4. Andalusia: The Forgotten Europe: By Ammiel Alcalay, Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages, Queens College Given our very deep reliance upon assumptions about identity that we have inherited from the nation/state system, it is very difficult for us to imagine times and places in which notions of identity were constructed differently. The idea that Spanish culture might, for instance, be the result of an intense struggle for, between and against the memory and reality of its Arabic and Hebrew past, rather than the "self-evident" "national" outgrowth of a particular ethnic group, is rarely taken as an initial assumption. As we look at the culture of Andalusia and its impact on Europe and the New World, it is quite remarkable to note that in most studies on the subject, non-Christian peoples (that is Muslims and Jews) are seldom referred to as Europeans. In fact, we find that a millennium of Euro-Islamic culture has essentially been excised from the script. Click here for full text Get Adobe Acrobat Reader here