Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Over the course of the subsequent three hundred years until roughly the turn of the first millennium as it was calculated in the Christian calendar, the sort of political order and cultural flourishing that had once graced Roman Hispania returned to the peninsula. The Muslims never took and held the entire peninsula, however, and Christian outposts clung to the mountainous regions of the northwest Atlantic coast and the Pyrenees. . . . But within the stability of the long reigns and orderly successions of Abd al-Rahman’s sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, other kinds of revolutions occurred. There was a vast economic revival: the population increased, not just in the invigorated and ever more cosmopolitan cities, but even in the once decimated countryside, where the introduction of new crops and new techniques, including irrigation, made agriculture a prosperous concern; and the pan-Mediterranean trade and travel routes that had helped maintain Roman prosperity, and which were vital for cultural contacts and continuities, were reconfigured and expanded. . . . Within a few generations, a vigorous rate of conversion to Islam from among the great variety of older ethnic groups, and from the Christian and pagan populations, made the Andalusian Muslim community not only vastly larger, but one of thoroughly intermarried and intermixed ethnic and cultural origins. . . . both the Jewish and Christian communities in al-Andalus became thoroughly Arabized within relatively few years of Abd al-Rahman’s arrival in Cordoba. . . . Here the Jewish community rose from the ashes of an abysmal existence under the Visigoths to the point that the emir who proclaimed himself caliph in the tenth century had a Jew as his foreign minister." [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 27-30]