The treatment of non-Muslims in the Caliphate has been a subject of considerable debate among scholars and commentators, especially those interested in drawing parallels to the coexistence of Muslims and non-Muslims in the modern world. It has been argued that Jews (and other religious minorities) were treated significantly better in Muslim-controlled Iberia than in Christian western Europe, living in a unique "golden age" of tolerance, respect and harmony. Though al-Andalus was a key center of Jewish life during the early Middle Ages, producing important scholars and one of the most stable and wealthy Jewish communities, there is no clear scholarly consensus over whether the relationship between Jews and Muslims was truly a paragon of interfaith relations, or whether it was simply similar to the treatment Jews received elsewhere at the same time.
María Rosa Menocal, a specialist in Iberian literature at Yale University, has argued that "Tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society".[14] Menocal's 2003 book, The Ornament of the World, argues that the Jewish dhimmis living under the Caliphate, while allowed fewer rights than Muslims, were still better off than in other parts of Christian Europe. Jews from other parts of Europe made their way to al-Andalus, where they were tolerated - as were Christians of sects regarded as heretical by various European Christian states.
Bernard Lewis takes issue with this view, arguing its modern use is ahistorical and apologetic:
The claim to tolerance, now much heard from Muslim apologists and more especially from apologists for Islam, is also new and of alien origin. It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam have begun to assert that their society in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam, and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.[15]
Mark Cohen, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, in his landmark 1995 book on the subject, Under Crescent and Cross, argues that the "myth of an interfaith utopia" was first promulgated by Jewish historians such as Heinrich Graetz in the 19th century as a rebuke to Christian countries (particularly in Eastern Europe) for their treatment of Jews. This view went unchallenged until it was adopted by Arabs as a "propaganda weapon against Zionism",[16] who wanted to show that the establishment of the modern State of Israel shattered an alleged previously existing harmony between Jews and Arabs in Palestine under the Ottoman Empire; they pointed to the supposed utopia of the so-called "golden age" as an example of previous harmonious relationships. This "Arab polemical exploitation" was met with the "counter-myth" of the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history" by historians such as Bat Yeor,[17] which also "cannot be maintained in the light of historical reality".[18]
Frederick Schweitzer and Marvin Perry agree that there are two general views of the status of Jews under Islam, the traditional "golden age" and the revisionist "persecution and pogrom" interpretations. They argue that the 19th century idealized view of Jewish historians was taken up by Arab Muslims after 1948 as "an Arab-Islamist weapon in what is primarily an ideological and political struggle against Israel", and ignores "a catalog of lesser-known hatred and massacres", including Muslim pogroms against Jews in Córdoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.[19]The Caliphate treated non-Muslims differently at different times. The longest period of tolerance began after 912, with the reign of Abd-ar-Rahman III and his son, Al-Hakam II where the Jews of Al-Andalus prospered, devoting themselves to the service of the Caliphate of Cordoba, to the study of the sciences, and to commerce and industry, especially to trading in silk and slaves, in this way promoting the prosperity of the country. Southern Iberia became an asylum for the oppressed Jews of other countries.[citation needed]
Christians, braced by the example of their co-religionists across the borders of al-Andalus, sometimes asserted the claims of Christianity and knowingly courted martyrdom, even during these tolerant periods. For example, forty-eight Christians of Córdoba were decapitated for religious offences against Islam. They became known as the Martyrs of Córdoba. Muslim sources consider that many Christians deliberately courted martyrdom by publicly declaiming against Islam inside mosques, insulting Muhammad and making declarations of Christian religious beliefs considered blasphemous in Islam.[citation needed] These deaths played out, not in a single spasm of religious unrest, but over an extended period of time; dissenters were fully aware of the fates of their predecessors and chose to protest against Islamic rule.[20]
With the death of al-Hakam III in 976, the situation worsened for non-Muslims in general. The first major persecution occurred on December 30, 1066 when the Jews were expelled from Granada and fifteen hundred families were killed when they did not leave. Starting in 1090 with the invasion of the Almoravids, the situation worsened further.[citation needed] Even under the Almoravids, however, it is believed that most Jews prospered.[citation needed]
During these successive waves of violence against non-Muslims, many Jewish and even Muslim scholars left the Muslim-controlled portion of Iberia for the then-still relatively tolerant city of Toledo, which had been reconquered in 1085 by Christian forces. Some Jews joined the armies of the Christians (about 40,000), while others joined the Almoravids in the fight against Alfonso VI of Castile.
? cuz based on alpiana, people are forced to accept Islam? 
