You read that title and the music started playing in your brain. One of the few pieces of music that everyone knows. It is like the Mona Lisa, or the 3 Graces. You just know it and have no idea where you first learned it. It has always been there. Close your eyes. Enjoy the music while seeing two of the greatest pieces of art of all time.
For over a billion people, what you just did is something profane. Not merely a sin, but actively evil. Haram, to use the right term.
Music, representations of the human form - forbidden in Islamic culture. While most are reasonably tolerant, you get the wrong person while singing, your head will meet a heavy rock. Yet the urge to create is still there. To make beauty of nothing and to give up to God the most precious gift you can - your skills. No one who has been to
Cordoba will ever say there is no art there. It is breath-takingly beautiful. Somehow, a mix of both Islamic culture and Christian culture have created something greater than the sum of it's parts. The loving depictions of the saints, on a backdrop of mathematically perfect and painstakingly formed mosaics. It is perfection in stone. The joy of creating perfectly expressed by two opposed cultures.
A crossbreeding of cultures sounds wonderful. If it was not for the crossbreeding of the
Iroquois culture with the settlers, the constitution would look significantly different. Cross cultural fertilization is good, right?
It depends on the cultures. More importantly - who wins.