On January 2, 1492 CE, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand took control of Granada’s Alhambra fortress, thus marking an end to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula—a rule that had begun some eight hundred years before when a military force from North Africa had landed on the Iberian shore in 711. As the story goes, when the deposed ruler of Granada, Muhammad XII (known as Boabdil) left the city with his entourage, he took a final look back at the Alhambra, and wept. is, the famous Moor’s last sigh (el último suspiro del Moro) has come to symbolize the loss not only of this arguably very formidable and beautiful palace complex and its lovely Granada setting, but of all of Muslim Spain (al-Andalus)—a land and culture that had taken on an almost mythical status in the eyes of Andalusīs and foreigners alike well before it was finally lost to the Christians in 1492. At the peak of its power in the tenth and eleventh centuries, al-Andalus was an important military, political, and intellectual center in the Mediterranean world. During the period of the Umayyad Caliphate in Cordoba (929–1031), and also in the period that followed the break-up of that Caliphate into independent city-states (taifas, Ar. ṭawāʾif, 1011–1091), the sciences, arts, and literature were supported by rulers who possessed the material wealth and desire to patronize scholarly endeavors in ways that rivaled and even exceeded those of the ʿAbbasid Caliphs in Baghdad or the Fatimids of North Africa. Translation projects of Greek medical and philosophical texts were commissioned by wealthy patrons, as were panegyric poems, literary treatises, grammatical texts, religious scholarly apparatus, etc. As well, architectural masterpieces were erected, and agricultural and scientific advances assured the place of al-Andalus as one of the richest cultures in the Mediterranean basin.

On that January day in 1492, Boabdil wept for himself and his personal loss of power, prestige, and wealth to be sure, but he also wept in memory of a much grander lost time and place that would remain important for centuries to come; a place where Arab culture reigned supreme, and was embraced to varying degrees by Arabs and