‘The Inquisition wasn’t completely successful, however,’ Pedro said. ‘It changed Spain’s image of itself, and perhaps the image it gives to the rest of the world, yet nine hundred years of Moorish presence on the peninsula cannot be wiped away by a few autos-da-fé. Certain things slipped under their noses, precisely because they were disguised, invisible to the persecutors, even heralded as ‘Christian’. How better to escape your tormentors than to claim you are even more orthodox than they?’
He smiled at this remark. Wasn’t that what the legend of Musa’s treasure was all about?
Zine pulled on the denim jacket Lucía had given him, which had been hanging on the back of the chair. Just a few weeks into autumn and the evenings were beginning to feel chilly.
‘Do you want to go inside?’ Pedro asked.
Zine shook his head and pulled out a cigarette from the packet lying half-open on the table.
‘Here’s what I mean,’ Pedro continued after a pause to pour more hot tea. He handed out shortbread biscuits from a tin with a red tartan pattern on the lid.
‘I went to mass at the church near the French Lycée last week. Hardly anyone there. The priest was reading from the gospel and commentating on it, the usual thing. But it struck me that what he was saying about love could have come from the mouth of Ibn al-Arabi himself.’
An Islamic mystic and writer known to the West as ‘Doctor Maximus’, and one of the greatest Spaniards who ever lived, according to some, Ibn al-Arabi had been born in the nearby city of Murcia in the twelfth century. His work, along with Arabic legends about Muhammad’s journey to heaven, directly influenced Dante in the writing of his Divine Comedy – the ‘greatest single instance of Muslim influence on Western literature’, one scholar has said. Of all the Sufis in Al-Andalus, he had become the most celebrated, and groups had sprung up all over the world dedicated to studying his life and writings.
‘“Love is the faith I hold: wherever turn / His camels, still the one true faith is mine,”’ Pedro recited. ‘Who does that sound like, if not Jesus? Ibn al-Arabi, Jesus, it’s all the same thing. This is why Spain is still a Moorish country. Your friend here already knows all this.’ And he nodded towards Zine.
I wasn’t quite sure how Zine would take Pedro. The problem was you were never sure which Pedro might make an appearance. Sometimes, if he felt the company wasn’t right, he could slip inside his shell and sit quietly, barely making the effort to engage even in ordinary chit-chat. Yet now here he was in all his heterodox splendour, pouring tea for a North African he’d never met before, effectively saying that Islam and Christianity were the same thing.
‘Christian and Muslim mystics spoke the same language here,’ Pedro said. ‘Listen to this.’ And he began reciting again:
‘No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido
ni me mueve el infierno tan temido
para dejar por eso de ofenderte.’
’Tis not the promised heavens
That cause me to love you, O God,
Nor fear of hell
That prevents me from offending you.
‘OK? Now listen to this: “Oh Lord! If I worship you from fear of hell, cast me into hell, and if I worship you from desire of paradise, deny me paradise.”’
The poem, he explained, was anonymous, but believed to be by the great Spanish mystic St John of the Cross, writing in the sixteenth century. The second statement was uttered by the female saint Rabia al-Adawiya in Iraq, eight hundred years earlier.
‘One is a Christian, the other Muslim, yet they say the same thing.’
‘Of course,’ Zine repeated. I looked at him from the corner of my eye. Much of this appeared to be familiar to him. Arabs I’d known had often been very proud of the influence of their culture on the West, but still, I suspected this was fairly specialist information Pedro was passing on.
‘The crossovers are everywhere,’ Pedro continued, crumbs falling onto his pale-blue shirt from the biscuit he was trying to eat while talking at the same time. ‘Even in Don Quixote.’
I sat up. Spanish literature was virtually founded on Don Quixote, Cervantes regarded as a kind of Spanish Shakespeare. Was there a Moorish influence in the great book?
The famous story about the old man tilting at windmills because he believed them to be giants was a simple multilingual pun, Pedro explained. The windmill symbolized the emir al-mu’minin – the title of the fanatical leader of the fundamentalist Almohads who had once ruled Al-Andalus. It meant ‘leader of the faithful’, an epithet often used in an Islamic context, but Spaniards who didn’t understand Arabic well had garbled the name, dubbing the dreaded fanatic miralmolín.
‘Miralmolín,’ Pedro repeated, an expectant look in his eye. ‘What does that sound like to you … ?’
He paused, waiting for me to fill in. I was still trying to keep up with him as his conversation veered from one subject to the next. I turned the word over in my mind, trying to hear its supposed homonym.
‘Mira el molino – Look at the windmill,’ I said with a start, Cervantes’ play on words suddenly becoming clear.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Look at the windmill.’
In one brief episode of his lengthy book – the scene which most people remember – Cervantes drew neatly on both Moorish and Christian Spanish cultures, and the in-between world which the two had once combined to create. Don Quixote wasn’t charging at imaginary monsters. He was poking fun at fundamentalists.
A whole new layer of meaning was emerging as Pedro spoke.
‘Cervantes himself admits a Moorish influence,’ he went on. ‘The story was told to him by an old Morisco translating into Spanish from a book by the Arab author Cide Hamete Benengeli. It’s a made-up Arab name,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘But it’s Cervantes’ coded way of saying where some of his material comes from. Remember, he spent five years as a captive in Algiers. There are even Sufi jokes in the Quixote.’
I drank some more tea as I took this all in: the mother of all Western novels owed much, it seemed, to Al-Andalus. Cervantes had been writing as Moorish Spain was in its death throes – the years just before and after the expulsion of the Moriscos. The country would still have been soaked in the influence of the old Arab culture. Except that few people mentioned this when they talked about the book. I suspected that Cervantes, who was writing as the Inquisition was at its peak, would have had to disguise some of the sources of his inspiration: fundamentalism, this time dressed in Christian clothes, was once again taking over men’s minds.
There was a pause, and as though gauging this was the right moment to say something, Zine started to speak.
‘Muslim culture in Al-Andalus was the most advanced of its day,’ he said. ‘That’s what Jasie is looking for, I think. Although I don’t know how much he will find. But in the past, yes, of course. We gave you music, poetry, medicine, mathematics …’
‘And toothpaste,’ Pedro said. ‘Don’t forget that.’ And he told us how the Moors used to make it from boiled walnut root mixed with cloves and coriander.
‘They used to rub it on their teeth like this.’ He pushed a finger into the side of his mouth and laughed like a child.
‘But that was all a long time ago,’ Zine said. ‘Spain is not a Moorish country now. Come to Morocco and see a Moorish country. This is Europe. There’s more money, fewer bidonvilles.’
Pedro and I had both been to Morocco, as well as other Middle Eastern countries. The differences were obvious, even in basic things. There was a far more visible culture gap in the half-hour ferry journey from Tarifa to Tangier than there was in a two-day drive from Seville to Paris, for example. You didn’t see camels grazing in fields or men in jellabas and fezes anywhere in Europe. Yet it was precisely the less visible legacy of the Moors that I wanted to find.
‘Excuse me,’ Pedro said, and he got up to go and answer the telephone ringing inside the house.
It was probably foolish, I thought, for
two Westerners to try to convince a Moroccan that Spain was still Moorish. For Zine the foreignness of the place, and his foreignness in it, was all too clear. The police, if they found him, would make sure of that.
‘You should go to Murcia tomorrow,’ Pedro said, coming back from the house and sitting between us. ‘See the city where Ibn al-Arabi was born. Nothing remains of his house, but something of his presence in the air, perhaps.’
‘Baraka,’ said Zine. It was an Arabic word meaning something like ‘blessing’ or ‘good luck’.
‘Exactly,’ said Pedro. For a moment it seemed they were on the same wavelength. ‘Tabarak Allah alik.’
And the water in his hookah bubbled glob glob glob as he drew in another lungful of honey-scented smoke.
THE ROAD TO ALMERÍA
‘Your friend Pedro is ahmaq. A bit crazy, I think.’
The roadside café was decorated with dark-green flock wallpaper and filled with truck drivers and a group of bin-men eating three-course lunches. In Spain they say that when on the road you should stop off where the most lorries are parked – that way you know you’ll eat well. Something which, having been brought up in England, it took me a while to grasp.
‘You may be right,’ I said. ‘But he’s given me some clues.’
Taking Pedro’s advice, we had driven to Murcia the following day, through a flat, hazy landscape dotted with cuboid earth-coloured farms and randomly placed palm trees lifting from the ground like shooting stars. Large areas were little more than scrubland, while every few hundred yards a new estate stood half built and empty, a new scar in the semi-desert: with their thin walls and cheap materials, they looked as if they would be falling down within a decade or two. It was a cowboy builder’s paradise.
We had spent the morning in the city itself, wandering the narrow streets of the old quarter. As Pedro had said, there was nothing to show of Ibn al-Arabi’s birthplace. The cathedral, however, built on the site of the old mosque, was the last resting place of the heart of King Alfonso X ‘the Wise’. Alfonso had been an enthusiastic admirer of Moorish learning and culture, and commissioned a large number of books to be translated from Arabic into Castillian Spanish. He was also a lover of another great Moorish import into Europe: chess. Originating from an ancient Indian game, chess was adopted by the Persians, who passed it on to the Arabs, who then brought it to Spain. In most European languages the name ‘chess’ was derived from the Persian ‘shah’, meaning king. The Spanish ajedrez and the Portuguese xadrez both came from the Arabic name for the game: al-shatranj. The castle, or rook, was known in Spanish as the roque and came from the Persian rukh. The bishop was called the alfil and came from the Arabic for elephant, al-fil. Although records of chess being played in Spain date from 1008, Alfonso wrote the first description of the game in a European language in the thirteenth century, complete with miniatures showing players mostly wearing Arab clothes.
Alfonso was also responsible for a great collection of poetry known as the Cantigas de Santa María. Although written in Galician dialect, the poetic forms used were almost entirely zajals and muwashshahs – styles unique to Moorish Spain, having been developed centuries earlier by the poet Ibn Quzman. Both these forms later developed into the Spanish villancico – used for all kinds of Christian poetry, particularly Christmas carols.
We moved on from Murcia, pausing for lunch as we pushed southwards into the barren mountains of Almería. Zine stared at the waitress as she leant over to place two plates of arroz al horno and anchovies in vinegar on the table, her tight black trousers distracting him for a moment from the TV, with its talk of ever-closer war. A year before, in this same bar, I had first seen images of the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center, stopping off for a drink as I drove south to Andalusia. It had seemed surreal then, watching this dramatic and horrifying event take place thousands of miles away while sitting in the middle of a rocky desert, the only sound the passing of an occasional car on the empty road outside. Now, though, the images had become as familiar as a fizzy-pop commercial.
‘The CIA and Mossad were behind this,’ Zine said, pointing at the screen as the waitress walked away. ‘Some Frenchman – Thierry Meyssan – has written a book about it explaining everything. They needed it as an excuse to attack Afghanistan and now Iraq.’
Like many Arabs, it seemed he was ready to believe the most complicated and far-fetched rumours, especially if you could fit Mossad in there somewhere.
‘Of course. This is American imperialism. How come all the Jews were told to leave the Twin Towers before the attacks?’
‘Were they?’ I found these theories hard to take.
‘They want to control the oil.’
I was living in Alexandria during the protracted build-up to the previous Gulf War, and had grown increasingly alarmed, then ever more cynical, as the various ideas about what was going to happen to us all became more and more exaggerated every day. The lack of any decent local media coverage meant it was all too easy to speculate in an information vacuum.
‘Revolution will break out in Jordan … Scuds carrying chemical weapons will overshoot Israel and land in the Delta … Libya and Sudan will simultaneously invade Egypt.’ Or my personal favourite: ‘Mossad have mined the Aswan dam and will blow it up, flooding the country and wiping it out in only seven hours.’ Or nine hours, or eleven, depending on who was repeating this secret to you.
‘As far as I can see,’ I said, ‘everyone’s talking about hijacked planes, but the real hijacking here is of Islam.’
‘Islam?’
‘Al-Qa’ida says it’s an Islamic group, but suicide is forbidden, haram.’
‘And by dying as a martyr you go straight to heaven.’
It was the usual argument: the attackers were ‘fighters’ losing their lives rather than taking them. Committing suicide in a way that killed other people as well was somehow acceptable and even rewarded, where solitary self-murder was not.
‘They’re not the first people to think that nonsense,’ I said.
In the ninth century, a group of some fifty Christian extremists had been killed by the Moorish rulers and became known as the Martyrs of Cordoba. They got it into their heads that living under Muslim rather than Christian rule, albeit tolerated by the authorities, was somehow a bad thing, and decided to raise their profile by seeking audiences with the emir and openly insulting Muhammad and Islam in front of him. At first the emir dismissed them as harmless lunatics, but when they persisted he gave them what they wanted and had them decapitated for blasphemy. Other Christians were appalled by their co-religionists’ behaviour and condemned them, but some applauded their attempt to emulate those martyred at the hands of the Romans.
‘They said exactly the same things as this lot today. It’s the same madness, just a different religion.’
He grinned.
‘Muslims are supposed to be tolerant of Christians and Jews,’ I said. ‘They’re protected people – dhimmis.’
‘Only when they live in Islamic countries. Like Morocco: we have many Jews living there.’
The waitress returned with a bottle of wine and some lemonade to mix together. Tinto de verano, they called it: summer red wine.
‘Allah.’ Zine looked up at her, his eyebrows arched and a pleading expression on his face.
‘Hola,’ she said, smiling back at him.
‘I’m interested in when cultures like Islam and the West come together,’ I said. It took a moment for Zine’s concentration to return to the table. Smiling seductively as she looked down at him, the waitress finally walked away; for a second I’d almost thought she was going to sit down and have lunch with us.
‘What about the times when they seemed to get on?’ I said. ‘What happened then?’
‘You’re a romantic. That’s history,’ he laughed, looking back towards the bar where the girl was passing on a drinks order to a man in a stained white shirt. She glanced over at our table and smiled again before turning her head, flirtation lighting up he
r eyes.
‘We study Al-Andalus like you study – I don’t know what … the Romans and the Greeks. Interesting, but it’s over.’
‘We should stop looking at what’s usual and start trying to understand the unusual,’ I said. ‘It happened right here, right where we’re sitting: Moors, Christians and Jews lived together and created a great civilization.’
‘Of course. That’s what Pedro said. But what do you want? You think you can re-create Cordoba just by driving around Spain with a moro in the passenger seat?’
I placed my fork down slowly and stared at him. He laughed.
‘OK. Don’t get angry. It’s just a joke.’
Cheeky bugger, I thought.
As our conversation dried up, I noticed that the group of bin-men at the table next to us had a North African in their midst. He sat quietly near the leader, eating hungrily and sniggering at the mildly insulting comments being made about him by the others. He and Zine were aware of one another, but some sort of group pressure was at work, and the man’s will to be accepted by the bunch of red-eyed alcoholics who’d become his fellow workers made him ignore his compatriot just a few feet away. Struggling to become one of ‘them’. Although the difference was more cultural than anything else: the head dustbin-man could easily have just flown in from Istanbul, with his heavy skin, thick black moustache and ill-fitting toupee.
The waitress was at our table again, this time to clear away. Zine handed her our plates, pretending to drop them just as he passed them over. She laughed with him as he opened his eyes wide in pretend shock and panic.
‘Do you want to give me a hand?’ she asked. Most of her lipstick had smudged, leaving a dark border at the edges where she’d drawn with a liner.
‘Just the bill, please,’ I said.
Zine lingered over her football-shaped buttocks as she walked back towards the kitchen. I’d seen more advanced flirting at the reptile house at London Zoo.
‘She likes me,’ he said with a victorious grin.
Andalus Page 7