324 years later, things still remain the same.

1035 to 1331 the Visigoth Kingdom is gone.

Then around 1334 to 1402 "New Catile" is born?

Early in the eighth century Moorish soldiers crossed over from Africa to the Iberian peninsula. The man chosen to lead them was General Tarik ibn Ziyad. In 711, the bold Tarik, in command of an army of 10,000 men, crossed the straits and disembarked near a rock promontory which from that day since has borne his name--Djabal Tarik (`Tarik's Mountain'), or Gibraltar. In August 711, Tarik won paramount victory over the opposing European army. On the eve of the battle, Tarik is alleged to have roused his troops with the following words:

"My brethren, the enemy is before you, the sea is behind; whither would ye fly? Follow your general; I am resolved either to lose my life or to trample on the prostrate king of the Romans."

Wasting no time to relish his victory, Tarik pushed on with his dashing and seemingly tireless Moorish cavalry to the Spanish city of Toledo. Within a month's time, General Tarik ibn Ziyad had effectively terminated European dominance of the Iberian peninsula. Musa ibn Nusayr, Arab governor of North Africa, joined Tarik in Spain and helped complete the conquest of Iberia with an army of 18,000 men. The two commanders met in Talavera, where the Moors were given the task of subduing the northwest of Spain. With vigor and speed they set about their mission, and within three months they had swept the entire territory north of the Ebro River as far as the Pyrenees Mountains and annexed the turbulent Basque country.

In the aftermath of these brilliant struggles, thousands of Moors flooded into the Iberian peninsula. So eager were they to come that some are said to have floated over on tree-trunks. Tarik himself, at the conclusion of his illustrious military career, retired to the distant East, we are informed, to spread the teachings of Islam.

SOURCES
Golden Age Of The Moor, Edited by Ivan Van Sertima
The Story Of The Moors In Spain, by Stanley Lane-Poole

Where the moors just whites from africa?

Take it from this, the song of Roland written around the year 1100:

Who holds Alferne, Kartagene, Garmalie,
And Ethiope, a cursed land indeed;
The blackamoors from there are in his keep,
Broad in the nose they are and flat in the ear,
Fifty thousand and more in company.

When Rollant sees those misbegotten men,
Who are more black than ink is on the pen
With no part white, only their teeth except,
Then says that count: "I know now very well
That here to die we're bound, as I can tell.
Strike on, the Franks! For so I recommend."
Says Oliver: "Who holds back, is condemned!"
Upon those words, the Franks to strike again.

Spain never "expelled" moors, it just forced them to convert to christianity. Ferdinand and Isabella were not "racialists" but "religious". -OWG

Al Andalus (711-1492 C.E.)
Al-Andalus * in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) had been under the rule of Muslims of African descent - the Berbers and Moors since 711 when an African general, formerly a slave called Tariq ibn Ziyad went to Spain. Gibraltar is named after him, Jebal Tariq - mountain of Tariq, because he landed on the island and burnt his ships to inspire his men that there was no turning back.

* When Muslims came to Spain, its natives were called Vandals. So the Muslims called the land, Andalus - the Arabisation of the word Vandalusia.

In 1469, Ferdinand of Aragaon married Isabella of Castile, helping to unite two warring Spanish kingdoms against the common enemy, the Muslims. This union subsequently sounded the deathknell for the Muslims in Spain who had already lost territory in quick succession such as Cordoba (1236), Valencia (1238), Seville (1248), Lisbon, Toledo (1487), Malaga, etc through internal feuding amongst themselves.

The Roman Catholic Church having launched Inquisitions in France, Italy in the 13th century which wiped out Unitarian Christians, extended it to Spain in 1481 to kill or forcibly convert heathens or heretics, namely Unitarian Christians and Muslims. Were Unitarian Christians, heretics and witches (if there is such a thing as women dressed in black flying on broomsticks!), actually Muslims or potential Muslims (everyone is born a Muslim and truth stands clear from falsehood) ?

Isabella proved herself to be one of the greatest quartermaster generals of all time in supplying the Christian armies to drive the Muslims out. She was responsible for inflicting more torture and burning at the stake of mostly innocent people than any other monarch; for it was under her that the Inquisition was established and carried out its terrible work with her fervid blessing.

In the Inquisition, millions of Muslims were inhumanely treated, enslaved, tortured, burned, persecuted, forcibly baptised; and had property confiscated. Rather than have their daughters marry Christians, the Moors who were forced to convert to Catholicism put the girls into convents; thus today one finds many of the Spanish nuns' recipes for sweetmeats involving sugar, honey and almonds, are of Arab origin.

1492 marked a new age for Europe. After 781 years of Islamic presence in Spain, the Vatican was well on its way in reuniting the whole of Spain into Christendom. On 2nd January 1492, the last Muslim foothold in Spain, Granada was overrun by Christian armies. Thus ended the power, wealth and elegance of Al-Andalus.

The essence of the re-conquest of Spain was the transfer of power from Muslim to Christian rulers. To that process, there contributed greedy princes, fanatical bigots, roughneck French knights looking for fighting, Castilian squires seeking land and booty.

The destruction of the Islamic state in Spain was carefully planned, to ensure that Muslims from Africa were not in a position to assist their co-religionists in Spain. With two year's preparation and a papal bull, a Crusade was launched on 24th August 1415, against Ceuta, a strategic Muslim stronghold and trading centre in Morocco, just east of Tangier, opposite to Gibraltar. The Portuguese Armada, well armed, and supported by a contingent of English archers and ships overwhelmed the Muslims. Within a day the Crusaders had taken Ceuta. Having ransacked and piled the streets with dead Muslims, the city was left profitless. The main mosque was turned into a church.

When Granada fell to Christendom, Columbus successfully persuaded Spain's monarchs to support his expedition, in the context of the struggle against Islam. Ferdinand and Isabella then appointed Columbus, a Genoese (north west Italy) seafarer 'to go by way of the West to India'. They appointed him high admiral of the sea and made him Viceroy and perpetual governor of any lands he discovered. Eight months later, Columbus set sail in the name of the Trinity from Palos de la Frontera, Granada, Spain on the morning of August 3rd 1492. He first sailed down the West coast of Africa to the Canary Islands to take on wood and water and to refit; then he sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. In the same year, October 13 1492, he discovered the West Indies (San Salvador). [13].

'Description of the world' by Pierre d'Ailley, the Cardinal of Tournia was Columbus's favourite reading. D'Ailley introduced Columbus to Arabic sources and computations of the Muslim geographer, Al-Farghani. Columbus also studied the 'Universal History' by Pharaoh (Pope) Pius 2nd. [34].

To Combat the Religion of Mahomet and the Conquest of Jerusalem...

But what was the purpose of Columbus' voyage ? It is actually written in the prologue of his journal, in which he addresses Spain's monarchs. Here is a summarised extract [12]:

Columbus first praises the Spanish monarchy for finally bringing to an end the Crusade against the Moors (Muslims) on 2nd January 1492 at Granada. He describes the humiliating end of the Moors when the Muslim leader emerged from his fortress at Alhambra to kiss the hands of Spain's Christian monarchs. (Weeping Moor).

In his second paragraph, Columbus states that he intends to go to India to meet its ruler, the Great Khan, who like his predecessors, had appealed to Rome many times, for men learned in Christianity to instruct him, an appeal to which the Pope had not yet responded, resulting in many people being 'lost' through idolatries and acceptance of religions of damnation [12].

The prologue explains that Spain's Christian rulers who are dedicated to the expansion of Christianity have sent Columbus to combat the religion of Mahomet and all idolatries and heresies. Columbus is to meet the rulers of the India, see the towns, lands and all other things, to find out in what manner they might be converted to Christianity. [12]. Hence, Columbus was accompanied by an Arabic interpreter.

Finally, Columbus makes the following pledge: "that he intends to find gold mines and spices and everything in such quantity that the Spanish monarchs within three years would undertake and organise themselves to go to conquer the Holy Sepulchre, for all the wealth gained in the enterprise should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem" [12]. Columbus was convinced that he had been chosen by God to recover Jerusalem. The conquest of Jerusalem was also the aim of Ferdinand and Isabella, who styled themselves as King and Queen of Jerusalem. In later voyages Columbus tried to convince his crew of circumnavigating the whole world and return home to Spain via Jerusalem. It was India's massive population of over three hundred million and its inexhaustible natural wealth; for Christians needed to finance their Final Crusade to colonise all of the Muslim world and capture Palestine. To this end, Columbus deposited money in San Giorgio Bank in Genoa, his native city, for when his successors conquer Jerusalem.

When King Ferdinand accepted the keys of the city of Granada from King Boabdil on January 2, 1492, he assured the defeated Moor that he would safeguard the rights and practices of his people. But as Christian fervor continued to envelop the peninsula, and the "Jewish problem" was settled later that year with the edict of expulsion, the Inquisition turned its gaze southward. Although they were not expelled by decree until 1609, in reality the Muslims, like the Jews, were either compelled to convert to Christianity or encouraged to leave. Thus, in this instance of 'ethnic cleansing', the unofficial tolerance and pragmatism that had permitted the three cultures of the Iberian peninsula to live side by side, by necessity if not actually peacebly, for hundreds of years, officially came to an end.

In the centuries leading up to the reconquista political relations between the querulous Muslim and Christian kingdoms were extremely flexible, subject as they were to the vagaries of necessity and pragmatism. Alliances on both sides were often short-lived. Even the medieval Spanish hero El Cid seems to have fought along side the Moorish champions almost as often as he fought against them. The same seems to be true of the personal relations between some Moors and Christians in affairs of the heart, given the evidence of songs "Si te quitasse los hierros", and "Di perra mora". Even after the fall of Granada brought down the last Iberian Moorish kingdom, the interchange between the two cultures of the peninsula continued in the border areas as it had for centuries. Intolerance was still the order of the day; in fact I have heard it suggested that while the rest of Europe favored the round-backed lute (the western descendant of the Arabic oud), because of its Moorish connotations the lute was shunned by the Christian Iberians in favor of the flat-backed vihuela. But in the aftermath of the reconquista some parts of Christian Spain may have developed a taste for 'things Moorish', creating a demand for stories, songs and plays portraying Muslim characters, much as Native American stories and legends were popular in North America in the 19th century. The nuba music of modern day North Africa, though now a composed tradition, traces its lineage directly to the music of the Moors in Spain, and may represent a vestige of the music of 16th century Andaluz.

OWG, if you think most Spaniards arent White, you need to take a trip there and see for yourself. Madrid is one of the most wonderful large cities I have ever visited. Compare France to Madrid, and if even if you can discount the tons of dogshit on Parisian streets, Madrid is still cleaner and safer and WHITER. Maybe there may more blondes in Paris, but there's also tons more NIGGERS.

Worst thing I'll say about Spaniards is the persistent and troubling presence of marranos, who are crypto jews aware of their concealed identity.

The year 1492 has long been a histor­ical touchstone. Europeans and Americans recently marked the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the New World, not with­out protests from those who felt that the hemisphere's gains from the event were far out­weighed by its losses. Spain was a focus of atten­tion in the quincentennial year, in part because it was Columbus's point of departure, and as host of the universal exposition EXPO '92 in Seville and the summer Olympic Games in Barcelona.

There was another 500th anniversary to be marked in 1992, however, and it too involved Spain. While this event has also had important repercus­sions in world history, and remains the source of a lingering sense of loss, it has attracted much less attention. The event was the fall of the Muslim city of Granada (Gharna-tah in Arabic), on the second day of 1492, to the forces of the Catholic kings of Castile, ending nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Ibe­rian Peninsula and closing one of the most turbulent and glorious chap­ters in Islamic history.

As some historical accounts have it, Muslim armies first arrived in the peninsula in AD 711 at the request of one side of a civil war raging in Visigothic Spain. Muslim rule was ac­cepted voluntarily by many Span­iards, and numbers of them accepted Islam. In 732, just 100 years after the death of the Prophet, Muslim troops crossed the Pyrenees to make their deepest advance into western Europe; they were checked at Poitiers in a battle that has rung down the centuries in Western legend, but which Muslim chroni­clers record, if at all, as a minor skirmish. The Muslims soon withdrew again and set about estab­lishing Islam in Spain, in the territories they called al-Andalus. The society they developed was perhaps uniquely tolerant and heterogeneous, with Arab and Berber immigrants living side-by-side with Spanish Muslims, Christians and Jews. Intermarriage was fairly common.

Al-Andalus was ruled by the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus until 750, when the Abbasid dynasty came to power in the East. One Umayyad prince alone, Abd al-Rahman ibn Mu'awiyah, escaped and fled to Spain; there he established an inde­pendent Umayyad state in 756. The Andalusian rulers, sovereign politically, continued to regard the Abbasid caliphs as the ultimate religious author­ity for almost 200 years, but the eighth ruler of the dynasty, 'Abd al-Rahman III al-Nasir, claimed the caliphal title for himself and his progeny in 929. The Andalusian Umayyad caliphate was the gol­den age of al-Andalus in terms of political power. The southern two-thirds of the Iberian peninsula were united under the caliph in Córdoba (in Ara­bic, Qurtubah), and he was also an important player in North African affairs. It was the Umayyads who, through skill, cleverness and occa­sional ruthlessness, laid the foundation for the splendor of al-Andalus.

Between 1009 and 1031, however, a series of uprisings and a succession of weak rulers together led to the dissolution of the Umayyad state. Filling the vacuum, more than a score of independent petty monarchs emerged, called "party kings" or in Arabic mulukal-tawa'if, from the word ta'ifah (Span­ish taifa), meaning party or faction. Though these rival kingdoms - some no more than city-stateswere much weaker than the unitary Umayyad caliphate, the taifa period witnessed a flourishing of arts and learning as each ruler attempted to outdo the others in the prestige of his court. As David Wasserstein points out in The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings, the profusion of rulers also meant a profusion of patrons, so artists, scholars and scien­tists could find a sponsor, or even competing spon­sors, with relative ease.

Nevertheless, weakened by chronic infighting, treacherous double-dealing and internal deca­dence, the taifa kings gave up considerable terri­tory to the Christian kingdoms that were reassert­ing themselves in the north of the peninsula. By 1085 the Castilians had taken the crucial city of Toledo, and the petty kings asked the new Almoravid ruler in Morocco, Yusuf ibn Tashufin, to inter­vene. The Almoravids (in Arabic, al-Murabitun, "The Garrisoned Ones") were a puritanical dynasty that had arisen among the Berbers of far southern Morocco, and for a time they were con­tent to assist the taifa kings militarily - but in 1090 Yusuf decided that his erstwhile hosts had to go, and the petty kings were swept aside. The Almoravids at first imposed their puritanism and rigid religious orthodoxy, visible even in their art, on Spain, but in the end, though their faith remained pure, they themselves succumbed to the luxury and ease of al-Andalus.

The Almoravids' faltering strength provided the Christian kingdoms with opportunities for reconquest, and by 1145 Almoravid Spain was reeling. The Muslim population rose in revolt and a new group of taifa monarchs asked the Almohads (in Arabic, al-Muwahhidun, "Those Who Profess God's Unity") - another puritanical movement from southern Morocco, which sup­planted the Almoravids in North Africa - to intervene. The Almohads willingly obliged, and for a time the new North African rulers enjoyed some success in Spain. But the tide turned in favor of the Christians in 1212 at the Battle of al-'Iqab, called in Spanish Las Navas de Tolosa, and within decades the Almohads had retreated back across the Strait of Gibraltar. Muslim cities fell one after another until 1260, when only the kingdom of Granada remained.

Precariously balanced between hostile Christian powers to the north and rival Muslim rulers in Morocco to the south, Granada survived for almost two centuries more. Although they gradually ceded terri­tory to the Spanish Christian forces, the Nasrid rulers of Granada, afraid of being swallowed by their rescuers, refused to turn to the Moroccans for assistance. Isolated politically, the Granadines lived on, on borrowed time.

Yet, architectural historian John Brooks notes, "despite the general winding down of the organ­ized political and military state during the last period of Muslim rule in Spain, this strikingly rich and original culture was still evolving." Indeed, many of the most lavish and famous examples of Andalusian art and architecture date from this period (See Aramco World, September-October 1992). Within its slowly shrinking enclave, Granada flourished magnificently, both artistically and cul­turally, until the end of the 15th century, when Catholic Spain overcame political division and the effects of the Black Death and the final stage of the reconquista began in earnest.

By the end of 1491 the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella were at the gates of Granada itself. There remained only one final act to be played out, a knell whose sorrow was to reverberate across the Muslim world and become legend. Granada's ruler, [Muhammad XII Abu 'Abd Allah, known in the West las Boabdil, secretly agreed to hand over the city to {the Christians in return for his safe passage out of Spain. As he left the city, Boabdil paused to look [back at the Alhambra palace, the Generalife gardens and the rest of Granada. Stanley Lane-Poole relates Boabdil's reaction in his classic 1887 work The Moors in Spain:

"Allahu akbar!" he said, "God is most great," as he burst into tears. His mother Ayesha stood beside him: "You may well weep like a woman," she said, "for what you could not defend like a man." The spot whence Boabdil took his sad farewell look at his city from which he was banished for ever, bears to this day the name of el ultimo sospiro del Moro, "the last sigh of the Moor."

Thus, on January 2, 1492, Muslim political sovereignty in Spain came to an end.

Muslims and people of Muslim origin had lived relatively unmolested in Christian areas before the fall of Granada and continued to do so immediately after; the city's inhabitants received generous terms of submission and a large degree of religious freedom. In 1499, however, the Catholic monarchs' guarantees were broken, and forced conversion of the Muslims was introduced. The Muslim popula­tion rebelled, but the revolt was quickly suppres­sed. In 1500 Spanish Muslims were presented with a stark choice: Convert to Catholicism or be ex­pelled from Spain. While some Muslims did convert, others continued to practice their faith in secret, and the rest chose exile, principally across the Mediterranean in North Africa.

Although Muslim rule in Spain had ended, the rich cultural and intellectual legacy of al-Andalus survived, both in the Iberian Peninsula and throughout the world. Elements of the Islamic heritage can be found throughout Spain, and in recent years modern Spain has become more aware, and more proud, of the glories of this period of its history. Many place names, such as those of the port city of Algeciras (from al-Jazirah al-Khadra', green island), the Guadalquivir River (from al-Wadi al-Kabir, great river), and the southern region of Andalusia itself, all come from the Arabic used in al-Andalus. The Spanish lan­guage itself has been greatly influenced by Arabic, particularly in terms of vocabulary, and many terms of Arabic origin passed on from Spanish into English in the New World.

Some of Spain's most famous architectural monuments, including Córdoba's Great Mosque, Seville's Giralda and Granada's Alhambra, date from the Muslim period; architecture in southern Spain and Latin America borrows a great deal from Muslim builders, both in terms of materials used -tile, stucco - and design elements like central cour­tyards, abstract ornamentation, and creative use of water and fountains. The artisans and craftsmen of Spain after the reconquista remained largely Mus­lim, and they often received commissions from Spanish nobility; their work can easily be seen today throughout Andalusia - in the royal resi­dence of Seville, the Alcázar (from the Arabic al-Qasr, meaning the palace), for example.

The instruments, rhythmic patterns, vocal con­ventions and overall structure and organization of Andalusian music, derived directly from Arab pre­cursors, have also had their effect on Spanish - and, by extension, Latin American - music. In some cases even the Andalusian melodies have been passed down intact.

The works of many of the most prominent think­ers and practitioners of al-Andalus, along with writings from the eastern Muslim world, were translated from Arabic into Latin by Spaniards (See Aramco World, May-June 1992). Through these translations, philosophical and scientific thought from the Greek and Roman worlds, preserved and expanded upon by Muslim scholars, passed into European consciousness to fuel both the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.

Nevertheless, it was back in the Arab and Muslim worlds that Andalusian culture and society had their greatest impact, even before 1492. Many important contributors in Islamic intellectual history came from or worked in Muslim Spain: No account of the development of philosophy in Islam is complete without a discussion of Ibn Tufayl, who died in 1185, and of his pupil Ibn Rushd, who was born in Córdoba, became chief qadi, or judge, of Seville, and died in 1198. Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, made his most important con­tributions in his commentary on Aristotle, his refutation of al-Ghazali's critique of philosophy, and his examination of the relationship between reason and religion. Much of Ibn Rushd's thought prefigured the work of Thomas Aquinas.

In medicine, al-Andalus produced scholars like al-Zahrawi (died ca. 1013), who wrote extensively on surgery, pharmacology, medical ethics and the doctor-patient relationship. Ibn Zuhr (known in the West as Avenzoar), a century and a half later was an advocate of clinical research and practical experimentation.

In literature, Ibn Hazm (died 1064) expanded traditional romantic poetry with his "Tawq al-Hamamah" ("Dove's Necklace"), which expounds on the various forms of chivalric love and the joys and sorrows it produces. The courtly muwashshah form of poetry passed from al-Andalus into North Africa, and influenced the development of both literature and music in the Maghrib. The classical music of North Africa, which remains popular, is still known as "Andalusi music."

The most immediate effects of the events of 1492 to 1500 were felt in the great cities of North Africa, where most of the Andalusian refugees fled after their expulsion. Residents of each Spanish city tended to migrate to a particular Maghribi city, so that many exiles from Valencia ended up in Tunis, those from Córdoba in Tlemcen, refugees from Seville in Fez, and so on. Andalusian scholars, mer­chants and artisans in many ways revitalized North African society, enriching Maghribi culture and adding a fresh influence to the existing Arabo-Berber traditions. This influence continued for some 200 years, until the Andalusian heritage had been completely integrated into North African life. Nonetheless, many present-day Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians can still trace their lineage back to a specific city of al-Andalus (See Aramco World, July-August 1991).

Its intellectual, cultural and esthetic contribu­tions aside, however, al-Andalus left a bittersweet emotional legacy to the Arab and Muslim worlds. Though the sense of loss is most pronounced in descendants of the Andalusian exiles, the memory of al-Andalus retains its emotive power throughout the Islamic world

The 20th-century Iraqi writer Daisy Al Amir, for example, takes contemporary England as the set­ting for her allegorical story "An Andalusian Tale," about an Arab student who meets "a Spaniard who recognized his Arab ancestry" and is proud of his Andalusian heritage. Tunisian film director Nacer Khemir borrows his title and his melancholy sub­ject matter from Ibn Hazm in the 1990 film Le colier perdu du colombe (The Dove's Lost Necklace). Khemir's fanciful costumes, dream-like architecture, shim­mering colors and stunning cinematography give life to the esthetic ideal of al-Andalus.

When the Moors Ruled Spain

by Thomas J. Abercrombie
National Geographic
Vol. 174, No. 1, July 1988.

Through parting curtains of drizzle the lights of Africa dissolved into the widening gray dawn. Climbing back on deck with course corrections and hot coffee, I watched the last ghosts of lightning dance off the flanks of Morocco's Jabal Musa just astern. To the east a fine day was building; already the first breezes stiffened our sails and, gently heeling, our small chartered sloop Nejmah--Arabic for "star"--started to gallop.

"Perfect weather for a morning's sail--or an intercontinental passage," said my Spanish shipmate, Rafa, beaming from behind the wheel. Here the narrow Gibraltar Strait is one of the few places a sailor can combine the two. The radio forecast confirmed our optimism, and as Rafa eased our bow to 015 magnetic to allow for the tide, I switched the dial back to Spain's Radio Flamenco. We scanned the rising mists ahead for our landfall, snapping fingers to a Gypsy guitar.

"Ole, que bonita!" Rafa exclaimed. "Wow, what a beaut!" A beacon for mariners since the dawn of seafaring, the famous Rock was one of the Pillars of Hercules (Jabal Musa, twice as high behind us, formed the other). For the ancients they marked the boundary of the known world. To the occupying British, strategic "Gib" with its history of heroic sieges remains a monument to empire. Spain vociferously claims the tiny peninsula, a natural extension of its own soil.

Rafa--Rafael de Tramontana y Gayangos, the Marquis of Gaudacorte--measured the scene with his own thoughts. Before Spain lost Gibraltar to England in 1713, the Guadacortes ruled hereabouts. A grandson of Dr. Pascual Gayangos, Spain's first modern Arabist, Rafa now presides over the Fundacion Gayangos, a Madrid-based institute to promote cultural exchange between Spain and its Muslim neighbors. For me the stronghold marked the first stop on a journey into a neglected corner of Europe's history, a distant time when Muslims ruled Spain, and Islam visited its mind on the West.

The creed of Islam had been revealed to the seventh-century prophet-statesman Muhammad in distant Arabia. It spread swiftly, embracing the entire desert peninsula by the time of his death in 632. Six years later Syria and Palestine fell to the zealots. From their new capital in Damascus, Muslim armies fanned eastward through Mesopotamia to India and Central Asia, westward to the Nile and across North Africa. A century after the birth of Islam, its call to prayer rang from minarets all the way from the Atlantic to the outskirts of China, an empire larger than Rome's at its zenith.

History named these Muslim conquerors of Spain "Moors," probably because they arrived by way of Morocco. The Moors themselves never used the term. They were Arabs, from Damascus and Medina, leading armies of North African Berber converts. Most married into Spanish and Visigoth families or took fair- skinned Galician slaves to wife; soldiers all, they brought no women with them. From this heady mix of race and culture sprang the Moorish civilization, an adventure that would last 900 years, one that would change the face--and the soul--of Spain forever.

Rafa and I were bobbing in the wake of Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Muslim general. With soldiers and horses in four borrowed boats, he crossed from Ceuta on the African side--as did we--and set up his beachhead on the narrow ledge below the Rock where the town of Gibraltar huddles today, then dispatched the tiny fleet back to ferry the rest of his army.

In the spring of 711, Tariq marched northward from Gibraltar with 12,000 Muslims. At the Rio Barbate, south of Cadiz, the invaders met the hastily gathered forces of Spain's Visigoth king, Roderic. "Before us is the enemy; behind us, the sea," shouted Tariq, drawing his scimitar. "We have only one choice: to win!"

For an already faltering Visigoth rule, the battle of Barbate proved the mortal wound. King Roderic was slain; his body was never recovered. Whole battalions deserted, and the Christian army crumbled. The Islamic conquest of Spain was thus set in motion.

"Only recently have the Spanish begun to approach their Islamic past," Rafa said. "We take pride in our sangre pura, pure blood. No Catholic wants to face the thought of Moors on the family tree. "But we are finding that much of what we think of as 'pure Spanish,' our architecture, our temperament, our poetry and music--even our language--is a blend from a long Arabic heritage." In the weeks ahead I would find even more marks of the Moors on the face and heart of Spain.

Only two hours from the African coast we sailed Nejmah past Europa Point Light and into the lee of the Rock to tie up at Marina Bay, just below the lofty Moorish castle built by Tariq's successors. Shops, warehouses, traffic-clogged streets, quays, and dockyards now cover any traces of the first Arab conquerors, all except one: The name Gibraltar descends from jabal Tariq, Arabic for "Tariq's mountain."

I visited the hillside Arab fortress with a knowledgeable Gibraltar friend, Richard Garcia, a former schoolteacher with a passion for the history that crowds his town. Along the way Richard showed me Moorish walls, traces of an Arab gate, the domed baths now housing Gibraltar's small museum. Narrow lanes and steep stone steps led us up a block of modern high rises that today fills the large castle yard to the 80-foot-high tower that dominates the town and its harbor.

"Abu al-Hasan, a Moroccan king, refurbished the tower in 1333, and he built it to last," Richard said, pointing out small starburst patterns that pocked the ramparts. "Cannonballs barely scratched the ten-foot-thick walls. "The tower suffered 14 major sieges," he said. "Several times its defenders were starved out, but no army ever took it by force."

I was surprised to find the fortress still inhabited. The high-walled keep, just below the tower, serves as Gibraltar's lockup. Douglas Gaetto, an officer at the jail, showed me its newly painted cell blocks and what must be the world's smallest soccer field, squeezed into the prison yard. In cellars below we prowled rows of dungeons used for solitary confinement until the turn of the century. They faced on to a gallows courtyard and a lime pit once used to reduce corpses of the condemned.

"We have only eight 'guests' at the moment, small-time smugglers mostly. All short-termers," Officer Gaetto said. "We are looking forward to newer, larger quarters. Money will surely be appropriated. The problem is--as always on this tight little island--where to build it?"

Gibraltar's claustrophobia was aggravated during Spain's 16- year-long closure of its narrow land border, a ban lifted only in 1985. At his office I talked about the isolation with Jon Searle, then editor of the Gibraltar "Chronicle." "We are 29,000 people perched together on two and a half square miles of cliffs and beaches," Searle said. "The blockage deepened our siege mentality. We developed more ties with Tangier across the strait." And of Spain's oft voiced claims to the Rock? "The British Empire is history now. In the age of the missile, Gibraltar's strategic value has dropped," Searle said. "Britain just might be happy to let Spain have it. But how can it, really? We Gibraltarians are bilingual, our culture tied to both Spain and England. But we prefer to remain under the Union Jack. In a recent referendum only 44 voters cast their lot with Spain."

Still marveling at the vagaries of history, I followed the conquering footsteps of Tariq ibn Ziyad northward. After the victory at the Rio Barbate he had moved swiftly. One by one the Spanish cities fell to him, often betrayed by their own citizens long chafing under the Visigoths. Early in 712, after a perfunctory siege, his Muslims galloped through the gates of the Visigoth capital, Toledo. The Christian armies, those left, were pinned in the northernmost mountains of Spain.

Hemmed by walls, moated by a loop of the Rio Tajo, Toledo remained for nearly 400 years a stronghold of the Moors, who spun its tangled web of steep streets and narrow plazas. Its role as a border fortress is today recalled by the huge military school that sits atop an adjoining bluff.

In 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon wrested the city from the Moors; the Reconquista, or Reconquest of Spain by the Christians, had begun in earnest. But for several centuries after Toledo's recapture, the city remained bilingual, tolerant. Alfonso X patronized an important 13th-century translation school where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars collaborated to render Arabic manuscripts into Latin--masterpieces like the commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rushd (Averroes); works on algebra and mathematics by al-Khwarizmi (from whose name comes our term "logarithm"); and the Canon of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), which remained Europe's standard medical textbook for 500 years.

Christians raised a cathedral befitting a capital of Castile and dozens of churches and convents. Toledo remains the country's religious capital; its archbishop still reigns as primate of Spain. Today synagogues and mosques have been restored and splendid palaces opened to the public--museums to display Toledo's abundant heritage. The whole city has been officially declared a national monument.

Artists and artisans, plying old Moorish crafts, still prosper. On Calle Santo Tome a shopwindow sparkling with gold drew me inside to the friendly workbench of master craftsman Modesto Aguado-Martin. With a jeweler's hammer and steel point he deftly laid 24-carat thread into delicate patterns scored on a black iron platter. "We turn out Madonnas, Bible scenes, and Star of David motifs, all popular with tourists who day-trip down from Madrid," Senor Aguado said, tapping away. "But, as you see, we specialize in arabesque designs. "The art of damascene, as its name implies, came here from Damascus," he continued, the tiny hammer never missing a beat. "This is an authentic Toledo design; it could have come from the dome of a tenth-century mosque. Pure Arabic."

A local sculptor, Maximo Revenga, took me to a Toledo museum he helped restore, the Taller del Moro, literally, the "Moor's workshop," although it never served as such. It was built during the 14th century as a palace in Mudejar style, a lavish blend of Arab and Gothic architecture that graces many Spanish monuments. Its high salons, arches, and alcoves were worked in yeso, an art the Arabs mastered, carving plaster walls with breathtaking patterns of flowers, geometrics, and calligraphy.

"Yeso is a demanding medium, requiring patience to master and speed to execute; the carving is intricate and must be finished before the plaster hardens. "I studied the technique here at Toledo's School of Applied Arts," Revenga said. "Now I'm teaching it here. We must preserve this art; Toledo has dozens more Arab-style buildings-- throughout Spain there must be hundreds--that need loving care."

The darker side of Toledo's past chilled my last afternoon in the city--an exhibit of old torture implements at the Hermandad gallery across from the cathedral. It included a rack, branding irons, skull squashers, thumbscrews, an iron maiden. The grisly display was assembled, according to the city's Council of Culture, to remind us that even today "human beings are victims of physical and psychological torture in many parts of the world...."

I retreated back into Toledo's quiet gray streets dogged by ghosts. It was here, long after Alfonso VI, that the first victims of a growing Christian bigotry perished at the stake. In 1469 Prince Ferdinand of Aragon wed Princess Isabella of Castile; the marriage would unite Christian Spain under their rule. While waging war against Moorish potentates to the south, they would view as a threat Muslims and Jews in their own lands. In 1480 they established the Spanish Inquisition. Before it was over, three centuries later, thousands of Muslims and Jews had died; an estimated three million people were driven into exile. Shorn of its leading businessmen, artists, agriculturists, and scientists, Spain would soon find itself victim of its own cruelty.

A train ride south through sun-swept Andalusia brightened my mood. Here, across the warm, undulating landscape that nurtures rows of grape vines and olive and citrus trees, Islamic culture sank its deepest roots. Small wonder. Mediterranean Spain is a mirror of Morocco, a close cousin of the Levant. Here the Arabs felt at home. Indeed to a desert Arab, Andalusia--from the Arab al-Andalus--competed with descriptions of heaven in the Holy Karan: "gardens dark green...springs pouring forth...fruits and dates and pomegranates...." In 756 Prince Abd-al-Rahman, who had escaped massacre when his dynasty was overthrown in Syria, planted his capital at Cordoba on the fertile banks of the Guadalquivir (from the Arabic al-wadi al-kabir, great river) in Andalusia's heartland.

Under Abd-al-Rahman III and his successors, 150 years later, Cordoba blossomed into a metropolis of half a million with, according to contemporary chroniclers, 21 suburbs, 500 mosques, 300 public baths, 70 libraries, and miles of paved, lamp-lighted streets. The largest city in western Europe, Cordoba stood with Baghdad and Constantinople as one of the great cultural centers of the world.

Cordoba's pride today is its venerable Mezquita, or mosque, which in 1986 celebrated its 1,200th anniversary. Begun by the first Abd-al-Rahman, it was enlarged and embellished to become what is considered today the epitome of Moorish architecture. From its quiet Patio of the Orange Trees, past fountains where the faithful once performed their ablutions, I entered the 600-by-450-foot shrine, rivaling in size Islam's holiest in Mecca. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I wandered through the forest of jasper, marble, and porphyry columns, some 850, that support the tracery of double-tiered Moorish arches. Nineteen doorways, before they were walled up, let in light and air and extended the theme of the columns to the rows of orange trees in the courtyard.

My footsteps led me to the mosque's domed mihrab, or prayer niche. From behind its scalloped marble arches, amid the splendid mosaics designed by Byzantine carftsmen, Cordoba's rulers once led Friday prayers. Flowing Arabic calligraphy adorning the walls exalted Cordoba: "...praise to Allah who led us to this place...."

In the dim vastness I hardly noticed the cathedral. After the Christian Reconquest, Catholics reconsecrated the Mezquita as a church and for 300 years held services there. Then the clergy persuaded Emperor Charles V to raise a cathedral in its midst, despite strong protests from city leaders. Later, inspecting the baroque incursion, Charles confessed disappointment: "By installing something that is commonplace, you have destroyed what was once unique."

From smaller parish churches issue the spirit and spectacle of Cordoba's Semana Santa, or Holy Week. Thousands of Cordobans line narrow streets and wrought-iron balconies to watch the processions. Their religious intensity reflects the passion that drove medieval Christians to oust their Moorish occupiers.

Twenty churches participate, circulating about 50 pasos, or platforms, set with ornate statuary. "Different scenes each day recall the Madonna, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Burial," explained a Cordoban friend, Luis-Eduardo Prieto Rico. We finished our fried squid and garlic shrimp at El Triunfo, a small restaurant near the Mezquita, then wedged into the throng at the Plaza de las Tendillas to witness one of the processions.

To the beat of distant drums, the solemn escort arrived: files of 200 or more penitentes, ghostlike in long robes cinched with ropes and tall pointed hoods. Most carried long flickering tapers or swung smoking silver censers; others bent under heavy oaken crosses. Behind marched women of the parish veiled in black lace mantillas. The drums grew louder as the paso appeared from around the corner, in a blaze of light, swaying with the measured footsteps of some 30 bearers straining beneath it. The life-size Virgin sat draped in lace and rich brocades above banks of fresh white roses that perfumed the air. A hundred enormous candles set her silver halo aglitter and caught the sparkle of tears on her radiant face.

The drums stopped, the paso paused, and suddenly a woman in the crowd broke into song, a passionate saeta, the flamenco hymn for which Andalusia is famous. The words were Spanish, but the mournful melody echoed Arab and Gypsy origins:

Like the precious stones of a jeweler,
The tears that flood your lovely eyes....

The stunning solo had its effect; throughout the applauding crowd around me I saw many eyes moisten as drums took up the beat and the paso moved on into the night. The quiet cool of morning is the time to stroll Cordoba. After a strong, black cafe solo at the Bar Mezquita, I followed one of the twisting cobblestone lanes that fan outward from the mosque through the medieval Muslim quarter, some so narrow that a stretched handkerchief spans their walls. They lead to small plazas, some holding statues of Cordoba's famous sons: the Roman Seneca; Arab philosophers Ibn Hazm and Ibn Rushd; Maimonides, major Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages; the 15th-century general, Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, "El Gran Capitan"; Manolete, greatest of bullfighters.

Potted geraniums and carnations splash color on the tidy white-washed houses that line the lanes. On many of the massive wooden doors, as on those in Fez or Damascus, hang heavy iron knockers in the form of a hand--the hand of the Prophet's daughter, Fatima, according to one legend; another says the fingers recall the Five Pillars of Islam: the creed, prayers, alms, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.

As in Muslim cities, a Cordoba house acknowledges the outside world only begrudgingly through small windows, iron- grilled and shuttered, turning its attention inward to the center of family life, the patio. At Number 8, Pozo de Cueto, near the river, I got out my key and let myself in. "I cannot imagine a house without a patio," said my landlady, Senora Antonia Ortiz de Marin, bringing coffee and small glasses of amontillado, the local dry sherry. Now that the children were grown, she and her husband, a retired policeman, rent rooms during crowded Holy Week.

"How else, in such a small space, could we have had a private garden in the city?" she said. "A safe place for the children to play?" Our patio was typical. Entered through a Moorish arch, it was paved with arabesque tile work and softened by flowers, an herb garden, and orange trees set in pots around a fountain. I recalled that one of the Arabic words for home was muskin, from the same root as sakun, peace. Even in the heart of the city, my room looked down on a tranquil world of its own, under a private square of blue sky.

Of the extensive royal architecture that once crowded Muslim Cordoba, little survives. By far the grandest palace, a Versailles of its time, was built by Abd-al-Rahman III five miles northwest of the city at the foot of the Sierra Morena. For 25 years, until its completion in 961, he lavished on it a third of the royal budget, naming it Madinat al-Zahra, the City of Zahra, after a favorite concubine. Under his son and successor, al- Hakam II, it grew into a small city; double walls, each as thick as 15 feet, enclosed half a square mile. According to one account Hakam's family, his generals and viziers, scribes and translators, workmen and shopkeepers gave it a population of 20,000. The royal bodyguard added 12,000; the harem, 6,000 more.

"There was nothing visible when archaeologists arrived in 1910," said Antonio Vallejo, director of excavations, when we walked together down the terraced palace grounds. There were cypress and olive trees, a litter of fallen columns and capitals. "Foundations outline the caliph's mansion, the mosque, 400 houses, the ancient market, aqueducts, formal gardens, pools-- even a zoo," Vallejo said. "We have restored one of the buildings, the magnificent audience hall."

Amid its tattered splendors, where Hakam once received embassies from Europe and the East, I conjured up scenes from the "Arabian Nights" of turbaned notables and veiled dancing girls. Suddenly my daydreaming was interrupted by a vision coming through an archway, a tall Moor in white robes and pointed black beard.

"Salaam Alaykum!" he bowed, "I am Hakam II--of course, just for today." Francisco Bernal Garcia, an actor from a local troupe, smiled. We were soon joined by a dozen of his colleagues, taking their places on thick cushions set on sumptuous carpets in the center of the marble floor. While a television crew arranged its lighting, several hundred ten-year- olds filed noisily into the chamber, girls costumed in makeshift veils and slippers, the boys sporting burnt-cork goatees and cardboard scimitars.

"We are reenacting Caliph Hakam's reception for emissaries of King Ordona IV of Leon in 961," Francisco explained. "It is part of a program to bring history to life for Cordoba's schoolchildren." But Madinat al-Zahra underscores another of history's lessons: Even great powers are mortal.

Barely 50 years after its completion, the great palace lay sacked and leveled, as the caliphate dissolved into a score of bickering city-states. Amid the chaos that followed, many Muslim rulers became clients of northern Christian princes, and religious boundaries often became obscured. The famous Christian knight El Cid (his nickname derives from the Arabic al-sayyid, lord) changed his allegiance with the gusty political winds, now to fight for the emir of Zaragoza, now to help a Christian king, now to rule over Muslim Valencia.

The fall of Toledo drove Spanish Muslims to desperation. They sent for armies of the Berber fundamentalists, the Almoravids, who poured in from Morocco to stem the Christian advance. But they soon seized power for themselves to unite Muslim Spain with North Africa, which they ruled from their capital in Marrakech. Gradually these desert warriors succumbed to Moorish luxury, and half a century later another wave of North African puritans, the Almohads, crossed the strait to supplant them. In 1170 the Almohad ruler, Yaqub Yusuf, moved the Spanish capital to Seville.

Sweeping views of Seville can still be enjoyed from Sultan Yaqub's minaret, one of three sister towers he commissioned. Two others survive in Rabat and Marrakech. From 20 stories up the eye pans from the red-tiled roofs of Seville's medieval hub to the distant rim of modern apartment blocks and factories and beyond to the glowing countryside that nurtures Andalusia's largest city. When Christians destroyed Yaqub's mosque, they spared his minaret and topped it with a belfry and the giant bronze weathervane, or giralda, that gives it its popular name. Today La Giralda serves as the steeple for the largest Gothic cathedral in Europe.

Seville, in one word, defines Spain. That is the reason why Bizet chose it as the setting for his opera "Carmen." And why romantics like myself are drawn back--to the spectacle of the bullfight at the Plaza de la Maestranza, where glittering matadors perfect their cruel ballet of bravery and death. Or to clap our hands to the rhythms of guitars and staccato heels during a Gypsy lament:

A woman is like your shadow.
Pursued, it runs away,
Ignored, it follows you....

Or even join the sweater-and-jeans set at a noisy cafe flamenco in Triana to whirl through a sevillanas, the folk dance popular now all over Spain. Or just relax by the whispering fountains under the peach trees in the gardens of the Alcazar.

Within its high walls the Christian king Pedro the Cruel erected in the 1350s his own palace. He imported Muslim architects from Granada, whose designs reflect the cultural overlap of the times. Escutcheons on the walls of the royal bedchamber feature the lion rampant of Leon and the towered castle of Castile emblazoned with Arabic script:

Glory to our sultan Don Pedro.
Allah aid and protect him.

"Seville's Alcazar is the finest example of Mudejar architecture in Spain," curator Dr. Rafael Manzano said. "But it is more than just a museum. It is the royal residence whenever the King visits Seville." Dr. Manzano recounted the legend of the Alcazar's peach trees. "A romantic 11th-century ruler, al-Mutamid, also famed as a poet, married a northern beauty. Although happy as queen, she pined for the snows of her native hills. So al-Mutamid, it is told, ordered the gardens of the Alcazar planted with wild peach trees. Each spring, to this day, they bank the gardens with snow-white blossoms."

Against a backdrop of the Sierra Nevada's eternal snows, the drama of the Moors was to play itself out. When Cordoba fell to the Christian Reconquista in 1236 and Seville 12 years later, Muslim lands shrank to a 200-mile-long bastion in Spain's rugged southeast, curving from Gibraltar to past Almeria. Here sultans of the Nasrid dynasty ruled from their stronghold at Granada. From 1248 to 1354 they raised their masterpiece, a palace- fortress, the Alhambra.

Today from its high hill, Sabika, the clay-red Alhambra (from the Arabic al-hamra, the red one) looks down on two Granadas. One is the sloping Albaicin quarter--austere, labyrinthine, Moorish. The second is the newer city--noisy, businesslike, baroque--that sweeps along broad boulevards out onto the Vega plain. From the rooftop of his restored Moorish house in the heart of the Albaicin, Professor Miguel Jose Hagerty and I enjoyed a sweeping view of the Alhambra. Born in Chicago to Irish parents with gypsy roots, Professor Hagerty graduated from Notre Dame, where he majored in Islamic Studies. He now teaches Arabic and lectures on Arabic poetry at the University of Granada.

"Arab Spain nurtured scores of poets. Many of its rulers-- al-Mutamid and Abd-al-Rahman I, for instance--were poets in their own right," Professor Hagerty said. "Strict Islamic tradition discourages the making of 'graven images,' so painting and sculpture never flourished among the Moors. Instead they channeled creative energy into language. With its wealth of vocabulary, its sonorous sounds, its flowing calligraphy, Arabic is well suited to the task.

"Little has been translated," he said, but he recalled lines that survived the journey into Spanish and English. From Ibn al- Sabuni:

I present you a precious mirror,
Behold there the beauty that consumes me
O furtive love, your reflection is more yielding
And better keeps its promises....

Then he countered those lines with a stanza by another Sevillian romantic, Ibn Ammar:

Slaves in the realm of love
Are the only truly free men.

Professor Hagerty and I climbed to the Alhambra. The lofty mansions of the Nasrid sultans make up the most visited site in Spain. It is a miracle that they survived the centuries. They were defiled by squatters, eroded by neglect, brutalized by Charles V's massive Renaissance addition--a brick among lace pillows--and confounded by misbegotten restorations. Nevertheless the Alhambra endures, a sublime Oriental meld of artifact and nature.

Here the walls themselves speak--if you know Arabic. We traced out poems in the supple calligraphy of the friezes, archways, and fountains. In the upper gardens we found a couplet by Ibn al-Yayyab that praised Allah for providing the sparkling palace with

...its light of virtue
And the peace of its shadows....

A marble fountain bragged,

No greater mansions I see than mine
No equal in East or West.

I had to agree. Even in the oil-rich Arab countries of today architects with unlimited budgets have yet to match the Alhambra.
Arabic poetry was crafted, above all, for recital and song. Its lyric forms, zajal and muwashshah, some say, inspired the first ballads of the European troubadors. The soul-stirring adagios of cante jondo, the deep song of Gypsy flamenco, still trace moods and rhythms to this lost age. Jaime Heredia, a local flamenco singer, told me: "A Moroccan orchestra recently came to Granada to join us in concert. It was fantastico. We were up half the night playing encores."

I had missed the concert, but in Fez and Tetuan I had heard that music, the same melodies that once entertained courtiers in the Alhambra, played and sung by the descendants of Spanish Muslims expelled during the Inquisition centuries ago. They still convene regularly to keep alive their musiqa al- andalusiyyah.

"We had language problems, of course," Jaime said. "But we agreed on one thing: Musically we were brothers." Throughout Spain today the art of flamenco is being threatened by its commercialization in floor shows called tablaos; these count on dramatic lighting, amplifiers, and curvaceous dancers to attract larger audiences. Sacrificed in the process is flamenco's hallmark, its duende: soul. But a night owl can still sample flamenco puro when Gypsies gather at Jaime Heredia's bar, La Fuente, in Granada's Albaicin for a misa de doce, literally a "midnight mass," slang for a flamenco bash.

Well after midnight young Bautista arrived with his guitar, the sign for Jaime to close up shop and aficionados to gather. A small, broad-shouldered man in sweater and jeans, Heredia didn't look "flamenco." Where was the flat hat, the bolero jacket, the high-heeled boots? No matter. The guitar starts to ripple. Snapping fingers pick up the beat of a fandanguillo, and Jaime's voice lights up the darkness:

A chorus of children's laughter
Flows past an unseen river
Bittersweet strains recall a former love.

The guitar fires another fusillade of minor chords, stopping everyone in mid-drink. Jaime presses his hands together. Sweat gathers on his brow, veins on his neck bulge, and the powerful voice again stabs the room, a "deep song" of Gypsy anguish. The words, stylized, blurred, are lost to my untrained ear, but closing my eyes, I hear an Egyptian chanting from his minaret.

What about the lyrics? I pressed Jaime when the session finally broke up. It was daylight now, and regular breakfast customers were already demanding their coffee and brandy. "Not easy, senor," Jaime apologized. "The song is about love and death and God--ah, but no one could understand who was not suckled at a Gypsy mother's breast."

The remote villages of the Alpujarras, halfway up the southern flank of Mulhacen, Spain's highest peak, were the last domains of the Moors in Spain. Many towns like Beninar, Almocita, Bubion, and Mecina Alfahar still wear their Arabic names, as does Mount Mulhacen--and the Alpujarras itself.

The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella sealed the fate of the faltering Granada sultans. Catholic Spain, finally united, continued to force the Muslims toward the sea, town by town. In 1492, the same year they launched Christopher Columbus on his historic voyage, Their Catholic Majesties rode into Granada to preside over the abdication of the last Moorish ruler, Muhammad Abu-Abdullah--Boabdil, as the Spanish call him.

On the way to the Alpujarras, I paused above Granada at the pass called Suspiro del Moro, the Sigh of the Moor. It was here Boabdil stopped to look back and shed a tear over his lost kingdom. According to legend his domineering mother, Aisha, berated him: "Fitting you cry like a woman over what you could not defend like a man." For a century more, Muslims held the Alpujarras's rocky folds and raided into the Christian lowlands, often igniting rebellions, until the last of the Moors were driven into exile in 1609.

The autumn day breaks late over the valley's brim at mile- high Bubion, waking the village slowly. I rubbed my hands together against the chill as I left my small pension. The first wisps of smoke drifted from conical chimneys atop slab roofs that staircase down the hillside toward the church square.

From nearby Capileira I set off on horseback with a farmer, Antonio Jimenez Estevez. We rode upward over narrow terraces through the last warm colors of autumn--orchards of red-leafed cherry trees and golden chestnut, bordered by yellow poplars and evergreen. For a while we followed the gravel way, Europe's highest motor road, that leads to 11,000-foot Pico de Veleta; then we turned off along a medieval acequia, or irrigation canal.

It brought us, after a mile or so, to a stone reservoir called, in Spanish, an alberca. The old watering system--and its Arabic- derived nomenclature--was still in use. "This is one of three canals on this side of the Poqueira Valley built by the Moors," Antonio said. "Twenty years ago, when I was a boy, we still ran water mills on this one." Now there was also a modern dam, a small hydroelectric plant, a larger canal.

We crossed a stream and walked our horses to the top of a rocky bluff. Beneath a sweeping snowscape, we came to the stone hut that serves as summer camp for the Jimenez family's upper fields. We sat under a walnut tree on the edge of the threshing circle while Antonio's young nephew, Jose Luis, hitched a team of mules to a wooden plow. Fall plowing would be the last chore before closing camp for the winter. A cousin waved a loud " Hola!" as he set off walking, in a cloud of dust and tinkling of bells, toward Mulhacen with the family's 400 sheep. Antonio's uncle Juan brought us local white wine, slices of the air-dried ham for which the Alpujarras is renowned, and a bowl of pears.

"Our terraces are small, the soil grudging, the season short," Antonio said. "Most of the men leave the Alpujarras to make their fortunes. I spent seven years in the orange groves of Valencia. "But I am back now to stay. Life is too hectic, too crowded on the plains. This is home."

The quiet crags of the Alpujarras look down on another world, lying only a dozen crow-flight miles away. An hour of hairpin turns dropped me from an eagle's next--alpine, traditional, and poor--to the Mediterranean--tropical, cosmopolitan, and booming. If the Alpujarras speaks of the past, the Costa del Sol plays the Spain of tomorrow.

At his office at the Costa del Sol Tourist Board, promotion manager Diego Franco said, "Historically, our two greatest enemies were the sun and the sea. One cursed us with a blistering climate; the other brought pirates." I had noticed that atalayas, or watchtowers, still guard every jut of land along the coast and that the older towns stood well into the cooler, protected foothills.

"Today, sun and sea are our stock-in-trade," he said. "Last year 50 million visitors came to Spain, one for every Spaniard and then some. It's an invasion--but a peaceful one."

The coast from Torremolinos to Estepona has crystallized into a 45-mile-long tourist metropolis: hotels, condominiums, restaurants, cafes, discos, amusement parks, casinos, boutiques. Many foreigners who come for a holiday decide to stay. An estimated one million pensioners from Great Britain alone have bought a piece of the Spanish sun.

At the other end of the scale stands Marbella. I checked in at the trendy Puente Romano Hotel, hoping for some cultural exchange with its jet-set regulars--the Countess Gunilla von Bismarck, perhaps, or Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Sean Connery, Christina Onassis. Now, during the low season, I found tranquillity instead--in an Arabian setting. My whitewashed stucco villa opened on a beachfront oasis, where a burbling stream flowed under olive and lemon trees past stands of bamboo and camellias, all shaded by palms that dropped ripe dates on my balcony.

"Allah akbar! Allah akbar!" The familiar call to prayer drifted in from the mosque across the street, Mezquita del Rey Abdul Aziz, built by Saudis who play or invest here and dedicated to their founding king.

All over Marbella and nearby Puerto Banus are other signals that modern-day Moors have joined the "peaceful invasion"; signs in flowing Arabic script point you to the Lebanese Delicatessen, the Banco Saudi-Espanol, the Near East Insurance Agency, to Arab doctors, a Muslim cemetery.

At Puerto Banus, Syrian-born Ahmed Mahayni, sales manager for Gray d'Albion, showed me the company's domed and turreted condominiums--a half-mile-long complex finished in marble and gold-tinted tile and commanding a view of the harbor's gleaming pleasure flotilla. I leaned toward Unit 507, a multi-level, four-bath, two-pool, hanging-garden extravaganza. But I had to admit that, at 1.5 million dollars, it was too tall for my purse. "We have smaller apartments, some for as little as $270,000," Mr. Mahayni said.

Near the Andalucia Plaza Casino, I sipped coffee with Mokhles "George" El-Khoury, a Christian Arab who moved to Puerto Banus from Beirut to run a building-management firm. "Andalusia reminds me of Lebanon--without the wars and politics," George said. "You have the mountains, the sea, the fine climate of olives and palm trees. The Spanish are a warm people, not stiff and formal like many Europeans. The food is much like ours, so is the shape of the houses and the towns. To an Arab--well, Andalusia feels like home."

Nowhere is this more true than in the old Muslim capital of Cordoba, where I spent my last Spanish days. I was awakened there early one morning by the clatter of workmen at the Mezquita across the street. From my window I watched a burly stonemason score a half-ton block with his screeching power saw, while another drove wedges into the kerf to split it off square. On wooden rollers they sweated it into a gap in the timeworn wall. Thus, for more than a thousand years, have Cordobans furbished their beloved Mezquita, first as mosque, then as cathedral.

No other artifact more richly evokes the golden age of the Moors, a stormy millennium that dovetailed two faiths, two cultures, two continents. Throughout, while king and sultan fought bitterly for the hand of Spain, ordinary life prospered as Arab, Visigoth, Castilian, and Berber worked together to forge the brilliant civilization that helped lead Europe out of the Dark Ages.

Ultimately the cross replaced the crescent. The Moors themselves faded into history, leaving behind their scattered dreams. But Spain and the West stand forever in their debt.