What is the world coming to when the word "jamon" offends someone!!! Story follows:

http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_28388.shtml

If this kid is offended by ham, he is in for a rude awakening when (if) he leaves his parents side and goes into the "real world."

People can be religiously insensitive in some cases, but this is not one of them.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say to this kid and his family (and the school for even investigating it): get over it.

Quoting aa61hvy (Reply 1): and the school for even investigating it

While the complaint is ridiculous, the school is obliged to follow up on complaints if only to conclude that they may be ridiculous. The regional government is standing by the teacher as is to be expected when a teacher is merely teaching children about the local economy and production.

This boy can not claim that the word ham or pig is offensive to him because of his religion. While the Quran does state that one must not eat the meat of a pig, it does allow it in certain circumstances such as being forced to or due to famine. There is no prescription on uttering the words pig or ham in the Quran. The Quran does state:

Quote: [16:116] You shall not utter lies with your own tongues stating: "This is lawful, and this is unlawful," to fabricate lies and attribute them to GOD. Surely, those who fabricate lies and attribute them to GOD will never succeed.

Quoting aa61hvy (Reply 1): I'm going to go out on a limb here and say to this kid and his family (and the school for even investigating it): get over it.

I would like to say something to the family, and trust me, it would not be so polite.  

It's no thanks to narrowminded imbeciles like these that the world is so full of problems   

Quoting WarRI1 (Reply 3):

Oh Hell yes War. The words I have in mind would get me banned!!!

I'm so sick of this type of thing. And they wonder why they have problems!           

Key Excerpt:

"The government’s Minister for Presidency, Ramón Jáuregi, was questioned on the incident in an interview on Onda Cero radio this Monday morning. He described the denuncia as ‘unfounded’ and said there was no hope of it going any further."

Spain has been a country that has had Moorish population for thousands of years and they have mingled and lived with the Christians and the Jews peacefully and each givng a lot to the other culture, besides living with a degree of harmony seldom seen in any other era of civilized humanity. This is so strange and out of place that my thinking is that the imbecile teenager tried to play a prank that backfired. Nothing will come of it, specially, in Granada, of all places.

Moving on...

Quoting AR385 (Reply 6): Nothing will come of it

Not directly, but that was enough to hit the media and stir anti-muslim sentiments, which are on the rise in Europe.

This family did nothing for the image of their religion...

I cant believe this , whats next not talking about leavened bread products around Jews during passover. The kid should suck it up and get used to being offended every once in a while. I am 16 and get offended sometimes by what people say about me, do you see me making it to the front page of the Houston Chronicle whenever someone calls me fat or rich, no i just brush it off and move on.

Talk about going overboard! I mean, it's not like the teacher waved a piece of ham in his face and said that if he didn't eat it, he would fail. Just talking about ham being a crime, now that is truly crazy. If I filed a lawsuit every time I heard something I disagreed with, I would pretty good friends with the court clerk, and the local judge would hate me  

Jamon, ham, jambon, prosciutto, ветчина, Schinken!
Hmm – yummy!

Stupid fundamentalists (from all religions).   


Axel

Warning: offensive post 

Jamón de Teruel



Joselito



Jamón Ibérico de bellota (Extremadura)



Presunto de Barrancos



Prosciutto crudo de Parma

I warned you!!!

JJJ,

Now you´ve made me go to my local deli to by a piece og Jabugo, and it´not peanuts. That Student, does not know wht he is missing. I guess he´ll be happy eating a Turkey drumstick. Oh wait, do they have those in Granada? Poor teen prankster.

JJJ, how much are these?   
200 Euros?

Axel

[Edited 2010-12-22 03:49:36]

Quoting AR385 (Reply 6): Spain has been a country that has had Moorish population for thousands of years and they have mingled and lived with the Christians and the Jews peacefully and each givng a lot to the other culture, besides living with a degree of harmony seldom seen in any other era of civilized humanity. This is so strange and out of place that my thinking is that the imbecile teenager tried to play a prank that backfired. Nothing will come of it, specially, in Granada, of all places.

I don't think there is one sentence in that entire paragraph that can be said to be true.. it reads like a political correct rewriting of history.

Has Spain had a moorish population for "thousands of years"? No of course not. A few centuries of invaders, yes.

Did the moors mingle and live happily with Christians and Jews? No of course not, they were invaders for one thing and for another killed, abused and desicrated Iberia and the Iberian population at every turn.

Was there a degree of harmony ... etc.? No, there was no harmony, except when the moors were killed, expelled and peace was again restored to the Iberian peninsula.

Later we had to deal with moorish pirates from N-Africa and now we have to deal with morons who immigrate but won't integrate. And historical revisions that make one's stomach turn.

asturias

Quoting oldeuropean (Reply 13): JJJ, how much are these? 200 Euros?

Took the pics from here, www.antoniomata.com, the Teruel one starts at 100 euros and is good enough (obviously a 600 euro Joselito is, well, I'm at loss for words here).

Apparently they ship to any country in Europe (not the US, though, there's those pesky FDA regularions about pork products).

Quoting JJJ (Reply 11): Warning: offensive post

Damn you for making me hungry! I looooooooooooooove Spanish cured hams   

Quoting Asturias (Reply 14): Has Spain had a moorish population for "thousands of years"? No of course not. A few centuries of invaders, yes. Did the moors mingle and live happily with Christians and Jews? No of course not, they were invaders for one thing and for another killed, abused and desicrated Iberia and the Iberian population at every turn. Was there a degree of harmony ... etc.? No, there was no harmony, except when the moors were killed, expelled and peace was again restored to the Iberian peninsula.

They weren't here for 'a few centuries. They held Southern Spain for almost 800 years.... more than the Christian monarchy that followed them, though they were forcibly converted first, then expelled anyway in 1609, so AR385 claim is not true, muslims had a token presence in Spain from 1609 to the early 2000s, though their legacy lives on in the cuisine, language (Arabic is the 2nd contributor of words to the Spanish language, right after the Latin from which Spanish evolved) and general use of the land.

Also there were quite a few periods of peaceful coexistence of Muslim, Christians and Jews during the Caliphate and the different Taifas, though the most famous such period was after the Christian conquest with Alphonse X.

Muslim Spain was an extremely complex period (800 years is LONG period), and alternated fundamentalist and socially advanced muslim governments, several invasions, muslim-christian alliances to attack other muslims or christians, etc. You can't just paint that period with such a wide brush.

The 'peace' bit after the reconquista is relatively true, peace was restored in the Iberian peninsula (the different wars with Portugal notwithstanding) but after 7 centuries of warfare we couldn't just sit there so proceeded to tell the rest of Europe and America just how good we were at our favourite hobby, so hardly 'peace' in absolute terms.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 14): Did the moors mingle and live happily with Christians and Jews? No of course not, they were invaders for one thing and for another killed, abused and desicrated Iberia and the Iberian population at every turn.

You obviously have not been to Córdoba, Granada, or the entire Andalucía for that matter. Or was the Alhambra built by the Celts?

Quoting Asturias (Reply 14): Was there a degree of harmony ... etc.? No, there was no harmony, except when the moors were killed, expelled and peace was again restored to the Iberian peninsula.

Really, what about the 800 years they lived there where they turned a backwards Iberia, which was nothing but a collection of towns with mud streets, beggars, and raw sewage running down where ever you stepped?

Quoting Asturias (Reply 14): Later we had to deal with moorish pirates from N-Africa and now we have to deal with morons who immigrate but won't integrate. And historical revisions that make one's stomach turn.

That´s your rigtht wing view of things talking, obviously.

And yes, I probably got carried away when I said 1,000s of years but the truth is that Spain and America, by extension, owe a lot to the moors. And thanks JJJ, your post makes a lot of sense.

Posted this on my Facebook wall, and suddenly got called racist by a supposed friend, and she meant it!!

Im still stunned!!!

I guess taking this kid to a game to see some good ol' fashioned pigskin (American football) is out of the question then.   

When i arrived in Cape Town the other year, i had barely had breakfast which was sausage egg and beans, my Muslim friends could smell my breath and i said sorry i had this but they didnt even mind which was nie of them. ( i usually have the veg option but it was kinda yucky so had the meat one.)

Quoting lhr380 (Reply 19): Posted this on my Facebook wall, and suddenly got called racist by a supposed friend, and she meant it!!

Tell your friend to get with the program and stop being ultra sensitive. It's people like her that are making this world too sensitive.

In a starvation scenario, it would be a four letter word for this family, good.

Quoting aa61hvy (Reply 22): Tell your friend to get with the program and stop being ultra sensitive. It's people like her that are making this world too sensitive.

And I should say that to her other friend who sent me such a nice message calling me a racist as well!!! I still can not believe what she has done..

Quoting Flyingfox27 (Reply 21): my Muslim friends could smell my breath and i said sorry i had this

I don't know what's worse, pandering after a complaint is lodged or apologising in advance.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 17): They weren't here for 'a few centuries.

Nor were they here for "thousands of years". 8 centuries can be said to be "a few" centuries.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 17): though their legacy lives on in the cuisine, language (Arabic is the 2nd contributor of words to the Spanish language, right after the Latin from which Spanish evolved) and general use of the land.

In the cuisine? In the jamón serrano then? I am joking a little bit, but seriously the mediterranean cuisine is a about as arabic as anything else. Besides, the cuisine of Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia is not very similar to mediterranean, rather you are referring to the Moros, who are indeed mediterranean like the rest of us. The people in Iberia were not eating very differently from the rest of the mediterranean, even before the invasion of the Moros.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 17): You can't just paint that period with such a wide brush.

Nor can you claim it was "complex" and thus had it's "nice" sides. It was an invasion and it was brutal. That's just plain fact. The reconquista didn't happen because the Moors were so darn tootin' nice. Nothing complex about that - and the periods of "peace" and coexistence was enshrined by the fact that the Moors were not in the majority and couldn't subjugate the population completely without running the risk of losing control.

That's the peace. Because the Moors weren't powerful enough to crush the iberians.

asturias

In German, people's bottoms can also be referred to as "Schinken" which is the German word for jamon.

Too bad that in our today's PC world, teachers are no longer alllowed to slap pupils with a cane on their "Schinken" .

This brat would certainly deserve it. The parents should actially be reprimanded and told that things are actaully exactly the other way round. If their child thinks he is offended by someone mentioning the word "Jamon" the he is actually offending all the people raising pigs, curing the ham, selling and eating a perfect and delicious food.

How arrogant and disgusting can a religion be that is indoctrinating their children in such a way that they become unable to live in peace with others who have differenmt opinions than they have? If the parenmts resist to understand that, that child should lave that school instantly.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 26): In the cuisine? In the jamón serrano then? I am joking a little bit, but seriously the mediterranean cuisine is a about as arabic as anything else.

Most of our almond-based desserts and sweets are Arabic in origin (starting with Turrón), watermelons, spinach, aubergines, rice, etc. all have ethimologically Arabic names for a reason. The Arab period broke with the Roman and pre-Roman cuisine traditions and is precisely then when Spanish (Iberian, by extension) food took a personality of its own.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 26): That's just plain fact. The reconquista didn't happen because the Moors were so darn tootin' nice. Nothing complex about that - and the periods of "peace" and coexistence was enshrined by the fact that the Moors were not in the majority and couldn't subjugate the population completely without running the risk of losing control.

No, the reconquista happened because there was a time when the relatively enlightened Spanish Muslims were no longer the baddest in the neighborhood and those hairy guys in the mountain started to claw back terrain from them. Old slaves, new masters as they say.

The enlightened religious cause wasn't a factor until the Crusades time, and, just like the crusades themselves, more an excuse to grab land than an actual religious commitment.

During the reconquista there were Muslims fighting Muslims, Muslims aiding Christians to fight other Christians and all the different combinations you can think about. They really happened, the short version of 'everything started at Covadonga and ended in 1492 in Granada' is pathetically simplistic. Hell, the Cid himself fought as a vassal for several Muslim kingdoms.

I was thinking more about this. Obviously this type of sensitivity is exclusive to a few Muslims. I worked with a devout Muslim when I worked in LA. We had office lunches etc where we had pork products. He would simply ask what was in everything and avoid the stuff with pig. He made no issue of it and we made sure to have enough food of things he could eat. He never every griped about us eating it. He even did his prayers in the office (privately). And to top it off, he was more than willing to answer any questions we had about his faith. It's all in open mindedness and tolerance!

Quoting JJJ (Reply 29): Most of our almond-based desserts and sweets are Arabic in origin (starting with Turrón), watermelons, spinach, aubergines, rice, etc. all have ethimologically Arabic names for a reason. The Arab period broke with the Roman and pre-Roman cuisine traditions and is precisely then when Spanish (Iberian, by extension) food took a personality of its own.

Arroz (rice) is from latin "oriza", from greek "oryza" via an Indo-Iranian language (persian: brizi) ultimately from Sanskrit. vrihi-s ... not Arabic. Though the same sanskrit word entered Arabic.

For instance. However this does not mean that arabic words didn't enter the language, but then a plethora of arabic words entered OTHER languages as well. It was a trade language in a large part of the mediterranean thus it is quite myopic to claim that this is the result of "enlightened" muslim invaders of Iberia.

You can go as far as Iceland (a country with no real contact to the Berbers/Moors/Arabs) and find plenty of words with arabic origin. That in and of itself is quite meaningless other than to highlight the obvious - namely that arabic was an influential trade language of a certain age.

Certainly there is some influence of cuisine in Spain because of the Berbers, but when you travel the mediterranean you realize that it is quite limited indeed. The cuisine of Morocco and Algiers and Egypt is not exactly reminiscent of Spanish cuisine.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 29): No, the reconquista happened because there was a time when the relatively enlightened Spanish Muslims were no longer the baddest in the neighborhood and those hairy guys in the mountain started to claw back terrain from them. Old slaves, new masters as they say.

Enlightened muslims were so busy undoing the entire enlightenment of the arab world that yes soon enough the "hairy" people of Iberia were quite a match. Mostly because the arab culture and so called "enlightenment" was a result of centuries of progress and conquest in the area of India/Pakistan - but was quickly ended by the backwater desert religion of islam. A millennia of progress undone in few centuries.

Enlightened indeed. Either way, yes the "old slaves" became the "new masters" or more accurately the invaders were repelled, killed and defeated as they should have been from the very start.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 29): The enlightened religious cause wasn't a factor until the Crusades time, and, just like the crusades themselves, more an excuse to grab land than an actual religious commitment.

The Reconquista was a "land grab"? Yeah just like the Allies were just "land grabbing" from the Germans in WW2. When you take my land and I kick you out of it, that isn't land grab on my part. You've got it ass backwards as they say.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 29): During the reconquista there were Muslims fighting Muslims, Muslims aiding Christians to fight other Christians and all the different combinations you can think about. They really happened, the short version of 'everything started at Covadonga and ended in 1492 in Granada' is pathetically simplistic. Hell, the Cid himself fought as a vassal for several Muslim kingdoms.

Meh the muslims never would have managed to take over Iberia had it not been for Christian traitors. That's true.. however this wasn't a religious war and I'm not painting it as such. That may have happened later in the end of the Reconquista, but until then this was just a war of defense and reclaim. That's also why it took so long. Had the Reconquista been purely a religious movement, the Moors would have been defeated within a century.

Some people seem to have some sort of a latent (very latent in fact) Stockholm syndrome concerning the muslim invaders of Spain. Strange sympathies and excuses made for them.

My attitude towards the muslim invaders: May they all rot in hell. As they do. And ironically for the apologists of these invaders and abusers, the M11 terrorists used this "enlightened" period of muslim invasion as an excuse. Not that they wouldn't have found another one, but then again, perhaps not and many Spanish lives would have been saved today.

asturias

I have few words of wisdom to this family "You are not doing any good to Islam with this stupid behaviour".
I travel all over the world and a lot of restaurant serve ham, i avoid eating it and i will not make a fuss about it. Live and let others live the way they like. I would like to extend my regrets to that poor teacher.

You know I really thought this was an item in some satirical magazine so did some more digging. It's not, apparently, but the issue seems to have been ruled as 'abusive, sectarian, capricious and inadmissible' and sensibly thrown out:

http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_28443.shtml

Quoting SOBHI51 (Reply 31): Live and let others live the way they like.

Spot on. Just wish the rest of the world would get on board.

Quoting aa61hvy (Reply 1): If this kid is offended by ham, he is in for a rude awakening when

You know what I am offended by? When someone claims that a simple food product, something that is an essential staple of my cuisine, an inseparable part of my culture and has guaranteed the survival of my ancestors through cold winters for millenia, is somehow "dirty". That I take serious offense with. Where is the line for me to lob a complaint next time some religious fundamentalist insults pork?

Sorry to post this late to an already dead topic, but this post is so full of factual errors I had to come again after some holiday without internet.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 30): Arroz (rice) is from latin "oriza", from greek "oryza" via an Indo-Iranian language (persian: brizi) ultimately from Sanskrit. vrihi-s ... not Arabic. Though the same sanskrit word entered Arabic

You might want to check that with the people from the RAE

(Del ár. hisp. arráwz, este del ár. clás. āruz[z] o aruz[z], y este del gr. ὄρυζα).

Rice as a foodstuff is a genuinely Arab contribution to Spanish cuisine. For the Romans rice was food for cattle.

In any case there are several books dealing with the subject of Arabic influence in Spanish cuisine, you will surely find them an interesting read.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 30): Enlightened muslims were so busy undoing the entire enlightenment of the arab world that yes soon enough the "hairy" people of Iberia were quite a match. Mostly because the arab culture and so called "enlightenment" was a result of centuries of progress and conquest in the area of India/Pakistan - but was quickly ended by the backwater desert religion of islam. A millennia of progress undone in few centuries

The Caliphate was the golden era for both Arab and Jewish culture in Spain. The caliphate was the richest kingdom in Europe at the time, through trade and advanced agriculture, its currency became the standard for trade transactions throughout Europe (something not seen since Roman times) and Cordoba itself boasted half a million inhabitants in the year 1000, while Constantinople had less than 300.000 and no other city in Europe came closer to 100.000

We're talking a city that attracted talent from all over the Muslim, Christian and Arabic world and became a center for culture and transmission of classic and Eastern knowledge to Europe.

Then came the Sahrawi Almoravids, Almohades, etc. and their fundamentalist beliefs and everything ended.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 30): When you take my land and I kick you out of it, that isn't land grab on my part

Whose land? Iberian? they were no longer there. Roman? Visigoth? You're thinking in today's terms, not the X century.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): Sorry to post this late to an already dead topic, but this post is so full of factual errors I had to come again after some holiday without internet.

Bullpucky, your opinions aren't facts. Just your opinions and certainly not factual. Extremely colored by wishful thinking, but let's go throgh them. Speaking of immense factual errors, your post is a textbook example.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): You might want to check that with the people from the RAE

You might want to check that with the Oxford dictionary of etymology - the word rice just simply doesn't come from arabic. It was however introduced *also* into arabic.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): Rice as a foodstuff is a genuinely Arab contribution to Spanish cuisine. For the Romans rice was food for cattle.

Wow that's so missing the point completely. Arabs are incidental in introducing rice into Iberia, but the *word* is not arabic.

The romans were long gone when the arabs invaded Iberia. Perhaps you'd do well to remember the timeline and not paint wishful thinking into it. By the by.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): In any case there are several books dealing with the subject of Arabic influence in Spanish cuisine, you will surely find them an interesting read.

I'm sure there are, but in the end it is completely irrelevant to this discussion (cuisine) and while rice is nice, it was just another product of trade with arabs and others. I'm sure the arabs will be writing books about the introduction of the hamburger and how wonderful it was to have America invade Iraq.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): The Caliphate was the golden era for both Arab and Jewish culture in Spain. The caliphate was the richest kingdom in Europe at the time, through trade and advanced agriculture, its currency became the standard for trade transactions throughout Europe (something not seen since Roman times) and Cordoba itself boasted half a million inhabitants in the year 1000, while Constantinople had less than 300.000 and no other city in Europe came closer to 100.000

Take for instance the story of the jew Maimonides,

According to The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, "the fundamentalist Almohad movement," which "fought to restore the pristine faith of Islam, based on the Quran and the Sunna, and to enforce the precepts of the sacred law" (sound familiar?), conquered Cordoba in 1148 and drove out the ten-year-old Moses Maimonides and his family. They hid from the Almohads in Andalusia for ten years, then emigrated to Morocco, where Maimonides wrote his Epistle on Forced Conversion to console his Jewish brethren forced to choose between conversion to Islam and death. Later he moved to Cairo, where he achieved safety by acting as a physician to the Muslim rulers. Obviously, the great works of Moses Maimonides were not written in Cordoba, and Christian exclusivism and the Inquisition had nothing to do with his departure.

The Caliphate was a lose collection of mini-kings that didn't have the power to completely squash the Iberian population and thus had to accomodate them to some extent. The "golden age" was therefore an uneasy 'peace' between invading arabs and th people they tried to subjugate. They even have a name for it. Dhimmi.

The "golden age" of arabs was just the death throes of the arab culture before islam, which was well on its way to crush all thinking and subjugate everything from the food you ate to how you approached foreigners, ruled a country and treated women with some quite imaginative distortion of Christianity and Judaism.

Cordoba is the best example of the historical rewriting and misinformation of the politically correct today, when they are really only referring the "golden age" of one king who wasn't all that nice anyway, unless you define nice as being the subjugator of the indiginous people and the enemy of Christianity. The Christian cathedral of Cordoba was indeed taken from the Christians and desicrated into a mosque.

And I quote Reinhart Dozy:

«All the churches in that city [Cordova] had been destroyed except the cathedral, dedicated to Saint Vincent, but the possession of this fane [church or temple] had been guaranteed by treaty. For several years the treaty was observed; but when the population of Cordova was increased by the arrival of Syrian Arabs [i.e., Muslims], the mosques did not provide sufficient accommodation for the newcomers, and the Syrians considered it would be well for them to adopt the plan which had been carried out at Damascus, Emesa [Homs], and other towns in their own country, of appropriating half of the cathedral and using it as a mosque. The [Muslim] Government having approved of the scheme, the Christians were compelled to hand over half of the edifice. This was clearly an act of spoliation, as well as an infraction of the treaty. Some years later, Abd-er Rahman I requested the Christians to sell him the other half. This they firmly refused to do, pointing out that if they did so they would not possess a single place of worship. Abd-er Rahman, however, insisted, and a bargain was struck by which the Christians ceded their cathedral....»

That's the golden age. Subjugation and humiliation. Just enough so they could get away with it. But enough to be remembered as the tyrants and invaders that they were.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): We're talking a city that attracted talent from all over the Muslim, Christian and Arabic world and became a center for culture and transmission of classic and Eastern knowledge to Europe.

We're talking a city that was populated by a subjugated nation under the heel of some crazy muslim fundamentalists that didn't deem an Iberian even human unless he declared himself muslim.

How was life in the "golden age"? For example, the contemporary scholar J.M. Safran discusses an early codification of the rules of the marketplace (where Muslims and non-Muslims would be most likely to interact), written by al-Kinani (d. 901), a student of the Cordovan jurist Ibn Habib (d. 853), "...known as the scholar of Spain par excellence," who was also one of the most ardent proponents of Maliki doctrine in Muslim Spain:

...the problem arises of "the Jew or Christian who is discovered trying to blend with the Muslims by not wearing the riqā [cloth patch, which might be required to have an emblem of an ape for a Jew, or a pig for a Christian] or zunnār [belt]." Kinani's insistence that Jews and Christians wear the distinguishing piece of cloth or belt required of them is an instance of a legally defined sartorial differentiation being reconfirmed...His insistence may have had as much to do with concerns for ritual purity and food prohibitions as for the visible representation of social and political hierarchy, and it reinforced limits of intercommunal relations

The idea that Muslims, Christians, and Jews "lived and shared together" in medieval Cordoba could perhaps be dismissed as a rhetorical flight of fancy, but the idea that Christianity (and the Inquisition) ended the brilliance of Cordoba is a deliberate lie.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): Then came the Sahrawi Almoravids, Almohades, etc. and their fundamentalist beliefs and everything ended.

It wasn't "then" like there was some great period of the "golden age", as I said the perceived golden age was under *one* king, and his sucessor made sure that policy wasn't continued - nor did it exist before.

The Almohades invaded in 1148 AD. That's pretty early on. The "golden age" was short indeed, if it ever existed.

Indeed by the end of the eighth century, the brutal Muslim jihad conquest of North Africa and of Andalusia had imposed rigorous Maliki jurisprudence as the predominant school of Muslim law. Thus, as Evariste Lévi-Provençal (1894-1956)-the greatest modern scholar of Muslim Spain whose Histoire de l'Espagne Musulmane remains a defining work-observed three quarters of a century ago:

The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation.

Quoting JJJ (Reply 35): Whose land? Iberian? they were no longer there. Roman? Visigoth? You're thinking in today's terms, not the X century.

Well good thing that the arabs just invaded empty lands. I don't even know in what terms you are thinking, not contemporary terms nor the terms of the IX century (because the whole invasion was already over in the X century, as I'm sure you know)

Perhaps the Iraqi invasion of the US is equally palatable to you, after all who were they really invading? They brought freedom and hamburgers and now is the golden age, where democracy has been introduced and everyone lives happily together.

In the terms of the IX century there were certainly people living in Iberia, people that hailed from the North and East of Europe, hence the names. The king that the invaders ousted was named Rodrigo. Maybe you've heard of him?

It makes me viscerally sick to know that today actual fellow spanish people bow down and apologize the brutal and pathetic invasion of the dogs of the Caliphate. As I said, it seems like some twisted and latent Stockholm syndrome.

That and the historical rewriting and political correctness. But you can have your own opinions, no matter how I feel about it - but you can't have your own facts.

asturias

Another example of the evils of religion.

I'd recommend JJJ to read this, but I don't think he'd be very interested (any more than I am in perceived arab infuluence in cuisine) but for those interested in reading the "non-politically correct" facts about what happened in Iberia under the arab invaders - here is a short cliffnote version of the actual events.

http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.co...spx?article=1364&theme=weciv&loc=b

by Darío Fernández-Morera (Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He is also a member of the National Council on the Humanities. His most recent book is Cervantes in the English-Speaking World (2006), co-edited with Michael Hanke.)

It's not the rosy pie-in-the-sky version many have come to consider the "unassailable truth" about the arab tyranny of Iberia.

asturias

Quoting Asturias (Reply 36): You might want to check that with the Oxford dictionary of etymology - the word rice just simply doesn't come from arabic. It was however introduced *also* into arabic.

You might want to check how did it enter Spanish, I gave you the RAE link on my post above. It's a proven fact that rice was brought to Spain by the Arabs and that the oldest rice recipes known in Spain (arroz con leche, for example) are of Arabic origin.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 36): According to The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, "the fundamentalist Almohad movement," which "fought to restore the pristine faith of Islam, based on the Quran and the Sunna, and to enforce the precepts of the sacred law" (sound familiar?), conquered Cordoba in 1148 and drove out the ten-year-old Moses Maimonides and his family

Thanks for proving my point, the Almohads ended the period of peaceful cohabitation. Until then Jews were an important part of an administrative elite serving the Caliphate and their culture thrived (especially compared to the persecutions suffered through the Visigoth period and after the Caliphate, and ending with the expulsion).

Quoting Asturias (Reply 36): That's the golden age. Subjugation and humiliation. Just enough so they could get away with it. But enough to be remembered as the tyrants and invaders that they were

You have to put that into perspective, at the time, muslims in Christian countries were forced to convert or die, literally.

Quoting Asturias (Reply 36): Well good thing that the arabs just invaded empty lands. I don't even know in what terms you are thinking, not contemporary terms nor the terms of the IX century (because the whole invasion was already over in the X century, as I'm sure you know)

Of course not, they invaded and found a people living under visigoth rule, speaking latin, etc. After the years they were gradually arabized (lots of them converting to Islam) so much that Mozarabe was lost as a language in the XIII/XIV century.

Those were the descendants of the very same people that had lived there, but each wave of conquerors had given them a new flavour. First Iberia was romanized, then christianized, then arabized and converted to islam, and then christianized again for good measure.... and the people were pretty much the same, as the conquerors were always few in numbers compared to the local population.

Each of those processes was essentially similar in nature, that the last one lasts until today does not give it any kind of additional legitimacy over the others, all of them have contributed to what Spain (and Portugal) is today.

Haha. I'm a veggie. Maybe I'll lodge a complaint next time my workmates tease me or discuss meat!!  

PC gone mad. Something related happened in England recently when a chipper had to close because the smell of bacon offended some muslims that live nearby. Most muslims wouldn't have an issue, so local governments should not bow down to over-sensitivities like that.