For nearly eight centuries, Arabic was the high literary language of much of the Iberian peninsula. The court of the Umayyad amirs and caliphs of Cordoba, the taifa kingdoms that succeeded them, the Almoravid and Almohad empires, and finally the Nasrid sultanate of Granada produced a distinct Andalusian Arabic literature with its own aesthetic.
The Andalusian poets — Ibn Zaydun and his beloved the princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, Ibn Khafaja the poet of gardens, the muwashshah and zajal pioneers — developed a lyric register quieter and more pictorial than the classical eastern qasida. The philosophical tradition produced Ibn Hazm (whose Ring of the Dove is one of the great medieval treatises on love), Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd, whose Aristotelian commentaries reshaped European philosophy through Latin translation.
After 1492 the surviving Muslims of Granada, the Moriscos, continued to write in Arabic in secret for more than a century, producing a clandestine literature called aljamiado — Spanish in Arabic script — that has survived in fragments.