I went to the tomb of Ferdinand III on a hot morning. Older Spaniards dropped to one knee and crossed themselves before the sepulcher of the Castilian monarch. There were men with tucked-in shirts, gray checked shirts, and women with short-cropped hair and knee-length dresses. After five and a half centuries of Muslim rule, El Santo, the patron saint of what would come to be called La Reconquista, came to an end in this town.
There is a banner above the altar with silver letters on it. The Virgin of Kings looked down at the scene. She was surrounded by black-haired putti. There was an organ playing. The minaret of the 12th-century mosque on whose bones it had been built was retained as the belfry of the Gothic church.
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I entered the tomb of Ferdinand III because I wanted to begin my journey through the ghost lands, even though we were in the middle of an ola de calor and the temperature was 115 degrees. The sainted king's sarcophagus was partially hidden by the gold of an altar rail. When I stood up among the worshipers, I saw a glimpse of what I had seen in my book. The last plaques in the four languages of medieval Spain were in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and Castilian.
The plaques marked a Christian victory but it wasn't a victory for Spain. The Arabic culture of Al-Andalus was where the conquering king's son grew up. He should be at home in the different languages. The plaques used the Hebrew calendar, the Islamic Hijri, and the Gregorian calendar, as well as Quranic phrases. It was because this Spain of three natures was on the eve of destruction that there was something sad about this familiarity. The authors of " The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture" wrote that it was "remarkable and poignant." How does a place with so much diversity fail? There is a cry for a limpieza de sangre.
When I stepped out into the garish day, I stood at the base of La Giralda, which was covered in a pattern of sebka.
There are three societies in the world that have had centuries of Muslim rule among large swaths of unconverted people. The Balkans in the 1990s and the partition of India in 1947 were both periods of religious violence and ethnic cleansing. The aims of ethnic cleansing were realized in Spain. Muslims remain in the Balkans. Despite partition, there are 200 million Muslims in India. Spain was the only country to achieve pure elimination. We were surrounded by the remains of the Moorish past in a number of ways. During Holy Week, the Andalusians ate honey-drenched and cinnamon-dusted pastries called pestios, which means "so-and-so". They were also there in secret, such as in the Alcazar, which is 20 miles away from Sevilla. The old Moorish castle is located in the middle of a Spanish white town at the crest of a hill of burned yellow grass with its shattered crenelations. Historians have used the term "shards" to describe these remnants, and they exist everywhere, but they are radioactive in Spain because of the descendants of the Norman Conquest. The arches of the old mosque, with their characteristic capitals of Roman spolia, are still visible as one stands in the patio of the church of El Salvadoran in Seville. It is not free from restriction.
Seville is a city of shadows and pleasure seems to walk with one like a person when one is alone. There isn't always enough light. On the first day, walking through the streets covered in shadow curtains, I was overwhelmed by the heat. It was so hot in June that I had never heard of it before. In bars, where the awnings sprinklers had been fitted that released timed bursts of cooling mist, I could make out through their permanent air of afternoon azulejos.
Sign up for the T List newsletter. A weekly roundup of what T Magazine editors are noticing and coveting right now, and guides to the world's best hotels and destinations.I was in a European town of white buildings picked out in brown, black and burnt umber, trying to imagine its Muslim past, aware that it was a distortion of history. When the armies of a new conquering faith reached as far west into Christian Europe as Poitiers in France, they were defeated, like in India, where I grew up. In 2002, Menocal wrote about the history of Al-Andalus in her book, The Ornament of the World. The tale begins with the story of an exiled Omayyad prince, who escaped a massacre in Syria and fled to North Africa as his family's sole surviving heir, founding the Emirate of Cordoba in 759. The Omayyads were the first dynasty of Islam. They conquered a large part of the classical world, from the time of the Persians to the Byzantines. In 711, a year after the conquest of the western reaches of India, a Berber, Syrian and Yemen army defeated the Visigothic king. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the Visigoths have ruled Spain.
The Omayyads were given a second lease on life in Spain by the leader of the Islamic world, known as al-Dakhil. There was a new dynasty going strong. The Abbasids replaced the Omayyads as Caliphs and turned Baghdad into the capital of the now. The history of Islam in Spain is said to be more like romance than sober fact, and it begins with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood. The term "Al-Andalus" is given to all of Muslim Spain, which has seen its borders expand and shrink over the course of hundreds of years. It was here in the south that the Islamic presence lasted the longest. Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Spain, handed over the keys of Granada to the Catholic monarchs in 1492 after Christopher Columbus sailed to America. Boabdil told him not to cry like a woman for what he couldn't defend, as he looked back at the city he would never see again.
There are mosques and churches in Spain. This was something that had been going on before. The Omayyad mosque was built on the remains of an old Byzantine church and sat on the Temple of Jupiter. Mosques in India reuse the columns of old temples that were used for viharas. There is nothing more natural than to use the sacred to meet the needs of a new time when building materials are hard to come by. The people who might have been heirs to the ruins were silent. The old monastery that was turned into a ceramics factory was opened as a museum as evening fell. I expressed my interest in the role of Al-Andalus in the Muslim imagination after talking to a former journalist. The silence that had been following me all day was back. She said you can't ask them because they're not here.
I went to the Alcazar of Seville before the heat took hold of the day. One of the finest examples of an art particular to Spain was created by the great-great-grandson. Muslims who stayed in cities under Christian rule after La Reconquista are referred to as Mudéjar. One of the glories of this syncretic culture is that Christian rulers, like Peter I, commissioned Muslim craftsmen to make the building techniques and ornamentation of Al-Andalus with Christian meaning.
The early days of La Reconquista weresimilative. Alfonso X had styled himself King of the Three Religions, and ran a massive translation enterprise out of his capital, Toledo. He was well aware of the literary culture of Arabic and would have considered men such as the Averroes and the great historian Ibn Rushd. This was the genius of medieval Spain and it was in this tradition that Peter I built his Alcazar.
There were rooms dripping with muqarna and walls adorned with arabesques in the Courtyard of the Maidens. An Egyptian living in Spain took a picture of his mother, who was visiting from Cairo, against a famous scene of a rectangular pool of greenish water. The birds flew into the tent behind her. Christians built a structure to celebrate Islam's recent defeat. What did you think about it? I asked, but I couldn't help. I was given a smile of tobacco-stained teeth by Ahmed. It's called a lost paradise by us. He said it was like seeing your own culture from another perspective. It's Spanish but it's Islamic. The walls were decorated with Arabic inscriptions in celebration of Peter I. He tried to read them but couldn't. He said it was difficult. I don't believe it was made by Arabs.
The term convivencia was first used by Américo Castro in 1948 to describe the coexistence of Muslims, Jews and Christians in medieval Spain. In his book, "Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain," Brian A. Catlos wrote about the "ethno religious diversity of Al-Andalus." Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived side by side here for a long time. They got married. They were a part of the intellectual enterprise. The art of the Other was absorbed by them. When it suited their interests, they collaborated against each other. Sometimes they were generous and sometimes they were cruel. Spain was a plural society for a long time. Around the 1600s it was not. What did you see change?
The question that was uppermost in my mind when I met Tabales was, "What happened to the Alcazar?" There was a man waiting for me near the exit.
He greeted me with enthusiasm and said that I was in the center of the taiFA period. In Arabic, TaiFA means "party orfaction". After a period of fitna, orcalamity, in the early 11th century, the Emirate of Cordoba fell apart, giving way to a glorious age of city-states.
The poet-emir al-Mu'tamid is similar to Caesar. The river Guadalquivir was a different place than it is today, making it more favorable to trade during his time. The city grew from 185 acres to over 700. Tabales said that they saw it in their investigations. The Islamic houses are the same. In an era of political instability but creativity, al-Mu'tamid made a terrible mistake. After the fall of Toledo to the Christians in 1085, he lost his nerve and invited the Almoravids to cross the strait from North Africa and help him drive back the Christian advance. After seeing the chaos of Al-Andalus, they came back a few years later as conquerors. Al-Andalus had a catalog of exiles, and Al-Mu'tamid was one of them. He wrote from North Africa and said that God might choose to kill him in Seville.
I inquired about the multilingual inscription on the tomb of Ferdinand III. He said it's common after the Reconquest. In the 14th century it becomes even stronger. The Castilian kings didn't have a problem with minorities after war ended. He pointed out that they were more accepting of Muslim influence in the arts once they had won.
The spirit of the Reconquest was assimilative by the 15th century. Tabales said that the political skeleton was established by the Catholic monarchs. The order of the day was one monarchy, one religion, and it wasn't just Jews and Muslims who were underground. Christians from the Arab world had to change their religion. Tabales suggested that the minorities were always at the mercy of political calculations. The convivencia is a myth.
There was a marble stone draped in a red cloth next to the table where we were sitting. I asked him about it as we left. He looked at me in a completely different way. The stairwell had us in it. He told us to go back upstairs.
He pointed to an inscription in Latin that said the stone had been given to the goddess. Tabales referred to it as the Germans because it was part of a column in a cathedral. It was made part of a doorway when the Muslims arrived. Tabales said when we were in the street that the city was full of spolia. Tabales didn't like the idea of using old stones. He thought it was a language of power and appropriation. He said spolia were used to indicate the position of Muslims over Christians.
The researcher in architecture and cultural identity at the University of Seville said he would go back to the year the Christians arrived in the city.
The Gypsy quarter of Triana used to be located on the right bank of the Guadalquivir. Abad had dark Andalusia features and almond-shaped eyes. She had previously said that her name was probably Moorish. She asked if it was possible for Christians from the north to come to a Muslim city.
I was told by Abad that her thesis dealt with the ways in which the architecture of La Reconquista had affected the relationship to modernity. She said thatSeville was the template for how other cities would look. As in other parts of Andalusia, an original period of subsuming and reconfiguring Islamic buildings gave way to a triumphalist Renaissance architecture. It looked like the Reconquistadores were making up in size for the cities they had depopulated. She felt that the controlling relationship to buildings brought about apedagogical architecture, so that even in the late 19th and early 20th century, Seville was unable to embrace movements such as Art Nouveau. Abad said that we have been a symbolic city for many years.
Callejon de la Inquisicin is an alleyway that leads down to the river. She said that you could imagine what happened there. They threw them into the river after killing them.
The Hermandad del Roco de Triana was on the street. Middle-aged men and women, some members of a famous band, and ancient ladies in floral dresses were all present. The boys from Andalusia wore collared shirts and embroidered leather belts. Each person had a green ribbon around their neck with a coat of arms of the Brotherhood. There was an icebox full of alcohol on the ground. When Abad introduced me to our host, he said, "I'm polygamous."
Young girls in flamenco dresses with shawls around their shoulders, young men in gray hats, every now and then a trickle of pilgrims, but the attendees of the nearly 400 year old pilgrimage, which had been canceled these past two years because of the Pandemic, were in for another Pilgrims' wagons were diverted due to the heat. The drama of pilgrims following in the wake of the main chariot would not happen now. The other people were more upset than I was. It was moving to see the chariot lit up with white lights. The tolling of bells. The street was filled with a lot of commotion and anticipation before it emptied.
Abad had told me that they didn't destroy what they got. The symbolism was changed. Both things happened in Spain. The Muslims absorbed the arch of the Visigoths in order to build their Mezquita and the Christians destroyed the Basilica of San Vicente in order to proclaim their victory.
Ftima Roldn-Castro is a professor at the University of Sevilla. I was told by Abad that one of her subjects is a discourse of alterity.
Roldn-Castro said that altering was an acknowledgment of difference. She said that it could be not very nice.
The cafe was set in an old tobacco factory and had a neo-classical facade. A green beaded necklace, yellow sunglasses, pink lipstick, and a long black dress were worn by Roldn-Castro. I was told of the influence of Moorish culture on Spain, which included the use of almonds in food.
Roldn-Castro said a new world was starting. I said it was necessary to make a Catholic Spain without Muslims. It was born out of convenience, rather than religious fervor.
Roldn-Castro was the one who first told me about the secret language of the Moriscos. Morisco is defined by Catlos as "Muslim-ish." The Jewish and Muslim subjects were told to convert or be thrown out. Many chose to convert to Islam.
The history of Al-Andalus shows that no concession is ever enough when a majoritarian atmosphere takes hold. Fears of bad faith were caused by the conversions of the Jews and Muslims. The era of book burnings and autos-da-fé began after those fears. For all the suspicion it aroused, these were the same people, with a shared culture, and Aljamiado was just a Romance language written in Sanskrit.
The Christian fascination with the legacy of Al-Andalus inspired Roldn-Castro to create Mudjar art. She said that she didn't know of another place where Christians are still working in the creative medium of Islam. If Al-Andalus was a place of longing in the Muslim imagination, it was also a place of forgetting. A close friend who grew up in Andalusia remembers his school friends saying, "Los moros para el otro lado del estrecho," which means "Moors to the other side of the strait."
I wondered if it was easier to embrace the art and culture of people who had been expelled. There was no contradiction between embracing Black culture and enslaving them in the US. I asked Roldn-Castro if the absence of Muslims in Spain made it harder to adopt their art and culture. It is about any way in which your neighbor may be different from you.
It's qURTUBA! The Arabic word for "cordoba" is the most powerful name in the Islamic imagination. In the early 20th century, the poet Allama Iqbal was inspired by these "enduring foundations, these columns without count" for the lost kingdom of Al-.
I had been to this "white and taciturn" city 18 years before, and was astonished to meet people in European dress rather than Arabs. The Mezquita was closed when I came to see it. I took it and left. The building grew and expanded in my imagination. The images I saw looked like a forest of 800 columns with their double arches and alternating voussoirs. In the 16th century, 300 years after the mosque had already been converted into a church, a bishop planted a Renaissance cathedral, drawing from his king, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
It had become a place of meaning for me. If, as Maugham writes, half the charm of Andalusia lies in what you divine rather than what you see, then I would like to see the ninth-century poet-musician Ziryab walk these streets. I thought of Abd al-Rahman III, who was three-fourths Spanish Basque and staked his claim to the title of caliph in 928, gazing out from his complex on a hill. The fountain of mercury on its rolling base flashed silver for guests after they were surprised. The cutting from the felled Omayyad tree was used to grow the city into one of the premier cities of Islam.
The Mezquita, the horseshoe arch picked out in umber and draped in arabesques, is a symbol of one culture and is what you will find when you search for it on the internet. I saw it embedded into the wall of honeyed stone. I had been in mosques all over the world, but this felt completely new to me, as it is to say, European. I imagined that the right and left movements of the Islamic prayer would send them dancing. There was a strange spectacle of a Christ crowned by interlacing arches in Pompeian red and white. I was able to return to the Omayyad mosque in Damascus instantly because of the ribbed ceiling of gold and large-leaved foliage. The spiritual message of Islam was strengthened by new influences, including Greek mosaics and Roman engineering. Islam became a petri dish for the cross-fertilization of the classical world as Hindu numerals traveled west.
An Arab with a potbelly sat on the steps outside of a mosque and read his Quran. The minaret of the old mosque was buried in the belfry. The mosque is extraordinary and the church is described as apustule by many. I like the fact that it strikes a discordant note, as described in the book " Moorish Spain". I felt like a New York therapist would say, "Where there is hysteria, there is history." I was born in India and it was very touching. In the northeastern state of UP, a temple is rising on the ruins of a 16th century mosque that was destroyed in 1992. The Mezquita is a reminder of the wounds of history, but it is also proof of people moving on, of the past becoming cold.
Five hundred years after the fall of Al-Andalus, the first mosque in Spain since 1492 was built in the city. The Moorish neighborhood of Albaicn was overlooked. The new mosque on that old stage was very suggestive. The majority of Spain's 2.3 million Muslims are from North Africa. The ancient drama of Christianity and Islam on the Iberian Peninsula was starting to happen again.
I saw the door that Boabdil had left behind. I was told by my guide that he had asked Ferdinand and Isabella to seal it shut. The assurance that Muslims would be allowed to practice their faith was betrayed by the catholic monarchs. The ancient Islamic code was the basis of the plurality of Al- Andalus. Non-Muslims were allowed to follow their religion as long as they acknowledged the superiority of Muslims and paid taxes. The law was in force during the early years of La Reconquista. A creed of uniformity became the order of the day as a new catholic Spain asserted itself. The Inquisition came to town within a few years. There were public fires. More restrictions followed.
Dehumanizing a people is the first thing one has to do. They need to be told that their history and culture are not important. The last order of expulsion came in the early 17th century when tensions between Spain and the Ottomans were high. It came after the book burnings, the forced conversions, the demands upon a people that they erase every aspect of their identity only to find their tormentors questing after further proof of their sincereness, almost as if the same people who had created this world of shadows were now afraid There wasn't enough historical memory to save the Moriscos. The centuries of living cheek by cheek of building a shared culture did not matter. The history of Al-Andalus is similar to that of Germany in the 1930s.
There is a community of Muslim converts and their families in Las Alpujarras, which is an hour's drive south of Granada. Medina Tenour Whiteman, a half-American, half-British 40-year-old, told me that her parents had left because they wanted to revive Islam in Europe.
Whiteman, the daughter of converts to Islam in Britain, felt like she had to engage in what felt to her like a form of "dress-up" in order to be accepted as a Muslim. There was no such thing in Spain. The memory of Europe's Islam was still there. She loved the fact that she could be exactly as she was.
Whiteman, who has written guides for Muslims in Spain, met a man from the province of Extremadura who still remembers his grandmother going to the basement of her house to wash and pray in the Islamic way. The expulsions of Muslims in the early 17th century were different from the expulsions of Christians. She believed that a simple act of ethnic cleansing was the work of the Reconquest.
When I asked Whiteman what Al-Andalus meant to Muslims, she said, "We can't help but be aware that something happened here." It's a flourishing of the word.
She was careful not to get too attached to that history. The Friday before, she had prayed at the mosque. The stations of Islamic prayer were performed as the sun set behind the Alhambra, yet, like all magical things, it was also a little unbelievable. Whiteman said that the Quran encourages you to celebrate. She said that it doesn't say to go and look at beautiful mosques and palaces.
She came back to Spain because she could raise her children in a land where Islam was in the soil and people could relate to and pray with. She said that she was just as Muslim as she was when she visited the Mezquita.
There was a wistfulness in her voice as she spoke of her desire to keep her faith a secret. The Spanish Inquisition took away the idea of the inner life. We were given the blueprints for what would become the state's dread apparatus of state monitoring. The diversity of Al-Andalus was more important than homogeneity.
There is aFixer in Spain.
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