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When Jerusalem was taken, 'Umar had marched in by the side of Patriarch Sophronius and had left all shrines and churches untouched, whereas the Christian Heraclius had massacred the Jews during the former invasion of the city. The same scene repeated itself in the Crusades. In 1099 when Jerusalem was taken, the crusaders caused a terrible slaughter among the native population during which Jews and Muslims were killed and burnt. When in 1187 Saladin wrested the city from the crusaders, he shamed the Christian world by allowing the Christian priests to take away with them all their church property. In an instruction left by 'Umar in his will "nothing is more emphatically recommended to his successor that he should refrain from violence towards his non-Muslim charges, indeed, rather should he, himself, take up arms to ensure their protection" (157:1) The Jews received the same treatment. It was under Islamic rule in Spain that medieval Judaism-- against which an unscrupulous war of extermination had been previously waged by Christian orthodoxy-- experienced its greatest flowering and where its greatest philosopher Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon taught. When at the end of the fifteenth century Spain once more came under Catholic dominion, the spirit of tolerance and indulgence was over. Now the government no longer operated according to Muhammad's command: "Let there be no compulsion in religion", but after the motto which the Curia Cardinal Ottaviani still defended in the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: "No freedom for error." Sigrid Hunke describes the change in the spiritual atmosphere which ensued with the end of Arab dominion in Spain: "When on the 2nd of January Cardinal D. Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza planted the cross on the Alhambra, the red royal castle of the Nasrids, it was not only Arab dominion in Spain that ended... Under Archbishop Juan Ximinez the Muslims and the rest of their flowering culture sank in a sea of terror, in which waves of religious fanaticism devoured everything: every time they expressed their faith, every time they used their language, at every word, every song, every time they played their instruments, used their surname, their national costume, or visited the baths, they were sent to the galleys, imprisoned, persecuted, even burnt alive. Whatever the conquering Christians or Berbers had not yet destroyed among the treasures of Arabic science and poetry was dragged out of all the libraries and hiding-places by the Archbishop's bailiffs and huge piles were thrown to the flames... Through mass-expulsions and the fury of the 'autodafe' the most flourishing land of that part of the world was depopulated and in a short time had once more become a desert."
(158:2)
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