The Islamic Warriors' Destruction of a Nascent Civilization: The Catholic Kingdom of the Visigoths in Spain (A.D. 589-711).

The Spanish [Muslim] city of Cordova, in the tenth century, was very much like a modern city. Its streets were well paved and there were raised sidewalks for pedestrians. At night one could walk for ten miles by the light of lamps, flanked by an uninterrupted extent of buildings. This was hundreds of vears before there was a paved street in Paris, France, or a street lamp in London, England. ... The marvelous cities of Toledo, Seville, and Granada were rivals of Cordova in respect to grandeur and magnificence.... Education was universal in Moorish Spain, being given to the most humble, while in Christian Europe ninety-nine percent of the people were illiterate, and even kings could neither read nor write.You had Moorish women who were doctors and lawyers and professors. --John C. Jackson, "The Empire of the Moors," in Ivan van Sertima, ed., Golden Age of the Moor (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991), 86