The Muslim-ruled lands of the Iberian Peninsula between the conquest of 711 and the fall of Granada in 1492 — a medieval civilization of great cities, libraries, irrigation, philosophy, and poetry, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in an arrangement that was productive and unequal at once, and whose memory still serves as a contested symbol of coexistence lost.
In the tenth century, while many western European libraries held only a few hundred volumes, the caliph in Cordoba is said to have kept a library of hundreds of thousands of books, with agents buying manuscripts in Baghdad and Cairo before rivals could. The figure is probably inflated, the way such figures usually are. But the boast itself tells you what kind of place this was, and what kind of place it wanted to be seen as. For nearly eight centuries a Muslim civilization grew on European soil, raised some of the continent's most cultured cities, and then was conquered, converted, and expelled until public Muslim political and religious life was dismantled, even as its architecture, language, and memory remained. What it left behind was not ruins but an argument, still running, about whether people of different faiths can share a country.