by Thomas J. Abercrombie
Through parting curtains of drizzle the lights of Africa
dissolved into the widening gray dawn. Climbing back on deck
with course corrections and hot coffee, I watched the last ghosts
of lightning dance off the flanks of Morocco's Jabal Musa just
astern. To the east a fine day was building; already the first
breezes stiffened our sails and, gently heeling, our small
chartered sloop Nejmah--Arabic for "star"--started to gallop.
"Perfect weather for a morning's sail--or an
intercontinental passage," said my Spanish shipmate, Rafa,
beaming from behind the wheel. Here the narrow Gibraltar Strait
is one of the few places a sailor can combine the two. The radio
forecast confirmed our optimism, and as Rafa eased our bow to 015
magnetic to allow for the tide, I switched the dial back to
Spain's Radio Flamenco. We scanned the rising mists ahead for
our landfall, snapping fingers to a Gypsy guitar.
"Ole, que bonita!" Rafa exclaimed. "Wow, what a beaut!"
A beacon for mariners since the dawn of seafaring, the
famous Rock was one of the Pillars of Hercules (Jabal Musa, twice
as high behind us, formed the other). For the ancients they
marked the boundary of the known world. To the occupying
British, strategic "Gib" with its history of heroic sieges
remains a monument to empire. Spain vociferously claims the tiny
peninsula, a natural extension of its own soil.
Rafa--Rafael de Tramontana y Gayangos, the Marquis of
Gaudacorte--measured the scene with his own thoughts. Before
Spain lost Gibraltar to England in 1713, the Guadacortes ruled
hereabouts. A grandson of Dr. Pascual Gayangos, Spain's first
modern Arabist, Rafa now presides over the Fundacion Gayangos, a
Madrid-based institute to promote cultural exchange between Spain
and its Muslim neighbors. For me the stronghold marked the first
stop on a journey into a neglected corner of Europe's history, a
distant time when Muslims ruled Spain, and Islam visited its mind
on the West.
The creed of Islam had been revealed to the seventh-century
prophet-statesman Muhammad in distant Arabia. It spread swiftly,
embracing the entire desert peninsula by the time of his death in
632. Six years later Syria and Palestine fell to the zealots.
From their new capital in Damascus, Muslim armies fanned eastward
through Mesopotamia to India and Central Asia, westward to the
Nile and across North Africa. A century after the birth of
Islam, its call to prayer rang from minarets all the way from the
Atlantic to the outskirts of China, an empire larger than Rome's
at its zenith.
History named these Muslim conquerors of Spain "Moors,"
probably because they arrived by way of Morocco. The Moors
themselves never used the term. They were Arabs, from Damascus
and Medina, leading armies of North African Berber converts.
Most married into Spanish and Visigoth families or took fair-
skinned Galician slaves to wife; soldiers all, they brought no
women with them. From this heady mix of race and culture sprang
the Moorish civilization, an adventure that would last 900 years,
one that would change the face--and the soul--of Spain forever.
Rafa and I were bobbing in the wake of Tariq ibn Ziyad, a
Muslim general. With soldiers and horses in four borrowed boats,
he crossed from Ceuta on the African side--as did we--and set up
his beachhead on the narrow ledge below the Rock where the town
of Gibraltar huddles today, then dispatched the tiny fleet back
to ferry the rest of his army.
In the spring of 711, Tariq marched northward from Gibraltar
with 12,000 Muslims. At the Rio Barbate, south of Cadiz, the
invaders met the hastily gathered forces of Spain's Visigoth
king, Roderic.
"Before us is the enemy; behind us, the sea," shouted
Tariq, drawing his scimitar. "We have only one choice: to win!"
For an already faltering Visigoth rule, the battle of
Barbate proved the mortal wound. King Roderic was slain; his
body was never recovered. Whole battalions deserted, and the
Christian army crumbled. The Islamic conquest of Spain was thus
set in motion.
"Only recently have the Spanish begun to approach their
Islamic past," Rafa said. "We take pride in our sangre pura,
pure blood. No Catholic wants to face the thought of Moors on
the family tree.
"But we are finding that much of what we think of as 'pure
Spanish,' our architecture, our temperament, our poetry and
music--even our language--is a blend from a long Arabic
heritage." In the weeks ahead I would find even more marks of
the Moors on the face and heart of Spain.
Only two hours from the African coast we sailed Nejmah past
Europa Point Light and into the lee of the Rock to tie up at
Marina Bay, just below the lofty Moorish castle built by Tariq's
successors. Shops, warehouses, traffic-clogged streets, quays,
and dockyards now cover any traces of the first Arab conquerors,
all except one: The name Gibraltar descends from jabal Tariq,
Arabic for "Tariq's mountain."
I visited the hillside Arab fortress with a knowledgeable
Gibraltar friend, Richard Garcia, a former schoolteacher with a
passion for the history that crowds his town. Along the way
Richard showed me Moorish walls, traces of an Arab gate, the
domed baths now housing Gibraltar's small museum. Narrow lanes
and steep stone steps led us up a block of modern high rises that
today fills the large castle yard to the 80-foot-high tower that
dominates the town and its harbor.
"Abu al-Hasan, a Moroccan king, refurbished the tower in
1333, and he built it to last," Richard said, pointing out small
starburst patterns that pocked the ramparts. "Cannonballs barely
scratched the ten-foot-thick walls.
"The tower suffered 14 major sieges," he said. "Several
times its defenders were starved out, but no army ever took it by
force."
I was surprised to find the fortress still inhabited. The
high-walled keep, just below the tower, serves as Gibraltar's
lockup. Douglas Gaetto, an officer at the jail, showed me its
newly painted cell blocks and what must be the world's smallest
soccer field, squeezed into the prison yard. In cellars below we
prowled rows of dungeons used for solitary confinement until the
turn of the century. They faced on to a gallows courtyard and a
lime pit once used to reduce corpses of the condemned.
"We have only eight 'guests' at the moment, small-time
smugglers mostly. All short-termers," Officer Gaetto said.
"We are looking forward to newer, larger quarters. Money
will surely be appropriated. The problem is--as always on this
tight little island--where to build it?"
Gibraltar's claustrophobia was aggravated during Spain's 16-
year-long closure of its narrow land border, a ban lifted only in
1985. At his office I talked about the isolation with Jon
Searle, then editor of the Gibraltar "Chronicle."
"We are 29,000 people perched together on two and a half
square miles of cliffs and beaches," Searle said. "The blockage
deepened our siege mentality. We developed more ties with
Tangier across the strait."
And of Spain's oft voiced claims to the Rock?
"The British Empire is history now. In the age of the
missile, Gibraltar's strategic value has dropped," Searle said.
"Britain just might be happy to let Spain have it. But how can
it, really? We Gibraltarians are bilingual, our culture tied to
both Spain and England. But we prefer to remain under the Union
Jack. In a recent referendum only 44 voters cast their lot with
Spain."
Still marveling at the vagaries of history, I followed the
conquering footsteps of Tariq ibn Ziyad northward. After the
victory at the Rio Barbate he had moved swiftly. One by one the
Spanish cities fell to him, often betrayed by their own citizens
long chafing under the Visigoths. Early in 712, after a
perfunctory siege, his Muslims galloped through the gates of the
Visigoth capital, Toledo. The Christian armies, those left, were
pinned in the northernmost mountains of Spain.
Hemmed by walls, moated by a loop of the Rio Tajo, Toledo
remained for nearly 400 years a stronghold of the Moors, who spun
its tangled web of steep streets and narrow plazas. Its role as
a border fortress is today recalled by the huge military school
that sits atop an adjoining bluff.
In 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon wrested the city from
the Moors; the Reconquista, or Reconquest of Spain by the
Christians, had begun in earnest. But for several centuries
after Toledo's recapture, the city remained bilingual, tolerant.
Alfonso X patronized an important 13th-century translation school
where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars collaborated to
render Arabic manuscripts into Latin--masterpieces like the
commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rushd (Averroes); works on
algebra and mathematics by al-Khwarizmi (from whose name comes
our term "logarithm"); and the Canon of Ibn Sina (Avicenna),
which remained Europe's standard medical textbook for 500 years.
Christians raised a cathedral befitting a capital of Castile
and dozens of churches and convents. Toledo remains the
country's religious capital; its archbishop still reigns as
primate of Spain. Today synagogues and mosques have been
restored and splendid palaces opened to the public--museums to
display Toledo's abundant heritage. The whole city has been
officially declared a national monument.
Artists and artisans, plying old Moorish crafts, still
prosper. On Calle Santo Tome a shopwindow sparkling with gold
drew me inside to the friendly workbench of master craftsman
Modesto Aguado-Martin. With a jeweler's hammer and steel point
he deftly laid 24-carat thread into delicate patterns scored on a
black iron platter.
"We turn out Madonnas, Bible scenes, and Star of David
motifs, all popular with tourists who day-trip down from Madrid,"
Senor Aguado said, tapping away. "But, as you see, we specialize
in arabesque designs.
"The art of damascene, as its name implies, came here from
Damascus," he continued, the tiny hammer never missing a beat.
"This is an authentic Toledo design; it could have come from the
dome of a tenth-century mosque. Pure Arabic."
A local sculptor, Maximo Revenga, took me to a Toledo museum
he helped restore, the Taller del Moro, literally, the "Moor's
workshop," although it never served as such. It was built during
the 14th century as a palace in Mudejar style, a lavish blend of
Arab and Gothic architecture that graces many Spanish monuments.
Its high salons, arches, and alcoves were worked in yeso, an art
the Arabs mastered, carving plaster walls with breathtaking
patterns of flowers, geometrics, and calligraphy.
"Yeso is a demanding medium, requiring patience to master
and speed to execute; the carving is intricate and must be
finished before the plaster hardens.
"I studied the technique here at Toledo's School of Applied
Arts," Revenga said. "Now I'm teaching it here. We must
preserve this art; Toledo has dozens more Arab-style buildings--
throughout Spain there must be hundreds--that need loving care."
The darker side of Toledo's past chilled my last afternoon
in the city--an exhibit of old torture implements at the
Hermandad gallery across from the cathedral. It included a rack,
branding irons, skull squashers, thumbscrews, an iron maiden.
The grisly display was assembled, according to the city's Council
of Culture, to remind us that even today "human beings are
victims of physical and psychological torture in many parts of
the world...."
I retreated back into Toledo's quiet gray streets dogged by
ghosts. It was here, long after Alfonso VI, that the first
victims of a growing Christian bigotry perished at the stake. In
1469 Prince Ferdinand of Aragon wed Princess Isabella of Castile;
the marriage would unite Christian Spain under their rule. While
waging war against Moorish potentates to the south, they would
view as a threat Muslims and Jews in their own lands. In 1480
they established the Spanish Inquisition. Before it was over,
three centuries later, thousands of Muslims and Jews had died; an
estimated three million people were driven into exile. Shorn of
its leading businessmen, artists, agriculturists, and scientists,
Spain would soon find itself victim of its own cruelty.
A train ride south through sun-swept Andalusia brightened my
mood. Here, across the warm, undulating landscape that nurtures
rows of grape vines and olive and citrus trees, Islamic culture
sank its deepest roots. Small wonder. Mediterranean Spain is a
mirror of Morocco, a close cousin of the Levant. Here the Arabs
felt at home. Indeed to a desert Arab, Andalusia--from the Arab
al-Andalus--competed with descriptions of heaven in the Holy
Karan: "gardens dark green...springs pouring forth...fruits and
dates and pomegranates...." In 756 Prince Abd-al-Rahman, who had
escaped massacre when his dynasty was overthrown in Syria,
planted his capital at Cordoba on the fertile banks of the
Guadalquivir (from the Arabic al-wadi al-kabir, great river) in
Andalusia's heartland.
Under Abd-al-Rahman III and his successors, 150 years later,
Cordoba blossomed into a metropolis of half a million with,
according to contemporary chroniclers, 21 suburbs, 500 mosques,
300 public baths, 70 libraries, and miles of paved, lamp-lighted
streets. The largest city in western Europe, Cordoba stood with
Baghdad and Constantinople as one of the great cultural centers
of the world.
Cordoba's pride today is its venerable Mezquita, or mosque,
which in 1986 celebrated its 1,200th anniversary. Begun by the
first Abd-al-Rahman, it was enlarged and embellished to become
what is considered today the epitome of Moorish architecture.
From its quiet Patio of the Orange Trees, past fountains
where the faithful once performed their ablutions, I entered the
600-by-450-foot shrine, rivaling in size Islam's holiest in
Mecca. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I wandered
through the forest of jasper, marble, and porphyry columns, some
850, that support the tracery of double-tiered Moorish arches.
Nineteen doorways, before they were walled up, let in light and
air and extended the theme of the columns to the rows of orange
trees in the courtyard.
My footsteps led me to the mosque's domed mihrab, or prayer
niche. From behind its scalloped marble arches, amid the
splendid mosaics designed by Byzantine carftsmen, Cordoba's
rulers once led Friday prayers. Flowing Arabic calligraphy
adorning the walls exalted Cordoba: "...praise to Allah who led
us to this place...."
In the dim vastness I hardly noticed the cathedral. After
the Christian Reconquest, Catholics reconsecrated the Mezquita as
a church and for 300 years held services there. Then the clergy
persuaded Emperor Charles V to raise a cathedral in its midst,
despite strong protests from city leaders. Later, inspecting the
baroque incursion, Charles confessed disappointment: "By
installing something that is commonplace, you have destroyed what
was once unique."
From smaller parish churches issue the spirit and spectacle
of Cordoba's Semana Santa, or Holy Week. Thousands of Cordobans
line narrow streets and wrought-iron balconies to watch the
processions. Their religious intensity reflects the passion that
drove medieval Christians to oust their Moorish occupiers.
Twenty churches participate, circulating about 50 pasos, or
platforms, set with ornate statuary. "Different scenes each day
recall the Madonna, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the
Burial," explained a Cordoban friend, Luis-Eduardo Prieto Rico.
We finished our fried squid and garlic shrimp at El Triunfo, a
small restaurant near the Mezquita, then wedged into the throng
at the Plaza de las Tendillas to witness one of the processions.
To the beat of distant drums, the solemn escort arrived:
files of 200 or more penitentes, ghostlike in long robes cinched
with ropes and tall pointed hoods. Most carried long flickering
tapers or swung smoking silver censers; others bent under heavy
oaken crosses. Behind marched women of the parish veiled in
black lace mantillas. The drums grew louder as the paso appeared
from around the corner, in a blaze of light, swaying with the
measured footsteps of some 30 bearers straining beneath it. The
life-size Virgin sat draped in lace and rich brocades above banks
of fresh white roses that perfumed the air. A hundred enormous
candles set her silver halo aglitter and caught the sparkle of
tears on her radiant face.
The drums stopped, the paso paused, and suddenly a woman in
the crowd broke into song, a passionate saeta, the flamenco hymn
for which Andalusia is famous. The words were Spanish, but the
mournful melody echoed Arab and Gypsy origins:
Like the precious stones of a jeweler,
The stunning solo had its effect; throughout the applauding
crowd around me I saw many eyes moisten as drums took up the beat
and the paso moved on into the night.
The quiet cool of morning is the time to stroll Cordoba.
After a strong, black cafe solo at the Bar Mezquita, I followed
one of the twisting cobblestone lanes that fan outward from the
mosque through the medieval Muslim quarter, some so narrow that a
stretched handkerchief spans their walls. They lead to small
plazas, some holding statues of Cordoba's famous sons: the Roman
Seneca; Arab philosophers Ibn Hazm and Ibn Rushd; Maimonides,
major Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages; the 15th-century
general, Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, "El Gran Capitan";
Manolete, greatest of bullfighters.
Potted geraniums and carnations splash color on the tidy
white-washed houses that line the lanes. On many of the massive
wooden doors, as on those in Fez or Damascus, hang heavy iron
knockers in the form of a hand--the hand of the Prophet's
daughter, Fatima, according to one legend; another says the
fingers recall the Five Pillars of Islam: the creed, prayers,
alms, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
As in Muslim cities, a Cordoba house acknowledges the
outside world only begrudgingly through small windows, iron-
grilled and shuttered, turning its attention inward to the center
of family life, the patio. At Number 8, Pozo de Cueto, near the
river, I got out my key and let myself in.
"I cannot imagine a house without a patio," said my
landlady, Senora Antonia Ortiz de Marin, bringing coffee and
small glasses of amontillado, the local dry sherry. Now that the
children were grown, she and her husband, a retired policeman,
rent rooms during crowded Holy Week.
"How else, in such a small space, could we have had a
private garden in the city?" she said. "A safe place for the
children to play?"
Our patio was typical. Entered through a Moorish arch, it
was paved with arabesque tile work and softened by flowers, an
herb garden, and orange trees set in pots around a fountain. I
recalled that one of the Arabic words for home was muskin, from
the same root as sakun, peace. Even in the heart of the city, my
room looked down on a tranquil world of its own, under a private
square of blue sky.
Of the extensive royal architecture that once crowded Muslim
Cordoba, little survives. By far the grandest palace, a
Versailles of its time, was built by Abd-al-Rahman III five miles
northwest of the city at the foot of the Sierra Morena. For 25
years, until its completion in 961, he lavished on it a third of
the royal budget, naming it Madinat al-Zahra, the City of Zahra,
after a favorite concubine. Under his son and successor, al-
Hakam II, it grew into a small city; double walls, each as thick
as 15 feet, enclosed half a square mile. According to one
account Hakam's family, his generals and viziers, scribes and
translators, workmen and shopkeepers gave it a population of
20,000. The royal bodyguard added 12,000; the harem, 6,000 more.
"There was nothing visible when archaeologists arrived in
1910," said Antonio Vallejo, director of excavations, when we
walked together down the terraced palace grounds. There were
cypress and olive trees, a litter of fallen columns and capitals.
"Foundations outline the caliph's mansion, the mosque, 400
houses, the ancient market, aqueducts, formal gardens, pools--
even a zoo," Vallejo said. "We have restored one of the
buildings, the magnificent audience hall."
Amid its tattered splendors, where Hakam once received
embassies from Europe and the East, I conjured up scenes from the
"Arabian Nights" of turbaned notables and veiled dancing girls.
Suddenly my daydreaming was interrupted by a vision coming
through an archway, a tall Moor in white robes and pointed black
beard.
"Salaam Alaykum!" he bowed, "I am Hakam II--of course, just
for today." Francisco Bernal Garcia, an actor from a local
troupe, smiled. We were soon joined by a dozen of his
colleagues, taking their places on thick cushions set on
sumptuous carpets in the center of the marble floor. While a
television crew arranged its lighting, several hundred ten-year-
olds filed noisily into the chamber, girls costumed in makeshift
veils and slippers, the boys sporting burnt-cork goatees and
cardboard scimitars.
"We are reenacting Caliph Hakam's reception for emissaries
of King Ordona IV of Leon in 961," Francisco explained. "It is
part of a program to bring history to life for Cordoba's
schoolchildren."
But Madinat al-Zahra underscores another of history's
lessons: Even great powers are mortal.
Barely 50 years after its completion, the great palace lay
sacked and leveled, as the caliphate dissolved into a score of
bickering city-states. Amid the chaos that followed, many Muslim
rulers became clients of northern Christian princes, and
religious boundaries often became obscured. The famous Christian
knight El Cid (his nickname derives from the Arabic al-sayyid,
lord) changed his allegiance with the gusty political winds, now
to fight for the emir of Zaragoza, now to help a Christian king,
now to rule over Muslim Valencia.
The fall of Toledo drove Spanish Muslims to desperation.
They sent for armies of the Berber fundamentalists, the
Almoravids, who poured in from Morocco to stem the Christian
advance. But they soon seized power for themselves to unite
Muslim Spain with North Africa, which they ruled from their
capital in Marrakech. Gradually these desert warriors succumbed
to Moorish luxury, and half a century later another wave of North
African puritans, the Almohads, crossed the strait to supplant
them. In 1170 the Almohad ruler, Yaqub Yusuf, moved the Spanish
capital to Seville.
Sweeping views of Seville can still be enjoyed from Sultan
Yaqub's minaret, one of three sister towers he commissioned. Two
others survive in Rabat and Marrakech. From 20 stories up the
eye pans from the red-tiled roofs of Seville's medieval hub to
the distant rim of modern apartment blocks and factories and
beyond to the glowing countryside that nurtures Andalusia's
largest city.
When Christians destroyed Yaqub's mosque, they spared his
minaret and topped it with a belfry and the giant bronze
weathervane, or giralda, that gives it its popular name. Today
La Giralda serves as the steeple for the largest Gothic cathedral
in Europe.
Seville, in one word, defines Spain. That is the reason why
Bizet chose it as the setting for his opera "Carmen." And why
romantics like myself are drawn back--to the spectacle of the
bullfight at the Plaza de la Maestranza, where glittering
matadors perfect their cruel ballet of bravery and death. Or to
clap our hands to the rhythms of guitars and staccato heels
during a Gypsy lament:
A woman is like your shadow.
Or even join the sweater-and-jeans set at a noisy cafe flamenco
in Triana to whirl through a sevillanas, the folk dance popular
now all over Spain. Or just relax by the whispering fountains
under the peach trees in the gardens of the Alcazar.
Within its high walls the Christian king Pedro the Cruel
erected in the 1350s his own palace. He imported Muslim
architects from Granada, whose designs reflect the cultural
overlap of the times. Escutcheons on the walls of the royal
bedchamber feature the lion rampant of Leon and the towered
castle of Castile emblazoned with Arabic script:
Glory to our sultan Don Pedro.
"Seville's Alcazar is the finest example of Mudejar
architecture in Spain," curator Dr. Rafael Manzano said. "But it
is more than just a museum. It is the royal residence whenever
the King visits Seville."
Dr. Manzano recounted the legend of the Alcazar's peach
trees. "A romantic 11th-century ruler, al-Mutamid, also famed as
a poet, married a northern beauty. Although happy as queen, she
pined for the snows of her native hills. So al-Mutamid, it is
told, ordered the gardens of the Alcazar planted with wild peach
trees. Each spring, to this day, they bank the gardens with
snow-white blossoms."
Against a backdrop of the Sierra Nevada's eternal snows, the
drama of the Moors was to play itself out. When Cordoba fell to
the Christian Reconquista in 1236 and Seville 12 years later,
Muslim lands shrank to a 200-mile-long bastion in Spain's rugged
southeast, curving from Gibraltar to past Almeria. Here sultans
of the Nasrid dynasty ruled from their stronghold at Granada.
From 1248 to 1354 they raised their masterpiece, a palace-
fortress, the Alhambra.
Today from its high hill, Sabika, the clay-red Alhambra
(from the Arabic al-hamra, the red one) looks down on two
Granadas. One is the sloping Albaicin quarter--austere,
labyrinthine, Moorish. The second is the newer city--noisy,
businesslike, baroque--that sweeps along broad boulevards out
onto the Vega plain. From the rooftop of his restored Moorish
house in the heart of the Albaicin, Professor Miguel Jose Hagerty
and I enjoyed a sweeping view of the Alhambra. Born in Chicago
to Irish parents with gypsy roots, Professor Hagerty graduated
from Notre Dame, where he majored in Islamic Studies. He now
teaches Arabic and lectures on Arabic poetry at the University of
Granada.
"Arab Spain nurtured scores of poets. Many of its rulers--
al-Mutamid and Abd-al-Rahman I, for instance--were poets in their
own right," Professor Hagerty said. "Strict Islamic tradition
discourages the making of 'graven images,' so painting and
sculpture never flourished among the Moors. Instead they
channeled creative energy into language. With its wealth of
vocabulary, its sonorous sounds, its flowing calligraphy, Arabic
is well suited to the task.
"Little has been translated," he said, but he recalled lines
that survived the journey into Spanish and English. From Ibn al-
Sabuni:
I present you a precious mirror,
Then he countered those lines with a stanza by another Sevillian
romantic, Ibn Ammar:
Slaves in the realm of love
Professor Hagerty and I climbed to the Alhambra. The lofty
mansions of the Nasrid sultans make up the most visited site in
Spain. It is a miracle that they survived the centuries. They
were defiled by squatters, eroded by neglect, brutalized by
Charles V's massive Renaissance addition--a brick among lace
pillows--and confounded by misbegotten restorations.
Nevertheless the Alhambra endures, a sublime Oriental meld of
artifact and nature.
Here the walls themselves speak--if you know Arabic. We
traced out poems in the supple calligraphy of the friezes,
archways, and fountains. In the upper gardens we found a couplet
by Ibn al-Yayyab that praised Allah for providing the sparkling
palace with
...its light of virtue
A marble fountain bragged,
No greater mansions I see than mine
Arabic poetry was crafted, above all, for recital and song.
Its lyric forms, zajal and muwashshah, some say, inspired the
first ballads of the European troubadors. The soul-stirring
adagios of cante jondo, the deep song of Gypsy flamenco, still
trace moods and rhythms to this lost age.
Jaime Heredia, a local flamenco singer, told me: "A Moroccan
orchestra recently came to Granada to join us in concert. It was
fantastico. We were up half the night playing encores."
I had missed the concert, but in Fez and Tetuan I had heard
that music, the same melodies that once entertained courtiers in
the Alhambra, played and sung by the descendants of Spanish
Muslims expelled during the Inquisition centuries ago. They
still convene regularly to keep alive their musiqa al-
andalusiyyah.
"We had language problems, of course," Jaime said. "But we
agreed on one thing: Musically we were brothers."
Throughout Spain today the art of flamenco is being
threatened by its commercialization in floor shows called
tablaos; these count on dramatic lighting, amplifiers, and
curvaceous dancers to attract larger audiences. Sacrificed in
the process is flamenco's hallmark, its duende: soul. But a
night owl can still sample flamenco puro when Gypsies gather at
Jaime Heredia's bar, La Fuente, in Granada's Albaicin for a misa
de doce, literally a "midnight mass," slang for a flamenco bash.
Well after midnight young Bautista arrived with his guitar,
the sign for Jaime to close up shop and aficionados to gather. A
small, broad-shouldered man in sweater and jeans, Heredia didn't
look "flamenco." Where was the flat hat, the bolero jacket, the
high-heeled boots? No matter. The guitar starts to ripple.
Snapping fingers pick up the beat of a fandanguillo, and Jaime's
voice lights up the darkness:
A chorus of children's laughter
The guitar fires another fusillade of minor chords, stopping
everyone in mid-drink. Jaime presses his hands together. Sweat
gathers on his brow, veins on his neck bulge, and the powerful
voice again stabs the room, a "deep song" of Gypsy anguish. The
words, stylized, blurred, are lost to my untrained ear, but
closing my eyes, I hear an Egyptian chanting from his minaret.
What about the lyrics? I pressed Jaime when the session
finally broke up. It was daylight now, and regular breakfast
customers were already demanding their coffee and brandy.
"Not easy, senor," Jaime apologized. "The song is about
love and death and God--ah, but no one could understand who was
not suckled at a Gypsy mother's breast."
The remote villages of the Alpujarras, halfway up the
southern flank of Mulhacen, Spain's highest peak, were the last
domains of the Moors in Spain. Many towns like Beninar,
Almocita, Bubion, and Mecina Alfahar still wear their Arabic
names, as does Mount Mulhacen--and the Alpujarras itself.
The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella sealed the fate of
the faltering Granada sultans. Catholic Spain, finally united,
continued to force the Muslims toward the sea, town by town. In
1492, the same year they launched Christopher Columbus on his
historic voyage, Their Catholic Majesties rode into Granada to
preside over the abdication of the last Moorish ruler, Muhammad
Abu-Abdullah--Boabdil, as the Spanish call him.
On the way to the Alpujarras, I paused above Granada at the
pass called Suspiro del Moro, the Sigh of the Moor. It was here
Boabdil stopped to look back and shed a tear over his lost
kingdom. According to legend his domineering mother, Aisha,
berated him: "Fitting you cry like a woman over what you could
not defend like a man." For a century more, Muslims held the
Alpujarras's rocky folds and raided into the Christian lowlands,
often igniting rebellions, until the last of the Moors were
driven into exile in 1609.
The autumn day breaks late over the valley's brim at mile-
high Bubion, waking the village slowly. I rubbed my hands
together against the chill as I left my small pension. The first
wisps of smoke drifted from conical chimneys atop slab roofs that
staircase down the hillside toward the church square.
From nearby Capileira I set off on horseback with a farmer,
Antonio Jimenez Estevez. We rode upward over narrow terraces
through the last warm colors of autumn--orchards of red-leafed
cherry trees and golden chestnut, bordered by yellow poplars and
evergreen. For a while we followed the gravel way, Europe's
highest motor road, that leads to 11,000-foot Pico de Veleta;
then we turned off along a medieval acequia, or irrigation canal.
It brought us, after a mile or so, to a stone reservoir called,
in Spanish, an alberca. The old watering system--and its Arabic-
derived nomenclature--was still in use.
"This is one of three canals on this side of the Poqueira
Valley built by the Moors," Antonio said. "Twenty years ago,
when I was a boy, we still ran water mills on this one." Now
there was also a modern dam, a small hydroelectric plant, a
larger canal.
We crossed a stream and walked our horses to the top of a
rocky bluff. Beneath a sweeping snowscape, we came to the stone
hut that serves as summer camp for the Jimenez family's upper
fields. We sat under a walnut tree on the edge of the threshing
circle while Antonio's young nephew, Jose Luis, hitched a team of
mules to a wooden plow. Fall plowing would be the last chore
before closing camp for the winter. A cousin waved a loud "
Hola!" as he set off walking, in a cloud of dust and tinkling of
bells, toward Mulhacen with the family's 400 sheep. Antonio's
uncle Juan brought us local white wine, slices of the air-dried
ham for which the Alpujarras is renowned, and a bowl of pears.
"Our terraces are small, the soil grudging, the season
short," Antonio said. "Most of the men leave the Alpujarras to
make their fortunes. I spent seven years in the orange groves of
Valencia.
"But I am back now to stay. Life is too hectic, too crowded
on the plains. This is home."
The quiet crags of the Alpujarras look down on another
world, lying only a dozen crow-flight miles away. An hour of
hairpin turns dropped me from an eagle's next--alpine,
traditional, and poor--to the Mediterranean--tropical,
cosmopolitan, and booming. If the Alpujarras speaks of the past,
the Costa del Sol plays the Spain of tomorrow.
At his office at the Costa del Sol Tourist Board, promotion
manager Diego Franco said, "Historically, our two greatest
enemies were the sun and the sea. One cursed us with a
blistering climate; the other brought pirates." I had noticed
that atalayas, or watchtowers, still guard every jut of land
along the coast and that the older towns stood well into the
cooler, protected foothills.
"Today, sun and sea are our stock-in-trade," he said. "Last
year 50 million visitors came to Spain, one for every Spaniard
and then some. It's an invasion--but a peaceful one."
The coast from Torremolinos to Estepona has crystallized
into a 45-mile-long tourist metropolis: hotels, condominiums,
restaurants, cafes, discos, amusement parks, casinos, boutiques.
Many foreigners who come for a holiday decide to stay. An
estimated one million pensioners from Great Britain alone have
bought a piece of the Spanish sun.
At the other end of the scale stands Marbella. I checked in
at the trendy Puente Romano Hotel, hoping for some cultural
exchange with its jet-set regulars--the Countess Gunilla von
Bismarck, perhaps, or Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Sean
Connery, Christina Onassis. Now, during the low season, I found
tranquillity instead--in an Arabian setting. My whitewashed
stucco villa opened on a beachfront oasis, where a burbling
stream flowed under olive and lemon trees past stands of bamboo
and camellias, all shaded by palms that dropped ripe dates on my
balcony.
"Allah akbar! Allah akbar!" The familiar call to prayer
drifted in from the mosque across the street, Mezquita del Rey
Abdul Aziz, built by Saudis who play or invest here and dedicated
to their founding king.
All over Marbella and nearby Puerto Banus are other signals
that modern-day Moors have joined the "peaceful invasion"; signs
in flowing Arabic script point you to the Lebanese Delicatessen,
the Banco Saudi-Espanol, the Near East Insurance Agency, to Arab
doctors, a Muslim cemetery.
At Puerto Banus, Syrian-born Ahmed Mahayni, sales manager
for Gray d'Albion, showed me the company's domed and turreted
condominiums--a half-mile-long complex finished in marble and
gold-tinted tile and commanding a view of the harbor's gleaming
pleasure flotilla. I leaned toward Unit 507, a multi-level,
four-bath, two-pool, hanging-garden extravaganza. But I had to
admit that, at 1.5 million dollars, it was too tall for my purse.
"We have smaller apartments, some for as little as
$270,000," Mr. Mahayni said.
Near the Andalucia Plaza Casino, I sipped coffee with
Mokhles "George" El-Khoury, a Christian Arab who moved to Puerto
Banus from Beirut to run a building-management firm.
"Andalusia reminds me of Lebanon--without the wars and
politics," George said. "You have the mountains, the sea, the
fine climate of olives and palm trees. The Spanish are a warm
people, not stiff and formal like many Europeans. The food is
much like ours, so is the shape of the houses and the towns. To
an Arab--well, Andalusia feels like home."
Nowhere is this more true than in the old Muslim capital of
Cordoba, where I spent my last Spanish days. I was awakened
there early one morning by the clatter of workmen at the Mezquita
across the street. From my window I watched a burly stonemason
score a half-ton block with his screeching power saw, while
another drove wedges into the kerf to split it off square. On
wooden rollers they sweated it into a gap in the timeworn wall.
Thus, for more than a thousand years, have Cordobans furbished
their beloved Mezquita, first as mosque, then as cathedral.
No other artifact more richly evokes the golden age of the
Moors, a stormy millennium that dovetailed two faiths, two
cultures, two continents. Throughout, while king and sultan
fought bitterly for the hand of Spain, ordinary life prospered as
Arab, Visigoth, Castilian, and Berber worked together to forge
the brilliant civilization that helped lead Europe out of the
Dark Ages.
Ultimately the cross replaced the crescent. The Moors
themselves faded into history, leaving behind their scattered
dreams. But Spain and the West stand forever in their debt.
courtesy of: http://www.millersv.edu/~columbus
National Geographic
Vol. 174, No. 1, July 1988.
The tears that flood your lovely eyes....
Pursued, it runs away,
Ignored, it follows you....
Allah aid and protect him.
Behold there the beauty that consumes me
O furtive love, your reflection is more yielding
And better keeps its promises....
Are the only truly free men.
And the peace of its shadows....
No equal in East or West.
I had to agree. Even in the oil-rich Arab countries of today
architects with unlimited budgets have yet to match the Alhambra.
Flows past an unseen river
Bittersweet strains recall a former love.