Johnson’s tortured reasoning here appears to be that, well, see, Muslims made a great civilization in Europe once, and so they may do it again, instead of simply mounting jihad terror attacks and promising imminent takeover. Very well. Maybe they will, but there doesn’t seem to be much genuine intellectual ferment among Muslims in the West — just a lot of victimhood-mongering, finger-pointing, and evasiveness. Johnson also appears to be implying that the Islamization of Europe and Britain is inevitable, and so we should look on the bright side.

However, Johnson wants us to know that he is tough-minded, by golly; he isn’t falling for any romanticized ahistorical fantasy. “Both Christians and Muslims wanted to be on top; both indulged in occasional pogroms and forced conversions; and don’t forget that in 1492 it was the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who kicked out the last Moor from the citadel of Granada and expelled every Jew from Spain.” But “what you cannot deny is the scale of the Muslim achievement.”

This is muddled in all sorts of ways. In the first place, Johnson’s moral equivalence is ridiculous in light of the fact that during the 800-year Muslim occupation of Spain, there was not some sort of mutual jockeying for power among Christians and Muslims. Both may have “wanted to be on top,” but the Christians were decidedly on the bottom. Even Mari­a Rosa Menocal, in her romantic and fantastic hagiography of Muslim Spain, The Ornament of the World, acknowledges the second-class status to which Jews and Christians were relegated there. “In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax–no Muslims paid taxes–and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.”

According to historian Richard Fletcher, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.” On December 30, 1066, about four thousand Jews in Granada were murdered by rioting Muslim mobs–more than would be killed in the Crusaders’ infamous Rhineland pogroms of the mid-twelfth century. What enraged the Granadan Muslims was the political power of the Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrila and his son Joseph: the mob resented the fact that these men had authority over Muslims, which they saw as a “breach of sharia.” The mob was incited to kill the Jews by a poem composed by Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq: “I myself arrived in Granada and saw that these Jews were meddling in its affairs. … So hasten to slaughter them as a good work whereby you will earn God’s favor, and offer them up in sacrifice, a well-fattened ram.”

The mob heeded his call. A Muslim chronicler (and later sultan of Granada), ‘Abd Allah, said that “both the common people and the nobles were disgusted by the cunning of the Jews, the notorious changes they had brought in the order of things, and the positions they occupied in violation of their pact [of second-class status].” He recounted that the mob “put every Jew in the city to the sword and took vast quantities of their property.”

So heed Boris Johnson’s advice. Islamic jihadists may murder some non-Muslims and enforce second-class status on Jews and Christians, but hey, they may build some fine buildings, so relax, you greasy Islamophobe.

“Amid dystopic visions of an Islamic Europe, remember the Alhambra,” by Boris Johnson, Telegraph, January 3, 2016: