Word: spain
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...spotted with squabbling factions -- Christians, Jews, Visigoths -- separated from Africa by a small strait and ripe for conquest. In 711 a mixed force of Arabs and Berbers under the command of Musa ibn Nusayr crossed the sea and smashed through the patchy Visigothic resistance; within 50 years most of Spain, except for the pockets of Castile and Catalonia in the north, had become al-Andalus, the farthest western expansion of a vast Muslim empire run by the Abbasid dynasty from Baghdad...
...sons of the Prophet brought no Arab women with them; they intermarried with Iberian ones. The conquering power became an indigenous one in short order, although the successive caliphs tended to retain a nostalgia for Baghdad. Out of the Moorish conquest grew the first unified culture Spain had seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted until 1492, when Catholic armies, under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, drove the last vestiges of Arab power back to North Africa. If you want to grasp why Spain, traditionally, is unique in Europe, you must begin with the fact...
Adaptation lay at the cultural heart of Islamic Spain. It was not always benign; like the Venetians bringing back war plunder to St. Mark's, the Arab rulers symbolized their victory over the Christian infidel by taking bells from church spires and converting them into mosque lamps. The most impressive single work of sculpture in the show, the 11th century Pisa griffin, is so hybrid that without a context, scholars seem unable to decide where it comes from -- or even whether it is from al-Andalus at all. It may equally well be Egyptian, North African or Iranian, though...
...durable art of al-Andalus -- the Arabs' word for Spain between their initial conquest and their final expulsion -- was, of course, architecture. Of the 4,000 or so "castles in Spain" that still stand (military buildings of all kinds, from fortified palaces to watchtowers), fully a quarter were built by the Arabs. Several of their buildings, from the Alhambra, or "red castle," in Granada to the Great Mosque of Cordoba to the towering Giralda in Seville, are among the key works of world architecture...
Hispano-Islamic culture was an extraordinary hybrid, built over the vestiges of Rome, mingling Western with Middle Eastern forms. This tension and merging shows itself everywhere in the remnants of Islamic Spain. The architects of ^ the prayer hall of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, for instance, designed its sublime forest of columns and horseshoe arches as a communal space without the hierarchical orientation of a Christian basilica, as befitted Islamic ritual -- but they also based its double-arch system on the design of Roman aqueducts. "You have taken something unique and turned it into something mundane," the Emperor Charles...