A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  While Gérard and Guy busied themselves with the next bottle, I looked at their map as I was bid. Gérard was right. There at the very top of the sheet were the southernmost tips of Italy and Spain: Sicily and Palermo, Malaga and Gibraltar, so close to Morocco that they were almost touching. And on the map, in the abstract, the African south coast of the Mediterranean, the Maghreb – from Tangier through Algiers to Tunis – looked reassuringly similar to the northern, European side: the same green background of arable land, the ranges of low hills, the meandering highways crossing it, marked out in red or yellow.

  All well and good. But then, just look a few inches further down the sheet, below the fertile Maghreb! No green any more, just the harsh pale beige and white of endless wilderness. Nothing but emptiness: the roads all gone, replaced with the spidery black lines of tarmac-free trails. In place of the big black dots of towns, light blue dots marked the places where you might find water – and at what depth below ground. The Sahara desert. Look at the size of it. It was enormous – it took up a whole two-thirds of the map! Hardly a sign of habitation there, either, just a few microscopic green patches of oasis. How were Gérard and Guy ever going to get across that on local transport? Was there any transport? Were there any people there, even?

  It was then that I saw it, slap in the middle of their pencilled-in route: the town of Timimoun. There certainly were people there. More than that, I knew some of them already. I had made a promise to go and visit them, too – even though it was rather a long time ago. When would I ever get another opportunity like this?

  OK, I said. Why not? I’m coming too.

  It was not that I’d had no desire to get back to Paris – or to Timimoun or Sesimbra, indeed. But it had taken a lot of concentration to dig myself out of that unpromising start in London. I had, though, watched with delight – from the safety of London – the collapse of the Salazar regime, and been filled with joy on the day the Portuguese army turned on its masters and, gun-muzzles loaded with pink and red carnations, marched arm in arm with the massed protesters calling for liberty and democracy. Two years later, every political prisoner in the country was set free. Rejoicing crowds partied in the streets, there were bonfires and mass celebrations, and I even received an official invitation to join in the fun. Anyone whose name was on the PIDE’s files was welcome to come and dig out the information held on them in the secret police offices, now thoroughly vandalized by a grateful population. You could pull out your file, rip it to shreds, throw it on the celebratory bonfires, and sing and dance while the evidence burnt.

  I missed all that, though. Money was still tight at the time, and the PIDE’s effect on my own life was still ongoing – I would get no passport until my debt to Her Majesty was paid off.

  As for Timimoun, it was beyond my wildest dreams. And from what little news you got about Algeria here, I’d gathered that things weren’t going as well as the brothers – or Sayid the optimist, at any rate – had hoped. The price of oil had collapsed by two-thirds in the 1980s, and all the country’s plans had gone awry. With better healthcare the population was growing apace, but there was little sign of the extra housing and work all these new people needed. The new, dynamic country that Algerians had dreamed of had not materialized – nor the democratic government, either. The leaders of the heroic army that had won the war against the French were still in charge – in various semi-elected guises – of a state that was growing less and less heroic as it grew in corruption. The mass exodus of young men towards France – or anywhere else there was work to be found – continued.

  Eventually, I had the price of that unwanted trip from Portugal paid. Early one spring morning the postman handed me the sturdy brown envelope I’d been waiting for. At last I was free to leave the country once more. I flicked through the passport’s pristine pages, lingering over the best bit – where Her Britannic Majesty, in a beautiful copperplate hand, Requested and Required everyone, wherever I might go, to Allow me to Pass Freely Without Let or Hindrance and to Afford me such Assistance and Protection as might be Necessary. Lovely stuff. One Requests first, politely: and moves swiftly on to Requiring, with its ring of gunboats at dawn. None of the above, of course, corresponded too closely to my earlier travel experiences. But I was not put off. Nothing for it but to make my second foray from the shores of Britain.

  A year later, when I returned to London, penniless again but at least not indebted, I still hadn’t quite made it either to Portugal or to North Africa. I’d got stuck neatly between the two, in the south of Spain: in Andalusia, where I’d been seduced by the Moorish charms of the city of Granada. This feeble effort would scarcely be worth mentioning if it wasn’t for the strange fact that, thanks to my landlord, Pedro, I had quite possibly learned as much about the Maghreb here – and about the place of distant Timimoun in its world – as I would have done if I’d actually made it across the Mediterranean.

  At this time, Spain, like Portugal before it, was joyously recovering from a long and repressive dictatorship: in this case, the rule of the Generalíssimo Franco. Pedro, boldly sporting a bright red tie one morning, told me that he had never taken this piece of neckwear out of its drawer in the whole forty years of Franco’s reign. Why? Because a red tie would get you a savage beating from the police, the Guardia Civil, that’s why, if not a spell in the cells!

  Spain’s multicultural heritage, along with her citizens’ red neckties, had been very much downplayed over the forty years of Franco’s reign. The jewel of Islamic architecture at Granada’s heart, the fabulous Alhambra palace, had for all this time been no more than a tourist attraction as far as the locals were concerned, a bizarre anomaly in a Spanish Catholic town, and certainly of no interest or significance to a good devout Franco-supporting Christian. The memory of a glorious 700-year-long Moorish culture would, of course, be as repellent to a right-wing Christian dictator as the sight of an avowed socialist. General Franco had even adopted, as his insignia, the yoke-and-fasces symbol of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the fifteenth-century monarchs who had overseen the ethnic cleansing of Spain: the deportation or forced conversion of all Muslims and Jews on Spanish territory.

  Now, though, hand in hand with its political recovery from the long silence of the Franco regime, Andalusia was slowly beginning to take pride in its Islamic heritage. At long last, the people of Granada could sport any colour of necktie they fancied, learn to take an interest in their city’s Moorish past and – in Pedro’s case – point it out to you at every opportunity. A Moorish culture of which my landlord in the red tie was extremely proud, one in which, at its height, Muslims, Christians and Jews, the three Peoples of the Book, bound by the common roots of their three religions, had lived not merely in mutual tolerance, but in active cooperation. Something that we in the modern world, as Pedro will tell you, have still not managed to achieve, in spite of all our airs and graces.

  Till now, apart from those few hints in Portugal, I’d had only the vaguest notion of the Iberian peninsula’s Islamic past. Here in Granada, within days I soon got a very practical introduction to this ongoing heritage. My new neighbourhood was the Albaycín, a friendly warren of narrow cobbled streets and whitewashed houses that straggled uphill towards the Gipsy quarter of the Sacromonte. It was the oldest part of town, built some five or six centuries earlier by the Moors themselves, a people born here on the Iberian peninsula from the mingling of the local inhabitants with the new Muslim settlers. And very hardy folk those Moors must have been, too. The winters here in Granada were horribly cold, and there was not so much as a fireplace in this draughty, centuries-old stone house. So I had – against the aged Pedro’s express instructions – snuck an electric blower-heater into the house. Within minutes it had blown the fuses to the whole place.

  Pedro came round to sort me out, bringing some fuse wire – and a bag of charcoal.

  What was I supposed to do with that, I asked, when there was no fireplace?

  Fireplace? Pedro tutted at me. And from the back of
a kitchen cupboard he dug out a red clay brazier, identical to the one I’d met all those years ago in Paris. Uncle Kebir’s couscous-cooker. Charcoal braziers might no longer be essential for cooking purposes in Granada – luckily we had gas bottles for that these days, though Pedro himself, he said, would not eat a sardine unless it was brazier-grilled – but they were still, five centuries on, essential for winter survival in the Albaycín: the only form of indoor heating in everyday use round here.

  Pedro showed me how to light the thing – outside, so you didn’t get smoked to death – and then slot it into the circular iron brazier-holder built in under the kitchen table: an item that I had taken for a strangely deformed foot-rest. Now then, just spread that big woollen blanket over the table – of course it’s a tablecloth! What did you think it was? – and hey presto! The rest of your home may be cold as ice, but as long as you stay at that toast-warm table, with the blanket-cloth nicely tucked in around your waist, you will probably survive the short but freezing Granada winter.

  Granada, my landlord soon revealed, had been the very last Muslim-run stronghold in Spain, holding out till 1492, the year Columbus set sail for America. Muslim settlers had crossed the Mediterranean during the long twilight of isolation left once the Roman Empire had crumbled away, bringing with them, incidentally, the knowledge of astronomy that would one day make Columbus’ trip possible. Soon the whole of Iberia was under their control, from Portugal to Catalua. They met with hardly any resistance until Poitiers, half way up France. The poor peasant farmers of Europe were completely bedazzled, it seems, by the sight of those stylishly caparisoned horsemen, determined bearers of North African civilization and Islamic purpose.

  Soon, though, humbler settlers followed that military vanguard across the waters – Muslim and Jewish, Arab and Berber – among them the Berber farmers who, Pedro tells me, contributed to their new homeland of el-Andalus many boons and blessings, such as the mighty olive tree, the almond and the orange. It was their skilled horticulturalists, he says, who first established the pomegranate here – the heraldic symbol of Granada to this day.

  Handily for the future of the decaying West, Eastern civilization was still going strong – and took a great interest in Europe’s own lost classics of Greek and Roman thought, along with its scientific and technological advances. These were all a vibrantly going concern in the Islamic world, though being slowly forgotten here – irrelevant to the backward conditions of modern life in Europe, where the once proudly paved roads of Rome were slowly turning back into muddy pathways along which a wheeled vehicle could no longer pass. But once the newcomers had established themselves here, Pedro says, a sophisticated civilization soon grew. Pedro himself has seen the remains of the impressive series of high-tech water-mills built by the skilled engineers of el-Andalus, all along the river Guadalquivir, to produce the good, reliable supplies of bread flour, of olive oil, and even of henna, required by a new, city-dwelling populace. Moreover, says Pedro, the name Guadalquivir is nothing but a corruption of Wadi el-Kebir, which means, in Arabic, ‘the Great River’. (Strange. Does this signify that Uncle Kebir’s name is actually Uncle Great? Very apt, if so.)

  Over the next few centuries, as the culture of the Moors reached its high point, the Muslims, Jews and Christians of el-Andalus formed the westward heart of an intellectual ferment that reached from the Spanish university cities of Cordoba and Seville, through those of Fez and Bejaia across the Mediterranean, all the way to the universities of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Eventually, all the accumulated knowledge of the East, lost classical texts and new scientific discoveries, would seep back into European culture thanks to the multilingual Moors and the collaboration of the Peoples of the Book, to feed Europe’s rebirth – its Renaissance, the first beginnings of the world as we know it today.

  And how did little Timimoun come into all this? Not only important highways of knowledge, but also major routes of trade connected Islamic Spain eastwards and southwards: across the Maghreb and through the Sahara to the kingdoms of the Sudan – source of the gold that oiled the wheels of the thriving economy that funded the universities and their scholars. The jewel in the crown of this trans-Saharan trade was the great oasis city of Sijilmassa, standing in what is now south-east Morocco, on the present-day border with Algeria, and allied with the Spanish Caliphate of Cordoba. Into this city’s bullish markets the gold and spices, oils and perfumes, ebony and ivory, slaves and parchments poured, to meet the merchants who would send them onwards to the great cities of the North African heartlands, or to the ports of the Mediterranean – Sicily, southern Italy, and el-Andalus.

  Somewhat more obscure in this glorious tale, but a mere day or two’s northward travel for those dusty camel-trains with their precious cargoes arriving from across the Sahara, was a place closer to my heart. The caravans’ final watering stop, before making that last push across sun-baked dunes and stony desert to Sijilmassa, was at the green and bountiful oases of the Gourara; chief among which was a certain small fortified city of deep-red earth named: Timimoun! Not at all the secret oasis refuge, the quiet desert backwater I had imagined, nor the self-sufficient little community of date-palm farmers and goat-herds, but a sophisticated centre of far-flung connections, on the main artery of a buzzing international trade route.

  Once the Inquisition had moved here to Granada, 700 years after the arrival of Islam in et-Andalus, Pedro tells me, not just the Muslim and Jewish faiths, but the entire lifestyle of the town came under attack. Cordoba had long since fallen to the Christians, as the culture of tolerance began to break down. First the Jews and then the Muslims of Spain had been given the choice of converting to Christianity or fleeing to seek asylum in foreign lands. Now the hammams, or Turkish baths, were banned, as was the use of henna for bodily adornment, and even the dancing of the zambra – though they got nowhere with that one, Pedro says gleefully: it is still danced in Granada to this very day! Moreover, he points out, although the Christian Church ruthlessly rooted out converts suspected of ongoing Jewish or Muslim connections, without the collaboration of all three Peoples of the Book, Columbus would never have made it to America. While Islamic science had provided the navigational technology, it was, as it happens, two ex-Jewish conversos who bankrolled Ferdinand and Isabella’s Christian expedition, providing the ships and stores.

  At the other end of the social scale, according to my ebullient landlord, just a very few among the ordinary Muslims of old Granada were actually asked to stay on: small peasant farmers in the villages of the Alpujarra hills, rapidly emptying now with the persecution. The Spanish Crown now requested – or do I mean required? – two Muslim families per village to remain. Their skills were urgently needed: the new Christian farmers being brought in from more backward parts of Spain to take their place must be taught how to use and maintain the sophisticated Moorish irrigation system. Without it, the rich crops of the south would be lost to the newly pure Christian nation.

  That system is still in use to this day. Let Pedro take you for a walk in those Alpujarra hills above his town (Alpujarra is really al-bajara, ‘the highlands’ in Arabic) and ask a local to point you to the nearest irrigation channels. You will soon find yourself wandering along many miles of sturdy stone pathways, built right into the narrow rushing watercourses that cling to the steep sides of hill and valley, engineered all those centuries ago to bring security of life and harvest to the farmlands of the interior. The Alpujarra local will very likely tell you – these being post-Franco days when people can speak their minds freely – that the Moors did more for Andalusia, nowadays an isolated and poverty-stricken region, than self-centred Madrid has done in the five centuries since they left.

  And as for me, settled here in Italy, several hundred miles further along the Mediterranean coast, many’s the time I’ve stood, at the end of a hot, dry summer, gazing hopelessly into my dried-up well and watching my vegetable patch curl up and die for lack of water, heartily wishing that the Moors had concentrated a bit harder o
n their northern conquests. They came to the south of Italy, all right, and held parts of Calabria – where I have seen with my own envious eyes villages set in that desiccated countryside which nevertheless own a merrily gushing public fountain on every street corner – and of course the kingdom of Sicily. But the best they could do for us up here in the Diano valley was a feeble attempt at coming in by sea from el-Andalus, in the year 739. For a century, it seems, they held La Garde-Freinet, nowadays well known to me as a train-station somewhere before Nice, where the train waits an inexplicably long time – perhaps in mourning? – before departing again for Monte Carlo, the Italian border, and home. And that was that.

  All we in Liguria have to show in the way of a Moorish presence are a few evocative ruined towers along the coastline, known locally as ‘Moorish towers’, a name that had me fooled for some time. But no: these were in truth anti-Moorish towers, watchtowers from which to keep the North Africans at bay, once Barbarossa and the corsairs had begun launching punishing raids, from their bases around Algiers, on Genoa’s coastal possessions, including, in 1508, our own Diano Marina.

  Here, in Liguria, we were left, by default, to the Christian monasteries, which did, three or four centuries after the Muslim arrival in Spain, introduce the olive tree to our region, for which they are heartily to be thanked. But Christian technical expertise at the time was certainly nowhere near that of Islam, and did not extend to brilliantly executed irrigation systems. If only those Moors had spent a century or two here, now, my tomato crop might get to ripen however dry the weather, and there would be no more of this sad shrivelling on the vine.

  2

  No sooner had I committed myself to heading off with Gérard and Guy than every friend I had, Italian or English – everyone who’d actually heard of the Maghreb – went into panic stations. Was I mad? Wasn’t there serious trouble there? Riots, strikes, Islamic fundamentalists, violence in the streets?