ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the romantic period of Al-Andalus as one of cultural tolerance where Muslims, Jews, and Christians all got along and created wonderful poetry, music, food, and architecture. In present-day Spain, after centuries of willful forgetting of the contributions of Muslims and Jews to the national history, Spanish musicians and artists have begun to revel in a kind of willful remembering—and re-mythologizing—of their multicultural past. Muslim Antisemitism, anti-Jewish sentiments, and Judeophobia have many stages. The Jew is typically seen as a western colonial ally, although millions of Jews are Arabs and Sephardic, with roots in Africa and the Magreb. The Muslim perception of the Jew changed after the Shoah, when they came to be seen as purely European, as refugees from Europe pouring into Palestine. Tibi’s assertion is that Islamists or extremists believe that Jews want to control and shape the world order, and this strain of thought justifies the internal conflict within the extremist view.
