal to consider any wisdom underlying the legal parameters and rulings sent down by the Lord of the Worlds or demonstrated by His Messenger, peace be upon him, renders his assessment of Iberian life a collection of shallow, anecdotal, journalistic outpourings devoid of any deeper coherent social context. Given that he judges according to christian norms and legal terms then we must remind him of the necessity of just perspective: to take but just one example: Any ‘killings’ on the Peninsula were exacted by appointed judges and in accordance with divine law, unlike the 7 millions killed in the Balkans by his co-faithists, the six exterminated by the neo-Aryan-redemptionist, wotanist christians, the untold hundreds of thousands by European christian colonialists in Africa and Asia or the 20 million plus eliminated by the linguistic inheritors of the jews and christians, i.e. the purgists, the communists. That Fernández-Morera ‘discovers’ a number of aberrant rulers or judges, the exception to the rule, only serves to support the legitimacy and reality of the judicial system of that time and place. Extra-judicial, inquisitorial torture and killings on a massive scale on the part of non-Muslim parties are historically proven by the latter themselves; such practices were certainly not the norm in Muslim societies.