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Behind You, the Sea: The Untold Story of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the General Who Conquered Spain
Paperback
Military BiographiesGeneral Middle Eastern HistorySpainish & Portuguese History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 28 2026
Pages: 276
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the spring of 711 CE, a Berber general named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with seven thousand men and almost no plan beyond the crossing itself.
He burned the boats behind them. He gave a speech. He fought a battle by a river called the Guadalete, and by the time the summer was over, the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain had ceased to exist.
In its place: the beginning of Al-Andalus - the eight-century Islamic civilization that would become the most intellectually alive place in the medieval Western world, the channel through which Greek philosophy returned to Europe, and the origin point of a cultural flowering that reshaped the trajectory of Western history.
Tariq ibn Ziyad made all of this possible. He also died in obscurity, his name stripped from the official chronicles, his achievements credited to the superior who arrived after the conquest was already won.
Behind You, the Sea tells the story of the man behind the mountain - the Berber freedman who rose from slavery to command, who crossed the Strait with nothing but his soldiers and his judgment, and who built, in a single extraordinary year, the foundations of one of history's most remarkable civilizations.
Drawing on the Arabic chronicles, the history of Al-Andalus, and the accumulated scholarship on the Islamic conquest of Spain, Narin Hikma brings to life a figure who has been too long in the shadow of the mountain that bears his name.
Gibraltar is the English word for Jabal Tariq - the Mountain of Tariq.
The mountain has been saying his name for thirteen centuries.
It is time to know the man behind it.
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