a language called Aljamiado, which was a dialect of the Spanish language (Mozarabic) but was written using the Arabic alphabet. Aljamiado played a very important role in preserving Islam and the Arabic language in the life of the Moriscos; prayers and the sayings of Muhammad were translated into Aljamiado transcriptions of the Spanish language, while keeping all Quranic verses in the original Arabic. During this period, a version of the Alexander legend was written in the Aljamaido language, building on the Arabic Qisas Dhul-Qarnayn legends as well as Romance language versions of the Alexander romance. New Persian traditions With the Muslim conquest of Persia in 644 AD, the Alexander romance found its way into Persian literature—an ironic outcome considering pre-Islamic Persia's hostility towards the national enemy who conquered the Achaemenid Empire and was directly responsible for Persian domination by Hellenistic foreign rulers. However, he is not depicted as a warrior and conqueror, but as a seeker of truth who eventually finds the Ab-i Hayat (Water of Life). Islamic Persian accounts of the Alexander legend, known as the Iskandarnamah, combined the Pseudo-Callisthenes material about Alexander, some of which is found in the Quran, with indigenous Sassanid Middle Persian ideas about Alexander. For example, Pseudo-Callisthenes is the source of many incidents in the Shahnama written by Ferdowsi (935–1020 AD) in New Persian. Persian sources on the Alexander legend devised a mythical genealogy for him whereby his mother was a concubine of Darius II, making him the half-brother of the last Achaemenid shah, Darius. By the 12th century such important Persian writers as Nizami Ganjavi (from Ganja in modern-day Republic of Azerbaijan) were making him the subject of their epic poems. The Muslim traditions also elaborated the legend that Alexander the Great had been the companion of Aristotle and the direct student of Plato. There is also evidence that the Syriac translation of the Alexander romance, dating to the 6th century, was not directly based on the Greek recensions but was based on a lost Pahlavi (pre-Islamic Persian) manuscript. Central Asian traditions Certain Muslim people of Central Asia, specifically Bulgar, Tatar and Bashkir peoples of the Volga-Ural region (within what is today Tatarstan in the Russian Federation), carried on a rich tradition of the Alexander legend well into the 19th century. The region was conquered by the Abbasid Caliphate in the early 10th century. In these legends, Alexander is referred to as Iskandar