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Article: The Moors' last high; Andalusia offers a glimpse of a once-great civilization.
- Article from:
- Europe
- Article date:
- October 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Delegation of the European Commission. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Well you may weep like a woman, for what you could not defend like a man!" Thus said the sharp-tongued dowager Aisha to her son Boabdil, Sultan of Granada, last of the Moors, as he looked mournfully back across the Vega plain to see the Catholic Kings' royal standards flying over the Alhambra palace he had just surrendered.
Last winter, I was captivated by this passage in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. Determined to find out more about the Moors and their lost empire, I decided to visit the land from which Boabdil fled.
In fact, the Moors were a mixture of Arabs and Berbers who invaded Spain early in the eighth century and swiftly extended their ...