Andalus

by Jason Webster

  If ‘dreaming’ Oxford seemed slightly detached from reality, Camilo’s Escuela was more like a fortress: high walls closing it off from the outside, a tiny plaque on the door stating what actually went on there. I’d walked passed it scores of times on previous visits to the area and had never realized what it was. And now I hadn’t gained entry without an interrogation from a suspicious woman at the entrance lodge and a severe quizzing from one of the professors I’d bumped into while finding my way to Camilo’s office. All this despite having a previously arranged appointment. It felt as if I’d falsely gained access to an exclusive gentlemen’s club.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to look around?’

  Camilo stood up, much smaller than he’d looked behind his desk, and we walked out onto the wooden gallery that ran around two sides of the old patio. A gardener was slowly sweeping up dead leaves from around the pool.

  ‘This house is a carmen,’ he said. Walking around the Albaicín, you noticed many houses were called Carmen This or Carmen That.

  ‘A carmen is when you have both a garden and an orchard,’ he continued. ‘The word comes from the Arabic karm, or vineyard.’

  So even the name of Spain’s most famous femme fatale had an Arabic etymology. Although perhaps it was little more than the simple absorption of another element of Moorish culture by an essentially Latin society, as Camilo had argued.

  He filled me in on more details about the renovation of the house, pointing out stucco work on the archways and niches in the walls, but as he spoke I found myself pondering the fact that ideas about history were subject to fashion just as much as anything else. Depending on who you listened to, Al-Andalus was responsible for all that was good or all that was bad about the place.

  ‘Without Islam,’ one Spanish Arabist had written in the late 1920s, ‘Spain would have followed the same course as France, Germany, Italy and England: and to judge by what was actually accomplished through the centuries, Spain might have led the way. But it was not to be. Islam conquered the whole of the Peninsula, distorted the destinies of Iberia and allotted to it a different part in the tragi-comedy of history … which proved extremely expensive to Spain.’

  Perhaps. Yet the author of these words, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, had been a perfect example – albeit in name alone – of the marriage between Moorish and Christian in Spain: his surname made up of the Visigothic ‘son of Sancho’ and the Arabic ‘the man with the burnous’.

  On the other side were people who stressed the importance of the Moors and Jews in the development of the very concept of ‘Spain’. Pedro was an example of this school, but its most famous advocate had been Américo Castro, whose ideas Sánchez Albornoz had attacked.

  Academics who denied or belittled the Moorish influence on Spain and Europe often did so in a way that seemed to defy common sense. They claimed that the polite Spanish form for ‘you’, usted, had nothing to do with the Arabic honorific ustadh, and originated solely from a shortening of vuestra merced, a formal mode of address used in the past. Or they denied any Moorish roots for the troubadour movement, despite clear similarities with certain Arabic poetic themes (chivalry was virtually invented in pre-Islamic Arabia) and the fact that the Arabic verb tarab and its variants mean ‘to make music’, ‘to sing’, ‘to fill with joy’, or ‘to move with music’. Just add the Spanish active-participle suffix -ador and you get ‘troubadour’. But no. Sometimes you got the impression the Inquisition had never actually ended.

  To claim that Spain was basically Roman seemed almost perverse: its capital city had an Arabic name: majrit, from majra, meaning water channel; the highest mountain on the mainland, Mulhacén, whose snowy cap we could see in the distance above Granada, had an Arabic name; its most famous river, the Guadalquivir, had an Arabic name (al-wadi al-kabir – the big river); what was fast turning into its national dish, paella, had strong Middle Eastern overtones, and the word gazpacho probably came from Spanish Arabic; its signature music, flamenco, had some of its origins in North African musical forms. Perhaps the only emblematic thing in Spain that didn’t come from the Moors was bullfighting.

  Some of the formality of earlier finally dropped away as Camilo and I said our goodbyes. The small old man, who had seemed so stiff in his office, shook my hand warmly, placing his left hand on my elbow, and asked after Pedro, smiling for the first time since I’d arrived. It was a shame we hadn’t conducted the whole meeting walking around this ancient house, I thought. His huge desk had seemed like a fence, and I was sure it had had an effect on our conversation.

  ‘Pedro is a dear friend of mine,’ he said. ‘I’m very glad he sent you.’

  It felt a sudden way to end it. I would have liked to ask him to have lunch with me, or something, just to show that we were finally beginning to make contact. But the circumstances, perhaps, or the distance that elderly Granadinos always maintain with people they’ve just met, made it impossible. There was a certain darkness and seriousness there that reminded me of particularly religious Arab cities like Fez, or the Al-Azhar district of Cairo. Perhaps there was more of the Arab in him than he cared to admit. With one last look across the valley to the Alhambra, framed by the cypress trees shooting out of the earth like green fountains, I turned to leave.

  MUHAMMAD

  Three days had passed since I’d last seen Zine. Again I’d offered to put him up, and again he’d refused, unbowed by his failure in Almería, and he’d taken off into the unknown city to find his own way. It had come as something of a relief, but now I wanted to find him and had come looking in the dozens of Moroccan teterías that had sprung up on the Calderería Nueva, one of the narrow cobblestone streets that led from modern Granada into the labyrinth of the Albaicín. A mini bazaar was in the process of being created here, with shop after shop being turned over to selling crystal lanterns, brightly coloured striped cloths, octagonal wooden tables with inlaid Arabesques, and brass coffee pots. Almost everyone working here was Moroccan or Algerian, it seemed: men dressed like Zine in jeans and trainers, with skinny sloping shoulders, and others wearing more traditional robes – green or black jellabas with Islamic white skullcaps. I’d caught sight of one moving slowly and amiably from shopkeeper to shopkeeper as he worked his way up the street, receiving warm handshakes and just slightly too much respect from each one as he exchanged a few words before moving on. I’d seen this before scores of times in Middle Eastern countries – the fawning behaviour reserved for imams and others high up in the – usually religious – hierarchy: all smiles and warmth for someone who had far too much power and say in other people’s lives. Politicians were similarly treated, but they usually didn’t go around with the same aura of holiness. For a religion that officially was supposed not to have priests, only a direct relationship between God and man, in many Islamic countries there was a very clear spiritual pecking order.

  I felt slightly uncomfortable about the scene I was witnessing, but I wasn’t quite sure why. In somewhere like Egypt I might not even have noticed, so common was it. But I remembered an incident in a minibus once, driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. One of the passengers had been an ultra-orthodox Jew, a grim, humourless-looking man who insisted on sitting in the front next to the driver, forcing the woman who was already there to move to the back. Just a few minutes into the ride he turned to the driver and insisted that the pop-music station on the radio be switched off. The driver complied, albeit reluctantly. When we got to Jerusalem, however, and our party-pooping companion had been dropped off in an area outside the centre of town, the radio immediately went back on and the driver launched into a lengthy public tirade against the religious conservatives. There was no way he was letting any more on his bus, he shouted to us all in the back. A vain protest, perhaps, but it showed just a small degree of defiance against the fanatics – something I had never come across so openly among contemporary Muslims. You might find the same sentiments privately, but there was also an unspoken worry that you never knew who might be listening. The hard-liners were s
teadily taking over through fear.

  ‘Hello, Jasie? I’m Muhammad.’

  A tall, white-skinned Spaniard with a felt-black beard and heavy eyebrows thrust his hand towards me. He sat down in front of me and nodded to the waitress, who quickly brought over some mint tea.

  ‘I’m a Muslim,’ he said, pouring himself a cup through a tiny metal sieve. ‘Muhammad López. Your friend Zine said you wanted to meet me.’

  I had never heard of him, nor had I expressed a desire to do anything of the sort, but I assumed that Zine thought he was doing me a favour, and yes, this could be interesting – a Spanish convert to Islam. Where was Zine right now and how did he know where I was?

  ‘My parents gave me the name Francisco, but I changed it, of course, when I became a Muslim,’ Muhammad said. There was a coldness in his round eyes, as though he were used to encounters like this, and having to explain his faith to scoffers and the curious.

  From a choice of thousands of Arabic names, you couldn’t really give him top marks for imagination, plumping for the most obviously Islamic name of the lot, but I decided to suspend judgement for the time being, trying to control my usual unease with anyone who’d converted to anything.

  He’d become a Muslim five years earlier when he met his Moroccan wife, he told me.

  ‘So you did it for love?’ I said.

  ‘That was how I originally came to Islam,’ he said. If a non-Muslim man wanted to marry a Muslim woman he had to convert first, he explained. That way the children were brought up as Muslims too.

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘No. I have a low sperm count.’

  Conversion to Islam, I was happy to see, had not done away with the common Spanish trait of speaking with utter frankness about bodily functions. For a moment I felt sorry for him.

  ‘But I have a new family now,’ he went on, forcing the burning hot tea down his throat. ‘All Muslims are my family.’

  I wasn’t sure I really wanted to hear too much about brotherly love at this hour in the morning, but his views on being a Spanish Muslim chimed with all the thinking I’d been doing. What was so unusual about being a Spanish Muslim? Many Spaniards had been Muslims at one time. But Muhammad felt that Spain itself was uncomfortable with people like him, despite the fact that he believed himself to be perhaps even more Spanish than the rest. Spain, in his eyes, was never conquered, but integrated into the Islamic world.

  It seemed clear that he and I would share quite a few ideas about Spanish history and the role Muslims played in it: not the military imposition of a foreign culture from abroad, but more a cultural phenomenon, where Spain, intellectually, artistically, religiously and commercially, became part of the Islamic sphere of influence. There was, however, a slight vehemence in his tone which I didn’t warm to, and perhaps too much readiness to refer to non-Muslim Spaniards as ‘them’.

  I wondered if he identified himself with the Moriscos, the Moors who were forced to convert to Christianity after the fall of Granada.

  ‘Yes. With the Moriscos, with the Arabs, the Berbers, the Syrians, but also the native peoples of the peninsula, all of whom were once united under the religion of Islam.’

  This was pushing the image of racial harmony a bit far, I thought. Berbers and Arabs, co-religionists in Al-Andalus, had been at loggerheads for decades over who got the best plots of land. Despite the egalitarianism of Islam, Arabs could be very disdainful of other races, and it showed in the rebellions and internal social divisions that had dogged much of the early history of Moorish Spain. But it was interesting, after my conversations with Zine trying to defend the country’s Moorishness, that I was now on the other foot, finding fault with Muhammad’s over-enthusiasm for the Islamic period.

  ‘What is happening now is an aberration,’ Muhammad continued. ‘The West wants conflict with Islam; it needs an enemy. People think Al-Qa’ida was behind September the Eleventh.’ He gave a joyless laugh. ‘It’s quite obvious the Americans did it. They needed excuses to impose themselves on the Middle East. Islam is a religion of peace.’

  There was a kind of blind certainty in his manner that I recognized from other intensely religious people, and a dismissiveness, as though you hadn’t a hope of reaching the heights of his understanding.

  It was depressing to see how polarized opinions were over the September attacks. First Zine and now Muhammad, like so many other Arabs and Muslims, positioned on one side, and Westerners on the other. As though that in itself marked a dividing line any future conflicts would be based upon. The centre ground was increasingly depopulated.

  Having seen the mosque being built on the Albaicín hill, the increasing numbers of veiled women, tea-houses and Moroccan shops around, an idea flitted into my head that someone or some group out there – perhaps Muhammad, in front of me now – was secretly planning on retaking the city for Islam. It was crazy, perhaps. But in today’s climate I couldn’t put it past some lunatic somewhere to want to ‘avenge’ the loss of Granada to the Christians five centuries earlier: a romanticized defeat of a former Islamic jewel that appealed to many Arabs’ yearning for a lost Golden Age.

  ‘Do you think …’ I hesitated. ‘Should Spain become a Muslim country once more?’

  ‘We have no problem with Christians or Jews. Israel is another matter. But it was Christians who threw out the Muslims and the Jews from Spain. Muslims never harmed anyone.’

  ‘What about the massacre of the Jewish population here in Granada by the Moors in 1066?’ I asked.

  ‘A one-off. It was a political struggle. The Jews were running the place. Nothing to do with their religion or race. As I said, Islam is a religion of peace. Salam.’

  I decided to move things back to more personal matters, asking him how his family had reacted when he converted.

  It hadn’t been easy. His mother was unhappy about his conversion. She felt he’d let down his father, who had died when Muhammad was only a teenager. None of his protestations about Spain’s Muslim heritage washed with her, and now he only saw her a couple of times a year in their home town of Cáceres. Muhammad had moved to Granada because of his wife, who worked helping immigrants, but for him Granada was also a city of special importance, a city for converts, the last Moorish city to fall.

  I asked if he knew anything about the new mosque on the top of the Albaicín.

  ‘No,’ he said vaguely. ‘Nothing to do with us. That’s a different group. I’m not sure if they’re Libyan, or something.’

  He sat back on his wooden stool and took his eyes off me for a second to look around the room, as though to indicate he’d had enough. I felt relief at not being under his piercing gaze. Strange how no-one knew about the mosque, though.

  We stepped out together into the street, where the sweet smell of fried cinnamon cakes filled the air. Virginia creeper fell over the wall of a nearby carmen like the long greasy hair of a teenager. The Arabic word al-huriyya – freedom – was spray-painted on the building opposite. Among all the new bazaar-like stalls, an old watch-repairer still had his shop, grey and barely noticeable among the crowds and colours. He wouldn’t be around much longer, I thought – old Granada was pushing out the new. Or was it the other way around?

  ‘Just like Morocco, eh?’ Muhammad said as we parted, waving at the souk-like street. ‘Tourists love it. It’s great for the economy.’

  I walked down to the Plaza Nueva in search of something stronger to drink, stepping over dog turds and dodging children clicking castanets as they rode their bicycles down the winding, stepped alleyways, no longer sure quite what I was looking for.

  ALHAMBRA

  Zine found me the day after my meeting with Muhammad. I was sitting in the Bib-Rambla square, the site of one of the old Arab gates to the city, watching a North African shoe-shiner convincing a tourist that his canvas walking sandals needed a good polish. Amazingly enough, the white-skinned camera-wielder had fallen for it and was happily raising his foot for the brush-and-cloth treatment, a handful of euros ready
in his hand.

  ‘You met a Spanish Muslim?’ Zine said with a grin as he pinched my shoulder, sitting down in the empty chair beside me.

  ‘Yes. Muhammad,’ I said.

  ‘He must have told you lots of interesting things about Islam and Spain,’ he said, basking for a moment in his success at setting up the meeting.

  ‘Yes, he did. Very interesting. How about you?’ I asked. ‘What’ve you been up to? I haven’t seen you for days.’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ He looked pleased with himself. That could only mean one thing.

  ‘Have you been making peace with the Granada girls?’ I asked.

  ‘Only one!’ he protested. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  He pushed over a plastic envelope. Inside, decorated with bright, childlike colours, were two tickets for the Alhambra.

  If you believed Camilo, the Alhambra palace, which sat like a sun-drenched cloud above the city and whose presence was so powerful it seemed to distort your internal compass, was just the product of a decadent, declining civilization. Christian Europe was about to enter its ‘renaissance’ and pull ahead of its southern Islamic rival when al-qala al-hamra, the Red Fort, was being built – a time when Moorish possession of the peninsula had been reduced to this small mountain kingdom in the south. While the history of the last years of Granada was a tale of labyrinthine in-fighting and corruption, a whole world away from the magnificence of the caliphal period some five hundred years earlier, to the north a new and expansive Spain was being born, a country on the point of discovering a new world and creating a mighty empire. In this context, the Alhambra was little more than an historical detail – beautiful, perhaps, a final starburst of a once-brilliant culture, but unimportant. Certainly not representative of Moorish Spain as a whole.