by Amin Maalouf
But not everyone was in the mood for the celebration. My maternal uncle, Abu Marwan, whom I always called Khali, then a member of the staff of the secretariat at the Alhambra, arrived late at the feast with a sad and downcast countenance. An enquiring circle formed around him, and my mother pricked up her ears. One sentence drifted across to her, which plunged her back for several long minutes into a nightmare which she believed she had forgotten for ever.
‘We have not had a single year of happiness since the Great Parade!’
‘That accursed Parade!’ My mother was instantly overcome with nausea, just as in the first few weeks of her pregnancy. In her confused mind she saw herself once again a little girl of ten with bare feet, sitting in the mud in the middle of a deserted alley through which she had passed a hundred times but which she did not recognize any more, lifting the hem of her crumpled, wet and mud-flecked red dress, to cover her tearful face. ‘I was the prettiest and most fussed over child in the whole quarter of al-Baisin, and your grandmother – may God forgive her – had sewn two identical charms on to my clothes, one on the outside, and the other hidden, to defeat the evil eye. But that day, nothing could be done.’
‘The sultan of the day, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali, had decided to hold pompous military parades, day after day and week after week, to show the world the extent of his power – but only God is powerful and He does not love the arrogant! The sultan had had stands built on the red hill of the Alhambra, near the Treason Gate, and every morning he and his retinue received visitors and dealt with affairs of state there, while innumerable detachments of troops from all corners of the kingdom, from Ronda to Basta and from Malaga to Almeria, marched past interminably, saluting the sultan and wishing him good health and long life. The inhabitants of Granada and the neighbouring villages both old and young, used to foregather on the slopes of Sabiqa at the foot of the Alhambra near the cemetery, from which they could see this continuous ceremonial taking place above them. Street sellers set themselves up nearby, selling slippers, or merguès, doughnuts or orange blossom syrup.’
On the tenth day of the Parade, as the Islamic year 882 was ending, the New Year celebrations, which were always unostentatious, passed almost unnoticed amid the hectic tide of these continuous festivities. These were going to continue through Muharram, the first month of the year, and my mother, who used to go along to Sabiqa every day with her brothers and cousins, noticed that the number of spectators was constantly increasing, and that there were always many new faces. Drunkards thronged the streets, thefts were commonplace, and fights broke out between gangs of youths beating each other with cudgels until the blood flowed. One man was killed and several wounded, which led the muhtasib, the provost of the merchants, to call the police.
It was at this point that the sultan finally decided to put an end to the festivities, evidently fearing further outbreaks of rioting and violence. Accordingly, he decreed that the last day of the Parade should be 22 Muharram 883, which fell on 25 April of the Christian year 1478, but he added that the final celebrations should be even more sumptuous than those of the preceding weeks. That day, on Sabiqa, the women of the popular quarters, both veiled and unveiled, were mingling with men of all classes. The children of the town, including my mother, had been out in their new clothes since the early morning, many of them clutching several copper coins with which they bought the famous dried figs of Malaga. Attracted by the swelling crowds, jugglers, conjurers, entertainers, tightrope walkers, acrobats, monkey-keepers, beggars, genuine and fake blind men could be found throughout the entire Sabiqa quarter, and, as it was spring, the peasants were walking their stallions, taking fees for letting them mate with the mares that were brought to them.
‘All morning,’ my mother remembered, ‘we had cheered and clapped our hands watching games of “tabla”, during which one Zenata rider after another tried to hit the wooden target with staves which they threw standing up on the backs of their horses at a gallop. We could not see who was most successful, but the clamour which reached us from the hill, from the very place known as al-Tabla, gave an unerring indication of winners and losers.
‘Suddenly a black cloud appeared above our heads. It came so quickly that we had the impression that the light of the sun had been extinguished like a lamp blown out by a jinn. It was night at midday, and without the sultan ordering it, the game ceased, because everyone felt the weight of the heavens on his shoulders.
‘There was a flash, a sheet of lightning, another flash, a muffled rumbling, and then torrents of rain poured down upon us. I was a little less scared knowing that it was a storm rather than some grim curse, and like the other thousands congregating on Sabiqa, I looked for somewhere to shelter. My older brother took me by the hand, which reassured me but also forced me to run along a road which was already turning to mud. Suddenly, several paces in front of us, a number of children and old people fell down, and seeing that they were being trampled underfoot, the crowd panicked. It was still very dark, and shouts of fear were punctuated with cries of pain. I too lost my footing, and I let go my brother’s hand and found myself trying to catch hold of the hem of one soaked dress after another without getting any purchase on any of them. The water was already up to my knees, and I was certainly yelling more loudly than the others.
‘I fell down and picked myself up again about five or six times without being trampled on, until I found that the crowd had thinned out around me and was also moving more slowly, because the road was going uphill and the waves rushing down it were becoming larger. I did not recognize either people or places, and ceased to look for my brothers and my cousins. I threw myself down under a porch and fell asleep, from exhaustion as much as despair.
‘I woke up an hour or two later; it was less dark, but it was still pouring with rain, and a deafening rumble assaulted my ears from all sides, causing the flagstone on which I was sitting to tremble. I had run down that alleyway countless times, but to see it deserted and divided by a torrent of water made me unable to work out where I was. I shivered from the cold, my clothes were soaked, I had lost my sandals in my flight, an icy stream of water ran down from my hair, pouring into my eyes which were burning with tears. I shivered again, and a fit of coughing seized my chest, when a woman’s voice called out to me: “Up here, girl!” Searching all around with my eyes, I caught sight of a striped scarf and a hand waving from an arched window very high above me.
‘My mother had warned me never to enter a strange house, and also that at my age I should begin to distrust not only men but also certain women as well. Thirty paces away, on the same side of the road, the woman who had called out to me came down and opened a heavy wooden door, making haste to say, in order to reassure me: “I know you; you are the daughter of Sulaiman the bookseller, a good man who walks in the fear of the Most High.” I moved towards her as she was speaking. “I have seen you going past several times with him on your way to your maternal aunt Tamima, the wife of the lawyer who lives close by in the impasse Cognassier.” Although there was no man in sight, she had wrapped a white veil over her face which she did not take off until she had locked the door behind me. Then, taking me by the hand, she made me go along a narrow corridor which turned at an angle, and then, without letting go of me, ran across a little courtyard in the rain before negotiating a narrow staircase with steep stairs which brought us to her room. She pulled me gently towards the window. “See, it is the anger of God!”
‘I leaned out apprehensively. I was at the top of the hill of Mauror. On my right was the new qasba of the Alhambra, on my left, far in the distance, the old qasba with the white minarets of my own quarter of al-Baisin rising above the city walls. The rumbling which I had heard in the street was now deafening. Straining to see where the noise was coming from, I looked towards the ground and could not suppress a cry of horror. “May God take pity upon us, it is Noah’s flood!” murmured my protectress behind me.’
My mother would never efface from her memory the terrified child’s vision
which lay before her, nor would any of those who had been in Granada on that accursed day of the Parade ever forget it. A raging torrent cascaded through the valley through which the bubbling but placid Darro normally flowed, sweeping away everything in its path, devastating gardens and orchards, uprooting thousands of trees, majestic elms, walnuts a century old, ash trees, almond trees and mountain ashes, before penetrating to the heart of the city, carrying all its trophies before it like a Tartar conqueror, swallowing up the central area, demolishing hundreds of houses, shops and warehouses, destroying the houses on the bridges, until, at the end of the day, because of the mass of debris which filled the river bed, an immense pool formed which covered the courtyard of the Great Mosque, the merchants’ qaisariyya, and the suqs of the goldsmiths and the blacksmiths. No one ever knew how many were drowned, crushed under the debris or carried off by the waves. In the evening, when Heaven finally permitted the nightmare to fade, the flood carried the wreckage out of the city, while the water ebbed away more rapidly than it had flooded. At sunrise the agent of death was far away, although its victims were still strewn over the surface of the shining earth.
‘It was a just punishment for the crimes of Granada,’ said my mother, repeating a well-worn maxim. ‘God desired to show that His power has no equal, and wanted to punish the arrogance of the rulers, their corruption, injustice and depravity. He wanted to warn us about the destiny which awaited us if we continued to walk in our impious ways, but our eyes and hearts remained closed.’
The day after the drama, all the inhabitants of the city were convinced that the man primarily responsible for their misfortune, the man who had brought down divine wrath upon them, was none other than the arrogant, corrupt, unjust, depraved Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali, the son of Sa‘d the Nasrid, twenty-first and penultimate sultan of Granada, may the Most High erase his name from memory!
To obtain the throne, he had removed and imprisoned his own father. To consolidate himself in power, he had cut off the heads of the sons of the most noble families of the kingdom, including the valiant Abencerages. However, in my mother’s eyes the sultan’s most heinous crime was to have abandoned his freeborn wife, his cousin Fatima, daughter of Muhammad the Left-handed, for a Christian slave girl called Isabel de Solis whom he had named Soraya.
‘It was said,’ she told me, ‘that one morning the sultan called the members of his court together in the Myrtle courtyard so that they could attend the Rumiyya’s bath.’ My mother was shocked to have to recount this ungodly act; ‘May God forgive me!’ she stammered, her eyes turned towards the heavens. ‘May God forgive me!’ she repeated (as she evidently intended to continue with her story). ‘When the bath was over, the sultan invited all those present to drink a small bowl of the water which Soraya had left behind, and everyone rhapsodized, in prose or in verse, about the wonderful taste which the water had absorbed. Everyone, that is, except the vizir Abu’l-Qasim Venegas, who, far from leaning towards the bath remained proudly in his seat. This did not escape the notice of the sultan, who asked him why he did so. “Your Majesty,” replied Abu’l-Qasim, “I fear that if I tasted the sauce I should immediately develop an appetite for the partridge.” May God forgive me!’ repeated my mother, unable to repress her laughter.
I have heard this story told about many of the notables of al-Andalus, and I do not know to whom it ought really to be attributed. However, at Granada on the morning after the accursed Parade everyone sought to find in the dissolute life of the master of the Alhambra the incident which could finally have exhausted the patience of the Most High. Everyone put forward their conclusive explanations, often only a verse, a riddle, or an ancient parable embellished with contemporary meaning.
The sultan’s own reaction to the calamities which rained down upon his capital was more disturbing than this idle gossip. Far from regarding this devastating flood as a warning from the Most High, he chose to draw the conclusion that the pleasures of the world were ephemeral, that life was passing by and that he must drain the utmost from each moment. Such may have been the wisdom of a poet, but certainly not that of a ruler who had already reached the age of fifty and whose kingdom was threatened.
Accordingly he gave himself over to pleasure, in spite of the frequent warnings of his doctor Ishaq Hamun. He surrounded himself with beautiful slave girls and with poets of doubtful morals, poets who carved in verse after verse the forms of naked dancing girls and slender youths, who compared hashish to emeralds and its smoke to that of incense, and who nightly sang the praises of wine, red or white, mature yet always fresh. An immense gold loving cup passed from hand to hand, from lips to lips, and the one who drained it to the dregs was proud to summon the cup bearer to fill it to the brim once more. Countless little dishes were pressed upon the guests, almonds, pine kernels and nuts, dried and fresh fruits, artichokes and beans, pastries and preserves; it was not clear whether this was to satisfy hunger or to intensify thirst. I learned much later, in the course of my long sojourn in Rome, that this habit of nibbling while becoming intoxicated was already common among the ancient Romans, who called these dishes ‘nucleus’; was it perhaps for that reason that in Granada such dishes were known as ‘nukl’? God alone knows the origins of things!
Devoted entirely to pleasure, the sultan neglected the affairs of state, allowing those close to him to amass huge fortunes by illegal taxes and appropriations, while his soldiers, who did not receive their pay, were obliged to sell their clothes, their mounts and their arms to feed their families. In the city, where there was profound insecurity and fear for the future, where the rise or fall of each captain was rapidly known and commented upon, where news of the drinking sessions leaked out regularly through the indiscretions of servants or guests, the mere mention of the name of the sultan or Soraya brought forth oaths and curses and sometimes pushed the people to the very edge of revolt. Without needing to lay the blame directly on Abu’l-Hasan (which they only rarely dared to do) certain Friday preachers had only to rail against corruption, depravity and impiety for all the faithful to know, without a shadow of doubt, who was being criticized by implication, and they did their utmost to utter loud and recalcitrant cries of ‘Allahu akbar!’, to which the imam leading the prayer would sometimes reply, in falsely enigmatic tones, ‘The hand of God is above their hands,’ all the while darting looks of hatred in the direction of the Alhambra.
Although he was universally detested, the sultan still kept his eyes and ears in the crowd, who reported to him what was said, which made him the more mistrustful, brutal and unjust. ‘How many notables, how many honourable burghers,’ my mother recalled, ‘were arrested because they had been denounced by some rival or even a jealous neighbour, accused of having insulted the prince or having besmirched his honour, and then made to parade through the streets sitting the wrong way round on a donkey before being thrown into a dungeon or even having their heads cut off!’ Under the influence of Soraya, Abu’l-Hasan made his own wife Fatima and his two sons, Muhammad, called Abu Abdullah or Boabdil, and Yusuf, live under house arrest in the tower of Comares, an imposing square castle to the north east of the Alhambra, opposite the Generalife. In this way the mistress hoped to promote her own sons to power. The court was thus divided between the partisans of Fatima, numerous but necessarily discreet, and the partisans of Soraya, the only ones to have the prince’s ear.
If the tales of these internecine struggles in the palace gave the common people a means of whiling away the boredom of the long cold evenings, the most dramatic consequence of the growing unpopularity of the sultan was his attitude towards Castile. Since he was accused of favouring a Rumiyya over his cousin, of neglecting the army, and of leading an inglorious life, Abu’l-Hasan, who was not lacking in physical courage, resolved to cross swords with the Christians.
Ignoring the warnings of certain wise counsellors who pointed out to him that Aragon had thrown in its lot with Castile as a result of the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and that he should avoid giving them the slig
htest pretext to attack the Muslim kingdom, the sultan decided to put an end to the truce which existed between Granada and her powerful neighbours, by sending a detachment of three hundred horsemen to make a surprise attack on the castle of Zahara, which the Christians had occupied three quarters of a century earlier.
The first reaction at Granada was a great outburst of joy, and Abu’l-Hasan managed to regain some favour among his subjects. But, very soon, many began to ask themselves if, by involving the kingdom in a war where the outcome was by no means certain, the sultan was not guilty of criminal irresponsibility. The course of events was to prove them right; the Castilians replied by taking possession of Alhama, the most powerful fortress in the western part of the kingdom, in spite of its apparently impregnable position on a rocky peak. The desperate efforts of the sultan to recapture it were in vain.
A major war unfolded, which the Muslims could not win, but which, if they could not have avoided, they could at least have delayed. It was to last ten years and end in the most ignominious manner possible. In addition, it was accompanied by a bloody and demoralizing civil war, so often the fate of kingdoms on their way to extinction.