[joegrundman]

Well, to nitpick a little, when you say Cordoba was originally Christian, what you really mean is that it was previously Christian, a fact acknowledged in the name reconquista.

The city itself was named by the Carthaginians, as with so many Spanish coastal cities, before this world of ours was blessed with either Christianity or Islam.

As for the issue of tolerance, obviously Muslims like to talk up the level of tolerance, and for many people today they like to point out its probable/possible limitations.

It is rarely wise to judge the past by the standards of today, but it is still worth noting that significant numbers of Jews, and even Christians, found life tolerable enough living in medieval Muslim Spain, Egypt and North Africa. Perhaps more so than was the case for Muslims and Jews living in medieval Christendom. They didn't vote with their feet and those Jews living in the Muslim dominated areas were still there in numbers until the establishment of Israel. At which point, they largely left for Israel and elsewhere.

I put it to you that this indicates that for most of the pre-modern period, for Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule, life was at least not significantly worse than other options available at the time.