"This whole investigation pivots off Debbie Wasserman Schultz," the official said.

"I think it’s too costly to refight the Civil War," Young said Wednesday at a press conference in which he and fellow civil rights icon C.T. Vivian endorsed Atlanta City Council President Ceasar Mitchell to succeed Kasim Reed as the city’s next mayor. "We have paid too great a price in trying to bring people together."

This book gives special attention to primary sources (medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish chronicles; literary works; religious and legal texts; and biographies), and usually quotes them verbatim so that nonscholars can read these materials (which in modern publications on Islamic Spain frequently are not part of the narrative and often not even part of the notes) and decide for themselves whether the widespread hagiographic interpretations of Islamic Spain are warranted or not. Unless otherwise indicated, assertions in this book are abundantly supported by these medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish primary sources, which are either quoted in the text or cited in the notes.

Despite the bubonic plague, locusts, drought, and the civil wars that ravaged Spain in the years before the Muslim conquest, the Catholic kingdom of the Visigoths still presented itself as a wonderland to the uncultured eighth-century Berber invaders. Medieval Muslim chronicles tell of the astonishment the Islamic warriors experienced at the splendor of Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, Merida, and other Visigoth cities. They also tell us that the Muslim armies' sacking of Spain was stupendous. Christian chronicles corroborate these accounts, as does the archaeological evidence of the treasures Christians buried before fleeing the invaders.

Elsewhere Avila observes, "In spite of the existence of sporadic instances of women whose activities seem to indicate a certain independence and freedom - the most famous example being that of the well-born poetess Wallada - all indications are that freedom of activity for Andalusi (free) women was limited to the domestic sphere." Wallanda was the daughter of a sexual slave of foreign origin, from whom she may have inherited her mores, and she was never married, so she never became a muhsan.

As Robert M. Haddan, Aptin Khanbaghi, Louis Milliot, and other scholars have noticed, the Christian dhimmis served as an intermediary between the more primitive society of the Islamic invaders and the superior civilizations of the Christian Greek Roman Empire and the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. The Persian Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Nadim testified that "in tenth-century Iran, the majority of philosophers were still Christian."