Why would it be symmetric? This is like if North American natives had successfully expelled the Europeans after some amount of time, and then saying that the natives were meaner to the Europeans than vice versa. Wouldn’t expulsion be justified from the North American native’s perspective?

Note that there was about 9 centuries between the Umayyad conquest of Iberia (8th century) and the explulsion of Moriscos (17th century). So the analogy with North American natives would be something like - if somehow the Native Americans win political/military control in the 23th century (9 centuries after the arrival of the Europeans) and then decide that all non-native Americans will have to leave the country to wherever their ancestors came from - do you feel that would be justified?

From the native perspective that would absolutely be justified. At the same time from the European perspective they should resist being expelled (just as the equivalent people in Spain should have and probably did resist being expelled in their time).

As a side note, I feel a lot of people have a hard time processing conflicting perspectives and instead project their own moral views as a uniform perspective onto everyone at once, which does not produce a useable model of reality IMO.

> I feel a lot of people have a hard time processing conflicting perspectives and instead project their own moral views as a uniform perspective onto everyone at once

Thanks for putting into words something I've been feeling for a long time! It's like people think that conflict is unnatural, when really it is one of the most fundamental aspects of nature.

> it is beyond any reasonable doubt that the non-Muslims had been much better treated under the Arab rulers than the non-Christians were treated after the territory had been reconquered by the Spanish kings.

Yeah, Spain the kingdom didn't really treat Muslims all that great, one just have to look at the "Expulsion of the Moriscos" in 1609 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Moriscos). Hard to beat that when it comes to treatment of entire populations.

Read the book. Preservation of knowledge was done by the Byzantine empire not the Arabs.

A part of the ancient Latin and Greek literature has been preserved by the Byzantine Empire and another part by the Arabs.

The Arabs actually had much more interactions with the Western Europeans than the latter had with the Byzantines, so much more old books have reached Europe through the Arabs. Most Byzantine books have reached Europe only after the Fall of Constantinople and the invention of the movable-type printing press, when their importance has soon become more historical than practical, due to the rapid advances that have started at that time.

Besides the ancient Latin and Greek books, the Arabs have also passed knowledge that had come from India and Persia and also the results of original research that went beyond what had been transmitted from others, especially in chemistry and mathematics, hence words like alchemy and algebra.

Muslims, not Arabs. Also you are mistaken about Arabs passing Persian knowledge. Initially invading Arabs were given to destroying books. It was Muslim Persians who did most of the translation, and subsequently elaboration of the ancient world’s thinking into the Muslim civilization and from there to Europe. And yes, they wrote in Arabic just like Isaac Newton wrote Principia in Latin. And most of us now write in English, but are we Anglos?

I agree than many of the most important scientific advances in the Muslim world were due to Persians, like the classification of the chemical substances made by Avicenna, who has written in Arabic, as you say.

However, the works of Avicenna and others like him have reached Europe through Arabs, frequently through Spain.

If you know of another path to Europe for the Persian Arabic works, I am curious to hear which is it.

Lot's of non-Muslim non-Arabs were part of this Islamic golden age as well.

> words like alchemy and algebra

And “algorithm” too, named after the scientist Al-Khwarizmi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi

What US state takes its name from the Arabic title for a ruler?

Alabama?

Good guess, but no, it's California from Khalifa.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California