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Above me, cutting into the storm-cloud sky of a late-spring morning, rise the marbled crags of what in antiquity was called Mons Calpe, a 1,396-foot eruption of stone on the Mediterranean coast. I gaze across the sea and contemplate the sere and forbidding massif of the Rif Mountains in Morocco-close geographically but in every other respect a world apart from where I stand, on Gibraltar ("The Rock," as locals knowit). Yet fiercenturies this was not so.

For the ancient Greeks, the soaring rock was so dramatic that it had to be the work of Hercules, nothing less than one of two pillars he erected to mark the entrance to Hades. The other pillar, Mons Abila, stood twelve miles to the south, across the water in present-day Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in northern MeroCeo.
In A.D. 711, when a Muslim army of eighteen thousand arrived from North Africa, Mons Calpe became "the mount of conquest," "the citadel of Islam," or, most colorfully, "an obstruction stuck in the throats of the idolaters." Eventually, after capturing the Iberian Peninsula from the Visigoths (who ruled over a population of Christians, Jews, and pagans), the Muslims renamed the rock Jabal ("mount") Tariq, in honor of General Tariq ibn Ziyad, who had led them to victory. A mix of Arabs and Berbers, the Muslims would come to be known as Moors, and the name Jabal Tariq, corrupted by the Europeans, would become Gibraltar.
A British colony since 1713, Gibraltar has in recent times been the subject of interration a] discord: Spain claims The Rock (reputedly a haven for offshore banking) as its own, to the loudly voiced displeasure of royalist and indeperidence-minded Gibraltarians. My expectation of finding little here besides angry Britons and seedy financiers is off. Gibraltar shares many of the idyllic characteristics of the peninsula to which it is attached, which I was able to see as soon as my plane banked toward the runway over a sapphire sea and touched down amid palms tinted pink by the setting sun. Its people are a vibrant m6lange of English, Genovese, Maltese, and Portuguese, joined by a large contingent of Spaniards who commute from the mainland and Moroccans, a number of whom came ashore illegally after perilously crossing the strait in skiffs.

For more than seven centuries after Tariq ibn Ziyad's invasion, much of the Iberian Peninsula,most notably its southern regions-Andalusia in Spain and the Algarve in Portugal, along with Gibraltar-belonged to the Moors and flourished under their rule. Moorish Iberia was, during the Middle Ages, the most prosperous, luxurious, and civilized corner of Western Europe. Its culture-cosmopolitan, imbued with a love of art and a quest forknowledge grew at the zenith of the Islamic empire, when Muslim armies had conquered territory stretching from North Africa to China.
The cities of Iberia, among them Silves, Córdoba, and Granada, far outshone the still roughshod and muddy settlements of the Franks to the north. Their only rivals in splendor were the metropolises of Byzantium and the Muslim East. Iberian poets writing in Arabic were legendary throughout the Muslim world; architectural masterpieces were renowned as among the finest on earth; the religiously diverse population lived in peace under enlightened caliphal rule. Yet the Moors did more than bring light to the lands they had vanquished: By way of Iberia, Arab scholars passed on to Western Europe the ancient Greek culture and science they had inherited from their formerly Hellenic lands, thereby sparking revolutions in every sphere of learning. Had the Moors never ruled Iberia, Europe might never have known the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration might never have begun, and Europeans might never have discovered the Americas. In short, the world as we know it might never have taken shape.

That is quite a legacy, to be sure, but Europeans have not always appreciated it. In 1983, when I went to Madrid to study at the university, the prevailing Spanish interpretation of the Moorish era was centuries of darkness dispelled only by the Reconquista. This, I eventually learned, is a misreading of history. After studying Arabic a few years later, I spent two and a half years working in Morocco and then traveled throughout the Middle East. I came to see how strong the Moorish influence has been in Iberia-and how positive. In fact, more than any other place in Europe or the Muslim World, southern Iberia shines with exemplary Islamic glory, beauty, and grandeur.

The evening I arrive in Silvess, or Shalb, as the Arabs called the town when it was the capital of the Islamic Algarve, a full moon bathes the reddish sandstone ramparts and turrets of the Moorish fortress in a silver pallor. Orange orchards perfume the air with a fruity aroma, and stately carob trees with ripening pods and droopy fronds stand against a limpid violet sky. Looking for a money changer, I wander the beige cobbled alleys beneath the fortress.

Somewhere near the Rua da Mesquita (Street of the Mosque; mesquita is from the Arabic masji) I stop a police officer, a bushybrewed, portly fellow with a round chin and rounder belly, and ask, first in English and then in Spanish, where I might change dollars into cures. Smiling and shrugging, he responds in Portuguese, which sounds to my ear something like Spanish deformed by an exotic nasal twang. Silves has no money changers, he saysthere are not enough tourists for that-and the two banks are closed. Just the same, he's sure merchants will accept payment in dollars.

I thank him and move on. Nearby, on the Rua Elias Garcia, I take a seat at one of the many outdoor cafes and watch the evening paseo. Women with olive skin and lustrous blackhair stroll armin arm; short old menwith narrow shoulders strut like kings or sit at caf6 tables, smiling and sipping their coffee; spikyhaired teenagers in gangstajeans gather around the fountain in the tiny square, joking and laughing. It seems everyone in town is out gossiping orjust enjoyingthe evening cool.

But I am in the thick of nostalgia, somehow puzzled by the ramparts and the palms and the purple sky and the scents... even the orange cake I'm eating. The Yemens who settled in Shalb in the Middle Ages turned a once-middling village into a feast of soft pastels for a connoisseur's senses, so unlike the stark desert light, barren mountains, and parched air from which they came. As darkness falls, I can almost imagine Silves as it was then, for almost four centuries following the Moorish conquest: a city grander than Lisbon, the abode of poets and historians, a port trading with all of the Mediterranean. (The Arade River, just eight miles south, which once gave Silves access to the sea, has since silted up.) The Moors introduced to Europe not only oranges but also lemons, pomegranates, figs, and almonds (not to mention sugarcane, rice, and saffron); the breeze carriesthe scentof the Moorish past.

Later in the evening, I walk back along the Rua da Mesquita. The street takes me up toward the fortress, where I find Silves's cathedral, a thirteenth-century assemblage of Spanish Gothic belfries and high white walls built decades after the Reconquista. The Moors lost Shalb in 1242 and according to my guidebook, the new Christlan rulers built the cathedral on the site of a mosque: hence the name of the street.

The next day at the Town Hall, just down the hill from the cathedral, I meet with the cabinet chief, Luis Miguel de Lima Santos, an aficionado of Silves's Moorish past, and mention my disappointment that Silves's Christian reconquerors destroyed the mosque. It turns out that there's more to the story. "In fact," Luis Miguel says, "we now think the Moors built their mosque over the site of a cathedral. They did this because they adopted our holy places-they tried to conciliate and combine." One wonders how conciliating the Christians of the time found the razing of their cathedral, but for Luis Miguel the mission of the present is clear.

"We are trying to clarify our Moorish past," he tells me, adding that the local government has made the recovery of this heritage a priority. "Nowadays, there are many Portuguese who talk of the 'conquest,' not the 'Reconquista,' because before the Moors came, Visigoths and Romans [many of whom were still pagan] lived here, and they invited Mr. Tariq and his army" to settle a dispute over succession among Visigothic kings. "Mr. Tariq liked it here, so he stayed."

The Moors of that time little resembled the Muslims of today, he adds. "They drank wine and gave rights to women.... They were educated, philosophical, and devoted to their studies; their civilization was more advanced than Europe's in mathematics, geometry, geography, and medicine. Our Christian reconquerors were the barbarians, not the Moors."

At that time, a degree of tolerance was the rule in Arab lands (the Koran enjoined it). This attitude derived both from Islam's respect for the two faiths on which it was based and from a certain magnanimity in victory. Over the hundred years following the death of the prophet Muhammad, Muslims had founded one of the largest empires in history, and Judeo Christian Europe, fragmented and backward, could not compete.

The defiant tenor of my university guide, a tall and long haired Spanish speaking Gypsy who wore a leather hat and spurred leather boots, still twenty years ater rings in my ears, challenging those Spaniards within earshot to dispute his assertions about the primacy of Los Moros in the country's history. (He may have been a convert to Islam, but I never learned for sure.) I no longer recall his name, but he was the first to awaken me to Andalusia's Muslim past, and his city, home to the Mezquita, was Córdoba, the most Moorish city in Spain.
After driving through endless sun washed olive orchards, I arrive in Córdoba. There, above the many arched Roman bridge (dating from A.D. 120) and the rushing brown currents of the Guadalquivir River, rise the buff stone facades of the eighth century Mezquita, topped in places by giant belfries added after the Reconquista. Built mostly by the prince Abd al Rahman I, the first of several energetic patron rulers of the city, the Mezquita, which occupies a large city block, is one of the biggest mosques in the world; for five hundred years it was, in the words of the Arab historian Philip K. Hitti, no less than "the Ka'bah of Western Islam" a pilgrimage site for Iberian Muslims unable to make the hajj to Mecca. The view of the Mezquita from across the Guadalquivir is immensely stirring. With its sandy brown hues and palms, it brings to mind the majesty of the medieval quarter of Fez.

As I enter the Mezquita from its courtyard of orange trees, a rush of cool air meets me, and I find myself faced with gloom and red and white striped arches resembling those of the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus, on which Abd al Rahman modeled his masterwork. Column upon column recedes into the half light; vault after vault, lit by the bulbs of flickering chandeliers and inlaid with the floral designs characteristic of Islamic art, rises skyward; the Oriental mosaics of the mihrab (a recess in the eastern wall pointing toward Mecca) recall the glory of Byzantium. This is no coincidence: Artists sent by Constantinople helped in the mihrab's construction. After the Reconquista, Córdoba's new Christian rulers were much impressed by the Mezquita, so, rather than destroy it, they converted it into a cathedral and built a myriad of chapels seemingly pell mell along the walls. If the chapels look out of place, they do not really diminish the Mezquita's grandeur.

The drama evoked by the Mezquita well accords with the storied life of Abd al Rahman I, a prince of the Umayyad dynasty and descendant of the caliph of Damascus. As a young man in Iraq, Abd al Rahman escaped a massacre by usurpers, and, hounded by assassins, he traveled for five years in disguise across North Africa to reach C6rdoba in 755. There he took control, established his city's independence from the Arab east, and initiated the greatest era of Moorish Spain's splendor. His legacy is the Mezquita and much, much more.

While Europe suffered the Dark Ages, Córdoba came to possess half a million citizens, seven hundred mosques, the first gas streetlights in Europe, three hundred public baths (when washing was anathema to Christians), twenty seven schools, and libraries containing hundreds of thousands of books this when most of Europe was unschooled or reading only the Bible. Literacy in Umayyad Andalusia may have been close to universal. Córdoba's poets, philosophers, architects, physicians, and craftsmen garnered fame all over the world. European countries sent their emissaries to the Córdoban court and their students to Córdoba's university, which was founded in the Mezquita itself.

In Córdoba, Moorish civilization reached its acme, and from here its influence spread across much of the known world. The Moors introduced Europe to Chinese writing paper. Moorish coins were something like what the U.S. dollar is for the world today a currency valued far beyond Andalusia's borders. As feudalism established itself in Europe, binding peasants to their lands and masters, the Moorish legal system offered Andalusians the rule of law, equality, and rights. Large numbers of Spaniards converted to Islam or adopted the Arabic language and customs.

After visiting the mosque, I walk out into a shower of sunlight and enter the serpentine lanes of the whitewashed old quarter, slipping into the maze of the Judería, or Jewish quarter. I pass by the Zoco (from the Arabic suq, or market) and gaze at the fine leatherwork, pottery, and gold and silver jewelry on sale all legacies of Moorish rule.

Here and there buskers play the guitar, an instrument the Moors brought to Spain. On narrow Calle Judíos, I stop by the fourteenth century synagogue, whose intricate friezes and inlays show clear Arab influence. But there are no Jews left: The Christians, reversing Moorish policies of religious tolerance, expelled them after the Reconquista.

I find myself yearning for something, well, more transcendental. A little way beyond the synagogue, at 12 Calle Judíos, I hear the sounds of a lute and strains of a lilting Arab tenor coming from a private house. A sign by the door reads CASA ANDALUSÍ, marking a restored twelfth century Moorish house open to the public.

I walk in and sense immediately that I have found what I've been hankering after. An arched door leads into the main courtyard. There, polished black and white stones in geometric designs make up the floor, potted ferns and flowers stand in every corner, ivy droops from the balconies of the second floor, soothing sounds emanate from a fountain. High arched doors give onto side rooms, where Moroccan tapestries cover many of the walls. In the largest chamber, an exhibition of presses, pulleys, and wheels shows how the Moors made paper from old rags, water, and rice paste; there are sample sheets available to touch. Every turn of a corner brings another delight small exhibits of objects from Umayyad days, displays of Moorish craftwork, gilt Korans, and pottery. In conformity with Moorish style and Islamic notions of privacy, there are no windows that give onto the street and offer distraction.

Casa Andalusí is more than a restoration, however: Its Moorish decor prompts contemplation and, most of all, exudes harmony. Later that morning, I talk with Salma Farouki, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, a resident of Córdoba for the past fifteen years, and Casa Andalusi's owner and restorer. Despite the horrific conflict in her homeland, Salma gives every indication of being at peace, seemingly achieved through her practice of Islam and adoption of Moorish civilization's highest values, which she has preserved in her home. Dressed in elegant robes of white, yellow, and red, her hair hidden under a wrap of similar colors, Salma reassures me that "the past of Córdoba is not dead but a living path to the future. All the prophets were sent by the same God, the one God, to help man become as God intended. God created everything in harmony for the benefit of man. I have restored this house so everyone can see his responsibility, to feel the harmony and unity that God intended."

After Élan of Islamic conquest had spent itself, the principalities of Moorish Iberia took to fighting among one another, an invitation to the Christian Spanish kingdoms in the north of the peninsula to intervene. C6rdoba fell to the Spanish, and its glory waned. But Moorish Spain was destined for one final and magnificent efflorescence in Granada, the last remaining Iberian province under Muslim control. Granada's greatest monument is the palace of the Alhambra (from the Arabic alqal'a al hamra', or "the red fortress," after the color of its bricks), which is set against the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada.

Salvador, an aged Spaniard with a barrel chest and a high shock of wavy silver hair, is my guide to the Alhambra. He speaks Spanish in a theatrical, stentorian baritone, trilling his r's endlessly, lisping through his z's and c's in the Castilian manner. During my three hour visit, he recounts the history of the palace (it began as a fortress in the ninth century and was expanded and embellished thereafter), states the length of the walls (more than a mile), and points out innumerable details, among them the arabesque patterns of the tiles, the wooden grilles of the harem windows (which let women see out into the courtyards and rooms of state but kept men from looking in), and so much more that I'm barely able to follow him.

The Alhambra is grand, overwhelmingly so, but what strikes me most is the sound of water trickling from fountains in every courtyard; the comforting proximity of cedars and elms, cypress and myrtle; the scent of flowers blossoming in the garden just outside the palace walls; the antics of chittering swallows and the serenity of doves cooing above the reflecting pools. This mingling of natural sounds and scents is not by chance: The word in Arabic for paradise also means "garden." For people raised knowing the deprivations of the desert, plants and birds and the sound of water provide temporal comfort and foreshadow the Eternal Bliss to come.

Beneath the Alhambra spreads the labyrinthine Moorish quarter of Albayzin (from al bayyidin, "the white ones," presumably a reference to the color of the houses), whose alleys amble up and down the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. That evening, I walk the quarter's quiet streets, emerging finally onto Avenida de los Reyes Católicos. I fall in with Spanish making their paseo, and wander among people seated at cervecerías and bodegas, enjoying drinks and eating tapas of sausage and fish a hectic and convivial scene possible only in a Mediterranean country.

Sensing that the peace I found in the Alhambra is fleeting, I turn off at Plaza Nueva and reenter Albayzin. On Calderería Vieja, a side street hardly three yards wide, my eyes fall on a sign mixing Spanish and Arabic: COCINA MARROQUÍ HALAL (halal is the Islamic equivalent of kosher). I smell incense and oranges, lemon and lamb; I pass sidewalk eateries serving couscous and sizzling kabobs. For a moment, I am in the medina of Tangiers but without the hassling youths or merchants pestering me.

Sipping freshly squeezed orange and lemon juice in Tetería ("teahouse") Nazarí, I revel in the sight of old style stanchions and carpets on the ocher colored walls, hookahs, and ornate divans and filigreed tables. Despite an exotic menu that would never be found in Morocco (Tea from the Country That Does Not Exist, for example), this is a teahouse in Marrakech or rather in what I would have dreamed Marrakech to be had I never lived there.

Abdullah Ben Abou, a Moroccan from Tétouan who manages Tetería Nazarí, brings me a plate of fat dates and sits down to talk. We speak in Moroccan Arabic. Square jawed and slender, Abdullah, whom I would guess to be in his twenties, tells me about the growth in the city's population of Moroccan immigrants over the past decade. He talks about how well the Spanish have received them in sharp contrast to the rough treatment North Africans often suffer in neighboring France and about the birth five years ago of this "Little Morocco" on Calderería Vieja. "The Spanish aren't racist," Abdullah explains. "If you do your job, people will help you. As Arabs we have no problems here. In Spain, traditions of courtesy are still very strong."

Since Calderería Vieja draws most of Granada's Muslims, one might expect Arabs to predominate in the crowd patronizing Nazarí's, but they are outnumbered by young Spaniards, sipping tea, chatting, and moving their heads to the tapes of Arab chants Abdullah has playing. I think back on a trip I made to Morocco last year and remember how many Spaniards I saw. Perhaps it was here that some of them conceived their desire to cross the straits.

I wish Abdullah well and walk back out onto Calderería Vieja, now much busier. Women in hijabs hurry homeward; the warm night air is filled with drumbeats from Moroccan cassettes and ringing exclamations--'As salam 'alaykum!" "¡Hola!" "Ya Sahbi!" "¡Hombre!" the lively cacophony of a mixed population getting along.

I have already driven south along the coastal highway and left the port town of Almería behind, with the rugged battlements and crumbling towers of its Alcazaba ("Moorish fortress") on the desert mountains above. I stand on the dock by the frothy blue green Mediterranean in the fishing village of Adra. In 1492, harried by advancing Christian armies, Muhammad Abu Abdullah XI (also known as Boabdil to Spaniards), the last sovereign of Moorish Iberia, gathered his troops here and set sail for Morocco, never to return.Many Muslims followed him, but

those who remained fared badly, eventually suffering exile, forced conversion to Christianity, or death during the Inquisition.

The era of Moorish Iberia has ended. Yet may its culture of tolerance and humane values now needed more than ever find new life.