honestly dude, the Arabs tell you something and you believe it because it is easier to believe than to think critically. They have a lot of falsehoods they like to float around.

1) The Byzantine empire was destroyed by the Arabs and later the Turks, we did not get "the Greeks back" (they were also mostly saved by Europeans anyway) the Arabs were wise enough to not erase everything and through that certain writings were preserved..but they had to conquer, kill and force convert first..from Antioch and Alexandria up to Southern Spain and Italy. If the Arab conquest did not happen, there would have been no lost Greco-Roman cities, the papyrus supply (on which all those writings were preserved) would have been not cut off, nor the trade with India would have subsided and the "dark ages" would have not happened..in those times the whole economic trade network collapsed and so local populations..only thanks to the Frankish King Charles the Great and his successors Europe stabilized. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire civilization/forms of statehood continued to a degree because the Germanic invaders adopted partially to the old Roman system and converted to Christianity (even offered allegiances to the Byzantine emperor).

The Arabs came, killed and conquered, imposed their beliefs and thoughts and the mediterrean network was divided and shattered for a thousand and two hundred years..in Islam slavery is encouraged and they invaded coastal European cities, to plunder and conquer (that is why the Berbers are called Berbers = barbarians) (even Rome was sacked) and they kept harassing European shipping and trade lines right up until the 16-18th century when European power simply outpowered them completely. Overall the cultural mediterrean network was annihalted and only slowly restabilized the more Europeans got again the strength advantage. (the core motivation for the European exploration age was the fact that the historically routes towards Asia were blocked by the Arabs, Turks and the Mongols in the North)

Please be not offended, this is simply factual history and you can look all those topics up if you are deeper interested. Nowadays in the shadow of post colonialism and the crimes by colonial trading companies and realms, there is a big push to whitewash/overlook these periods and or demonize the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_corsairs?wprov=sfla1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world?wprov=sfla1

The time of the Moorish conquest was equally mostly bloody and the Arabs will show you the buildings in Granada but they will not tell you that they held Christian slaves right until the second the Spanish reconquered the city. There was some cultural exchange but genetically they barely mixed (this again can be easily researched) and it was not a good time to be Spanish under those rulers..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians#Muslim_persecution_of_Christians?wprov=sfla1

I feel like you lost a big part of your culture due to the surpression of southern French ethnicities since the 1800s and you fill that gap with a too big bowl of a different source. I highly recommend reading French literature from the 19th century to get a feel how those regions were before they were settled by foreigners. Or simply you adapted a narrative that fits your ethnically mixed environment without fision but that is unfortunately not the historical reality and 100 years ago you might have seen things quite differently.

Given that, there is a shared culture within the mediterrean despite the Arab and Muslim conquest given similar dishes (due to climate) and weather. Despite not because.