Reinhart Dozy was born at Leyden in the Netherlands in 1820 and at an early age showed a great thirst for knowledge couple with a precocious scholarly acumen. At the age of twenty-five he published his first book, a lexico-geographical work on Arab dress, thereafter devoting his life largely to the study of the Arabic language and Arabian history, visiting the major libraries of Europe and discovering many forgotten texts. Moslems in Spain is the culmination of this exhaustive research and it is still held to be a standard authority on the history of Moorish dominance in Spain.

First published in 1861 as Histoire de Musulmans d-Espagne, this work remains for many years untranslated despite its undoubted importance. This edition, translated by Francis Griffin Stokes and first published in 1913, is here republished in facsimile complete with annotations and a biographical introduction.