Watch this documentary here
When, in the early days of 1982, I was interviewed for my next job in Saudi Arabia, video-players were still a great novelty and, needless to say, I didn't have one.
So, even if this documentary had been around at the time, I couldn't have seen it. However, I had seen the 1962 British epic historical film "Lawrence of Arabia", and also knew about Muslim Cordoba which already had street lighting and was a highly civilized, multicultural society when the rest of Europe was still mired in the Dark Ages.
I still don't know whether it was my Degree in Accountancy or indeed the degree of my knowledge of the enlighted Muslim world in the Iberian peninsula that got me the job, and none of it now matters.
What matters is that I added another string of worthwhile experiences to my life, experiences which greatly enlarged my knowledge of the commercial world and saw me travel frequently to London, Singapore, and, for a brief eighteen months, live and work in beautiful Greece.
While my time in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia came at a great personal cost to me, I still hold my then employers, the Mofarrij family, in high esteem. My time there also helped me to view Islam, so often mis-understood in the West, in a better light - in the street lights of Muslim Cordoba, in fact - long before I had watched this epic documentary.
