Andalus

by Jason Webster

  He laughed. ‘I’m making peace between Muslims and Christians. I told you.’

  ‘You can’t have sex in the middle of the bloody Alhambra,’ I said. ‘What’s got into you?’ Despite my surprise, I couldn’t help smiling along with him.

  ‘She works here. Where else are we supposed to do it?’

  ‘She works here?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, tucking his shirt back into his trousers. ‘How else do you think I got the tickets? I was just saying thank you.’

  CORDOBA

  ‘Egyptians,’ Zine said as we followed in behind. ‘Donkeys.’

  Two Muslims walked ahead of us, their long black beards, white jellabas and knitted skullcaps oddly conspicuous, although they were standing outside what had once been the third-largest mosque in the world. Tourists glanced at them furtively, curious but frightened of offending.

  Like Granada, Cordoba attracted visitors from all over the Islamic world: once the capital of Al-Andalus and the greatest city in western Europe, it was a memorial to a time when Muslims had been guardians of the most advanced culture in the world. The Moorish Golden Age had begun here when, during the tenth century, the Emir Abd al-Rahman III claimed the title ‘caliph’ for himself, in opposition to the established caliph in Baghdad and a rival contender in North Africa. The caliph was theoretically the religious head of the world Islamic community, in a similar way as the Pope is for Catholics. Home to five hundred thousand people – two hundred thousand more than today – Cordoba had boasted street lighting, five hundred mosques, three hundred public baths, fifty hospitals and seventy libraries – the Caliph Al-Hakam II (961–76) was said to have built one with half a million works in it. And it was filled with the advanced philosophical, scientific, mathematical, astronomical and medicinal learning that had been a part of the Islamic world since it came into contact with the disparate intellectual schools of Greece, Persia and India.

  The giant hall of the Great Mosque was lit with low orange lamps, eight hundred and fifty delicate columns of marble and jasper suddenly branching out before us, line after line, like an exercise for drawing perspective gone mad. In the accumulative way of so much of Spain, the Moors had built sections of the mosque using materials from the Visigothic church that had previously stood on the site, itself partly made from the remains of an ancient Roman temple dedicated to the two-faced god Janus. And so Corinthian capitals on one side of an arch might be married with Pharaonic on the other, neither quite the right height, but with small adjustments made in every case to give the appearance of symmetry. Likewise the famous red and white striped horseshoe archways above our heads, which became such an architectural feature all over Spain that they turned into a kind of logo for Al-Andalus, were borrowed from earlier Gothic and Roman styles. Yet something about the combination was at once Moorish and unique.

  Zine lagged behind, waiting for me to move further inside before breaking off to find his own way around. Arriving late in the city the night before, I’d finally persuaded him to stay at the pensión with me, arguing that even he would have trouble at that hour finding some available girl with a space in her bed. He knew I was right, but had been sulking ever since. In an earlier conversation I’d mentioned that las cordobesas were renowned as the prettiest girls in Andalusia, with their slim figures and long black hair tied back in shiny malenas; and it seemed he’d set his heart on discovering for himself the joys they offered.

  ‘Wait till they taste the flesh of Zine,’ he said. ‘Then they’ll wish the caliphs had never gone.’

  This morning, though, the sour mood of the night before seemed to have intensified. He’d refused breakfast, instead locking himself in the bathroom for an hour, and when I spoke to him he pretended not to have heard. It annoyed me, but I assumed that once he’d seen the mosque he would cheer up a bit. And so I dragged him along, down the white twisting streets of the old Jewish quarter – the Judería – to the jewel of Andalusi religious architecture.

  Once inside, he disappeared. A cluster of South American girls with tight-fitting jeans, all buttocks and chit-chat among the cloister-silence of the forest-like hall, tottered away towards the mihrab. Soon to become prey to Morocco’s greatest love machine, I felt sure. I just hoped he succeeded with one of them, otherwise the rest of the day might become unbearable.

  I wandered among the columns, trying to work out where one stage of the building of the mosque began and another ended. The ruler Abd al-Rahman I built the earliest section in the late eighth century, when the growing numbers of Muslims in the city meant that sharing the Visigothic church with the Christian population became impossible. Conversion to Islam among native Spaniards was slow during the first century or two of Al-Andalus, when the main incentive to switch faiths was merely financial – Christians and Jews were tolerated but had to pay a special tax. But in subsequent centuries the rate of conversion accelerated rapidly, so that by 1000, just a few years before Cordoba self-destructed in civil conflict, some 75 per cent of people were Arabic-speaking practising Muslims. Even when not converting to Islam, Spaniards adopted Muslim ways: the Christian Paul Alvarus, writing in Cordoba in the ninth century, had complained bitterly that young Christians in the city had forgotten their own language and culture.

  ‘For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend,’ he’d said, ‘there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.’

  With the ever-growing numbers of Muslims, Cordoba’s mosque had been added on to three times by Abd al-Rahman’s successors, each maintaining the essential architectural style of the building, yet gradually extending it from a modest temple into a giant of a thing, like an ancient low-ceilinged warehouse. The original section was the most eclectic, and perhaps the most interesting, as the early Muslims plundered the Roman and Christian churches around them for building materials. Hence the anomalous yet harmonious mixture of ancient and Classical elements. As the extensions were added on, though, a uniformity crept into the architecture, so that the last section, built by the military dictator Al-Mansur in the late tenth century – the man who sacked Santiago de Compostela and kidnapped its cathedral bell – had an almost pre-fabricated feel to it. Until then, something of the mixture of artistic styles of the earliest mosque had been maintained: the highly decorated mihrab – the niche in the back wall that signalled the direction of prayer – had been a gift from the Byzantine emperor, and Christian Greek artisans had created the complex and colourful floral mosaic work.

  Surprisingly, it was perfectly easy completely to ignore the massive cathedral the later Christian masters of the city had built inside the mosque. But once you noticed it, it was quite shocking, despite the syncretic nature of the building. Whereas previous additions had involved some degree of assimilation, Cordobans of the sixteenth century had simply plonked an overly decorated Baroque church right in the middle, like a boot in the face. It was little comfort that the word ‘baroque’ was of Arab origin, from burga, meaning uneven ground, reaching Europe through the word barrocco – a technical term used by Portuguese fishermen. The cathedral was simply brash and vulgar. Yet thankfully, perhaps because it was disguised from view by the host of columns, you could easily pretend it wasn’t there.

  I sat on a wooden bench in the far corner of the mosque, watching with slight edginess for signs of Zine while studying the building around me. Like many Friday mosques, this had been more than simply a prayer hall: it acted as a university, a meeting place, a community centre at the heart not only of the city but of Islamic Spain as a whole. Along these passageways would have walked all kinds of people, including, I fantasized, one of the most famous sons of Moorish Spain, Ibn Rushd.

  Averroes, as he was known in the West, was one of those emblematic characters of the Middle Ages who stuck in your mind for the sheer presence he seemed to have and the lasting legacy of his genius over centuries, like a Moorish Chaucer, Dante or Albertus Magnus. Jo
rge Luis Borges had even written a short story about him, imagining his struggle to translate the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ into Arabic while reading Aristotle’s Poetics.

  Philosopher, astronomer, medic and jurist, Averroes lived during a period of cultural brilliance in Cordoba that coincided with the political decline of Moorish Spain. Internal conflicts had brought an end to the caliphate some hundred years before his birth, in 1031, and Al-Andalus split up into a patchwork of little kingdoms – some no bigger than a village and its surrounding area – often referred to as the ‘Taifas’.

  Christian forces in the north had taken advantage of the chaos to make deep inroads into Muslim-held territory, and in the face of their continued pressure, rulers in Al-Andalus called for help from a group of fundamentalist warrior monks in Morocco known as the Almoravids. The Almoravids duly crossed over and stopped the Christian advance. Instead of then returning to Marrakesh, however, they stayed and took over the remaining Moorish section of the peninsula. A few years later their place was taken by an even more hard-line bunch of Moroccans called the Almohads, rulers during Averroes’ lifetime.

  Reading about him in the gloom from a book I’d picked up that morning, I started to discover more. Born into a family of jurists, Averroes acted as physician and adviser to two of the Almohad rulers, was appointed religious judge or qadi (from which came the Spanish word for mayor, alcalde), while in his spare time he discovered sunspots and a new star.

  He had also been a student of Ibn Tufayl, whose book Hayy bin Yaqzan,a story about a man growing up on a desert island, provided the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe centuries later. Averroes’ influence on Europe, however, was more immediate. He provided a comprehensible study of Aristotle’s work that was quickly translated into Latin for Christian scholars struggling to get to grips with the body of Greek philosophy. Western thinkers later dubbed him simply ‘the Commentator’ in recognition of his role, and St Thomas Aquinas admitted that much of his own inspiration in resolving the supposed conflict between Christian revelation and reason had come from the Spanish Muslim. Such was the respect for him in Europe that Dante had even given him a place in Limbo next to Aristotle himself. His works were standard textbooks in Western universities until the sixteenth century (in Mexico until the 1830s).

  There was more to Averroes than a beginner’s guide to Aristotle, though. The author of over eighty books, he expounded ideas on the collective unconscious eight hundred years before Jung, insisted on the importance of a good digestion and sound bowel movements for general health, and once famously issued a fatwa saying that Muslims living in Christian-controlled lands should emigrate to Muslim-held territory: ‘The obligation to emigrate from the lands of unbelief will continue till the day of judgement.’

  His popularity with the fanatical rulers of the day had not lasted, though. There was a story of how, on being accused of heresy and supposedly insulting the Almohad leader, he’d been ordered to stand at the entrance of the mosque, to be spat at by all ‘true believers’ walking by. Fallen from grace, he was sent into exile, and eventually died in Marrakesh, far from his beloved Cordoba; ‘God’s greatest city’, he had called it. The modern city reciprocated the compliment after a fashion by naming a street in his honour.

  Almohad control of Al-Andalus came to an end shortly after Averroes’ death with another big push by Christian forces southwards. The Moors were defeated at the battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and in the subsequent forty-odd years almost the entire peninsula was taken over by the Christians – Valencia, Cordoba and Seville were all conquered in this period. Only one area – the Kingdom of Granada – held out. It continued to do so for the next two and a half centuries.

  I found Zine in the Orange Tree Court that served as a sort of ante-chamber to the indoor section of the mosque. Tourists sat on low walls in the shade of the trees, writing postcards, changing the film in their cameras, or, as one German was doing with a certain irreligious devotion, simply picking his nose while his girlfriend spoke to a friend back home on her mobile phone.

  Zine, I saw as I walked towards him, was just finishing talking to the Egyptians we’d seen entering earlier on. He seemed friendly with them, his manner at odds with his previous hostile reaction. Now he looked almost deferential. I smiled as I walked towards him: at least now he might have got over the black mood of that morning. With any luck I might be able to drag him along that afternoon to the Medina Azahara ruins outside the city.

  ‘This place is dirty,’ he said as I approached him. ‘I’m leaving.’ His face, just a few seconds before all smiles with the Egyptians, had dropped into a deep scowl. ‘Look at all these people. This is a mosque!’

  I was surprised by the sudden anger in his voice.

  ‘They don’t even take off their shoes. Why can’t they treat it with more respect?’

  I didn’t take this outburst seriously. He hadn’t taken his shoes off either.

  ‘I thought you were more interested in the girls inside than the mosque itself,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t walk into a church shouting Allahu akbar – Allah is great,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘They treat Islam like shit. In Morocco we keep tourists out of the mosques.’

  He turned his face to one side, trying to control his rage, a strand of curly black hair falling into his eyes. He flicked it out angrily with his finger. I could see that he might find the tourists annoying, but it was still not a reaction I would have expected from him.

  ‘This is not how it should be,’ he said.

  And for a second I saw clearly how many gaps there were between us, even though we had been slowly and sometimes tetchily getting to know one another better as we travelled along. The Egyptians appeared to have hit some hidden puritanical nerve in him. Friendly leg-pulling now would almost certainly not be a good idea.

  ‘Stay among the dirt, la suciedad, if you want.’ And he turned to walk back through the pointed archway of the main entrance into the streets of the Jewish quarter, muttering in Arabic to himself.

  Totally confused, I walked after him, keeping my distance in case he blew up in my face. God knows what had really got into him. Normally I might simply have let him walk off – he had an unnatural knack of finding me whenever he needed to, and perhaps in a few hours or days he might have cooled off. But I wasn’t planning on staying in Cordoba long: we’d already been several days in Granada. I was beginning to want to get him to Niebla finally and leave him there.

  A waiter at one of the pavement cafés brought things unexpectedly to a head. Stepping in front of Zine just as he was trying to get past, he blocked his way, making him stop abruptly on the ancient street made narrower by the tourist shops bursting out of their doors and windows on either side. For a moment I had got too close, so as Zine stopped I walked straight into the back of him, scraping his heel with my shoes.

  It may have simply been a reaction to the sudden pain, or perhaps it gave him the excuse he’d wanted, but with a jolt I felt his forearm swing round and crash into my neck, just below the jawline. There was a loud clicking sound inside my head as a number of vertebrae seemed to rub against one another, and with a shock I stumbled backwards, almost falling over the people crushing behind us in the pre-lunch rush.

  ‘Oye, tío. Joder. ¿Lo has visto? Fuck. Did you see that?’

  A woman sitting at the café gave a yelp, and I quickly became aware of the curious attention we were receiving. I struggled to stand up straight, rubbing my numbed face and apologizing to the people I’d bumped into. Looking up, I saw that the waiter was eyeing Zine, as though trying to decide whether to beat him up himself or let the police do the job.

  ‘Perdón, perdón,’ I shouted. People were beginning to gather round us, and from the look on their faces it was clear who they’d decided was guilty. Zine was automatically viewed with suspicion: you couldn’t bury centuries of burning heretics at the stake that easily.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ I said hastily, raising my voice above the
din. ‘I tripped and bumped into my friend here.’ I put my hand on Zine’s shoulder. ‘I must have pushed him forwards.’

  The waiter looked at me with disdain. To be Moroccan was low down in his estimation, but to be a foreigner from the north was clearly little better. Still, you didn’t kick tourists out of the country just for tripping up in the street. He tipped his head to the side and clicked his tongue, then turned back to serving tables as though we weren’t there: he’d understood, but wanted to demonstrate that his pride had been wounded at the same time. Some of the men standing around were still looking at Zine aggressively, though. One of them spat on the ground. It seemed a good idea to move on.

  ‘A ver si tiene documentación. I wonder if he’s got any paperwork,’ I could hear one say.

  I grabbed Zine’s arm and we pushed through the crowd. More people were peering over to see what was going on. You could tell the English tourists because they were the only ones not stopping to look.

  We headed down narrow alleyways, past windows shaped like miniature Moorish archways, and flashes of green as the heavy foliage of proud patio gardens came into view through open doorways: brief glimpses of paradise. Zine’s body was stiff and tense, his muscles barely giving way as I continued to grip his arm, half pushing him along as I tried to find our way out of the old city and away from the crowds. He said nothing, his teeth clenching together, creating an ugly skull-like effect in his face.

  What, I thought to myself, was I doing with this man? I should take him to the station, put him on a bus for Niebla and let him sort himself out. I was buggered if I was going to carry on like this. But despite his mood swings and hitting me in the face, the bastard, I actually enjoyed his company and the sharpness he brought to this journey. He’d become an essential part of my search for Moorish Spain.

  Ten minutes later, we sat down at a bar just outside the city walls, a statue of Averroes looking down paternally at us while American girls tried to straddle his knees to have their photo taken. Crows peppered the midday sky, flying in over the coffee-coloured Guadalquivir with its ruined Moorish waterwheels.