It is said among Muslims that the hills of El Pujarra around Granada still weep for the sound of the adhan every morning and the mosque of Cordoba stays awake all night waiting for the sajda of a single momin. To this day Andalus evokes among Muslims nostalgia for a golden age when the resonated with the sound of prayer every morning and the name of Prophet Muhammed (p) was honored every day. No other country was contested between Muslims and Christians as bitterly as was Spain. The struggle went on for 500 years. When the battles had ended and the last adhan was said from the ramparts of Granada in 1492, Muslims had lost the crown jewel of the Maghrib. Soon, they would be tortured and expelled, along with the Jews, from a land they considered the garden of the west. Their monuments were razed, their mosques destroyed, their libraries burned and their women were sent as slaves to the courts of Europe. It was a turning point, a milestone and an event that profoundly and fundamentally changed the flow of global events.
Granada did not fall in a single day, nor did its collapse come with a sudden stroke. Rather, it was the last breath of a decaying society, which had lost the capacity to defend itself against a sustained offensive from Christian Europe. Long before church bells replaced the call of the muezzin and Boabdil (Abu Abdallah, the last emir of Granada) stood on the hills of El Pujarra, looked down on his lost capital and wept, Spain had spent itself politically, militarily and culturally. There was warfare between competing emirs, intrigues within each dynasty pitting father against son, tension between the religious establishment and corrupt administrators, murder, mayhem and external aggression. The surrender of Granada was only the final curtain in a drama that had played itself out.
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