Walk into the nearest university, walk up to a professor of literature, especially if you can find one specializing in the period and then get back to me with what you won't ever acknowledge you enormous goof.
Or, you could look at this from the NY Times, I suppose:
"The Arabic manuscript, the Moor tells him, is the "History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian." Cervantes brings the Moor to the cloister of a church and commissions a translation.
We know this is all a jest, as is the very name of the historian: "Cide" is an honorific, "Hamete" is a version of the Arab name Hamid, and "Benengeli" means eggplant."
...At the time when Cervantes was writing this novel, nothing about this jest was possible. Neither an Arabic-speaking Moor nor a Hebrew-speaking Jew would have been readily found in the Toledo marketplace. And no Moor would have translated Arabic in the cloister of a church.
...When Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote" a quarter century later, this experience led to an extensive story about Moors and Christians involving kidnapping, conversion and betrayal. He wrote, though, not as warrior but as a philosopher. His empathy for the Moors is cautious but unmistakable.
... "Don Quixote" is a resigned acknowledgment of a new kind of terrain that defined modernity: in it, very little is certain and much is lost. The book's power, though, also comes from Quixote's stubborn quest: he won't entirely let us accept that something else isn't possible.
Of course who wrote the thing has little to do with what it's point is, a thing the author tells us early on. But for some reason it's at that point that chrys stops believing everything he reads.lain:
I have thought that it is also about the idea that nobility may be found in curious and unexpected places....
