Mark Steyn at his best remembers the invasion of Iberia by the Moors in 711.
A taste:
And, if you think today's Euro-American feminists are pretty submissive in the face of Islamist theocrats, well, at the very dawn of female emancipation, millions of women apparently wanted nothing more than to be forcibly seized by some Bedouin chieftain, trussed up over his Arab stallion and ridden into the desert to be his bride. Valentino's moment was brief: the film of The Sheik opened in 1921 and he was dead by 1926, at the age of only 31. And, to the puzzlement of your average bloke, Hollywood's first great screen lover was frankly a bit of a nancy boy. But his alleged smoldering eroticism drove the gals crazy, and 80,000 of them showed up for his funeral, and came near to rioting. It was the biggest send-off for a charismatic Middle Eastern type until the Ayatollah Khomeini's six decades later, when the excitable young lads clutching at his shroud managed to yank the corpse off the bier at one point. |