Andalus

by Jason Webster

  We met up every day as we tried over and again to find him work – driving to other farms, calling friends, checking the small ads in Levante over glasses of cold horchata. I had been the one to start losing heart, yet he had never for a moment doubted we would succeed.

  ‘I trust you, Jasie. Really. Everything will be fine, I know.’

  Whether it was being in love or just his nature, I couldn’t tell. If anything, though, it was, perversely, this unyielding positive attitude in him that made me have doubts: I had yet to see a darker side to him, and when it came it would catch me unawares.

  The obvious way to start was by heading south. I felt certain that Moorish culture had seeped into all Spain in some form or other, but in the south and Andalusia – the region whose name derived from Al-Andalus – the influence was more immediate. This was home to the Alhambra and the Great Mosque at Cordoba – the two greatest architectural legacies of Spanish Islam. Skin tone was generally darker, hair blacker, and complicated geometrical Islamic design work could be found on everything from bathroom tiles to stickers on car bumpers. Once I’d soaked up as much as I could in Andalusia and honed my senses, I planned to continue around the peninsula by passing into Portugal, returning to Spain through the central plains of Castille before heading for Catalonia: I already had leads that suggested this far northeastern corner might prove fruitful in my search.

  Orchards of short bushy green trees peppered with bright oranges rushed past on either side of the road. To the east sat the town of Manises, today the home of Valencia airport, but still the capital of the region’s ceramic industry, as it had been since the Arabs introduced complex lustre techniques a thousand years before. The popes and kings of Europe had once been proud to own plates and jugs crafted by the Moors of Valencia, with their typical decoration patterns based on wild bryony.

  ‘They lack our faith,’ Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros once said of the Moorish craftsmen, ‘but we lack their works.’

  ‘All these villages,’ I said to my silent passenger, trying to start conversation, ‘used to be inhabited by your ancestors. Look, there: Aldaia. From al-day’a in Arabic – village or farm.’

  He said nothing, just drawing on his cigarette and nodding to show he was listening.

  ‘Moors stayed on in many areas for hundreds of years after the Reconquest,’ I said. ‘Especially in the countryside.’

  The Kingdom of Granada – and with it Al-Andalus as a whole – had come to an end in the late fifteenth century. The Spanish kingdoms of Castille and Aragon were united by the marriage of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, and a final attack was launched on the Moorish south. After a ten-year fight, the city of Granada finally fell on 2 January 1492. In August of the same year all Jews were expelled from Spain. Two months later Columbus touched land on the other side of the Atlantic. Many Muslims stayed on in Spain rather than emigrate, living for the most part in agricultural areas such as the Alpujarras valley south of Granada, or in Valencia and Aragón. Persecuted by the Inquisition, in 1521 the Moriscos, ‘little Moors’ as they were then called, were forced to convert en masse to Christianity and banned from reading or writing Arabic.

  The irony was not lost on me of our trying to find farm work for Zine now, when for their final years in Spain the Moriscos had been permitted to do little else. Not much had really changed in four centuries.

  ‘What happened?’ Zine asked, looking out of the window. It was the first thing he’d said all day.

  ‘Many remained Muslim in secret,’ I said. ‘But there was a rebellion. Moors living near Granada rose up in 1568. Sparked off the most savage European war that century.’

  Eventually, some forty years later in 1609, the king decided to kick them all out – perhaps 300,000 or perhaps three million. No-one was really sure. Almost nine hundred years after the first Muslims crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, Spain once more became ‘pure’.

  ‘They were actually thinking of castrating them until that point to keep their numbers down,’ I said.

  ‘Like animals.’

  The two religious communities had become polarized in the years just before the expulsion: in Valencia in the late 1500s condemned Moors were given the choice of being executed as Muslims or Christians. If they chose the former they were taken down to the river and stoned to death. If they chose to convert, they would be hanged in the usual way in the market square. Opting for the quicker way to die, many Muslims went through the motions of turning Catholic, only to renounce the faith of their executors just as the noose was being placed around their neck. Christian onlookers grew wise to this, though, and as the condemned man publicly declared himself a Muslim with cries of ‘Allah’ and ‘Muhammad’, they unleashed a hail of stones and rocks at him. Many spectators were hurt or even killed in the mêlée. By the next morning, however, not a trace of the riot would be left, as Moriscos would have come overnight and picked up every stone to take them away for safekeeping – sacred relics of their brother’s ‘martyrdom’.

  ‘Not everyone thought the expulsion of the Moriscos was a good idea, though,’ I continued. I decided, given Zine’s low mood, that it might be better to keep the execution story to myself. ‘Cardinal Richelieu described it as “the most barbarous act in human annals”.’

  ‘Richelieu? He was French.’

  ‘There were Spaniards against it as well. Just a few years beforehand some Valencian aristocrat even built a secret mosque for Muslims working for him, saying they should pretend to be Christians but remain Muslim on the inside. They had to pretend not to speak Arabic, and some were even arrested just for eating couscous.’

  ‘Try eating my couscous: it’ll put you in hospital,’ he said. ‘Seriously,’ he went on as I laughed, ‘I’m the worst cook I know. Even Lucía said so.’

  He fell silent again at the mention of her name, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray below the radio and immediately taking another out to light.

  I wanted to ask him how they’d left it. It was becoming obvious they’d had an argument, but it was unclear if they’d finished for good or were planning on seeing each other again. Was he just annoyed, or was I with someone suffering from a broken heart? I decided to wait. He might tell me himself anyway.

  We drove up into the coastal mountains as our journey continued south. Játiva, home of the first paper mill in Europe, came into view on the other side of the sun-filled valley. It was a small town, concentrated around the base of a rocky hill surrounded by pine woods and more fruit trees. Paper-making had reached here in the tenth century after the Arabs learned it from Chinese artisans on capturing Samarkand in Afghanistan, and most of the first paper to reach Christian hands had been exported from this very town. Cheaper and easier to produce than papyrus and vellum, paper, which was then made from straw and rice, was exported to Christian territories from the twelfth century, although it took a while to catch on. What had made it popular, though, was the invention of printing techniques: ‘When in the fifteenth century book production was commercialized by the introduction of mechanical apparatus, paper became an essential material in the production of machine-made books,’ one historian, A. H. Christie, had written. Without paper, brought by the Moors to Europe, the printing press would never have got off the ground.

  Strangely, printing took much longer to establish itself in the Islamic world, where the work of the scribe was faithfully preserved for much longer. Yet it was thanks to this innovation that books and learning were eventually able to spread to a greater audience in the West.

  Játiva was a picturesque yet forgotten place, now. A church, a cluster of old houses, a discotheque in an abandoned olive-oil press. Nothing showed where the paper factory had once stood. The ruins of an old Arab citadel watched over the lush valley, the only reminder of the key role the town had once played.

  The great Moorish poet Ibn Khafaja, born in the neighbouring town of Alzira, had often idolized this garden landscape:

  The stars shone there like live embers,

>   The night’s breath perfumed with ambergris:

  Fragrant orange blossom mingled with rose

  Like a sweet white mouth smiling as it kisses a cheek.

  We drove on, into the mountain range that lay before us like a wall: a narrow melting road threading over the peaks our passage to the south.

  WINDMILLS

  ‘Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim.’

  Pedro grinned as he opened the gate for us to enter.

  ‘Good to see you again, mi querido Watson.’

  He used his usual name for me, confusing my surname with that of Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick. The house looked unchanged: the same whitewashed walls, green shutters and jasmine-scented garden where we had sat in wrought-iron chairs when I’d first arrived in Spain ten years before. I had fond memories of this house – Pedro had taken me under his wing back then and I had him to thank not only for my connection with the country, but in many ways for the journey I was making now: he had been the first to plant the idea in my mind as one Arabist to another that Moorishness ran deep in Spain, and he seemed to be engaged in a personal campaign to hold on to as much of it as possible before it disappeared. ‘In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ he would mutter whenever we sat down to eat. A Spanish Arabist and a church-going professor of Islamic philosophy, he was as happy reading the Qur’an as the Bible, and had never been easy to pigeon-hole.

  From the family-run restaurant near by came the warm lingering smell of earlier lunches: fried garlic, prawns, artichokes, and the most characteristic Spanish cooking smell of all, grilled red peppers – a sweet, smoky reminder of the Moors who had first made them popular. Behind the house the pomegranate trees were in bloom, their deep-orange flowers burning among the dark-green leaves, while at the front palms towered high above the flat terrace roof. Pedro and I had often spent evenings watching the stars up there: the azotea. It had been the first Spanish word I’d learnt the Arabic etymology for: al-suth, ‘roof’.

  Yet the surroundings had changed since I had last visited. It had been a quiet, under-developed area reached along dirt roads with empty, stony fields stretching for miles on all sides. Dotted here and there were isolated, understated villas, tall pine trees, or the occasional goatherd with his animals, and there was a fine view of the sea. But now there were rows upon rows of tower blocks and ‘chalets’ with underground car parks and communal swimming pools. The little track in front of Pedro’s house had yet to be tarmacked, but everywhere there were razor-sharp white lines, STOP signs, paved sidewalks and black ribbons of roads to provide easy access for the commuters who had turned this into another suburb of the ever-sprawling city on the coast. The patch of land between Pedro’s house and his sister’s, like so many others in Albufereta (Arabic: al-buhaira – the little sea), where our little white cat used to hunt sparrows in the mornings, had been filled in with a brown, concrete condominium. Cars were parked in a tight row along one edge of the road, while a sign had already been put up in the field opposite giving notice of the building project soon to start work there – more houses, with more underground car parks and communal swimming pools. We had always expected this to happen, if not actually said so. And now it had. Pedro’s house stood in the middle of it all, an ark preserving something of other times.

  ‘You’ve brought your Moroccan friend,’ Pedro smiled as we stepped inside. ‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ he said to Zine. ‘Welcome. I’ve just made some tea.’ The pencil moustache above his top lip, a touch greyer these days, quivered as he spoke.

  ‘Hola,’ I said, kissing him on the cheeks.

  ‘Allah,’ he said, shaking Zine’s hand. ‘Have you realized every day millions of Spaniards and South Americans greet each other like Muslims?’

  ‘Is that where hola comes from?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought you already knew.’

  We skirted around the rosemary bushes to the jasmine enclave at the heart of his garden, and sat down at the table already laid out with a pewter teapot and china cups and saucers. Afternoon tea was one of the major rituals in the Pedro household – something he’d picked up from living in London years before. But he always made sure there was a Moorish flavour to it: a tangled bunch of fresh mint from the garden placed inside the pot, and a hookah lit and ready to smoke by the side of his chair.

  ‘Allah. Hola,’ I said to myself. Like ole or hala, hola sounded as though it came from the same word. The common way of pronouncing ‘Allah’ in Arabic was to stress the ‘l’ sound in such a way that the initial ‘a’ sounded more like an ‘o’ or a ‘u’, as in ‘ulla’. The words sounded very similar.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Zine. ‘They’re the same. I hear people in the street saying Allah all the time. Allah! Allah!’ he called out, pretending to wave at imaginary passers-by.

  ‘The Arabs ruled here for eight hundred years,’ Pedro butted in. ‘Some of us still haven’t left.’

  He drew long and deeply on the hookah sitting on the floor by his chair, a hot, bubbling sound filling the gap in the conversation for a second before he blew out a long slow stream of smoke through his mouth and nose, scattering the mosquitoes that had gathered around the bare lightbulb hanging above his head.

  ‘Do you remember Kenneth Clark?’ he went on. ‘Wrote a book called Civilisation.’ He explained that when the documentary version was shown on Spanish television it had to be pulled halfway through, as Clark announced that Spain had done ‘little or nothing to enlarge the human mind’.

  ‘This is the country that introduced Aristotle and higher mathematics to Europe, and yet this man could say that in full confidence,’ Pedro said. This was a common trap to fall into: of seeing only Christian Spain. He laughed.

  ‘Averroes, Maimonides and Ibn al-Arabi were all Spanish, Watson. Three of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages. Until as recently as only twenty years ago it was as though they never existed. Or only belonged to them – the Arabs. Yet the influence of these wise men can still be felt today.’

  Without any prompting, Pedro had slipped effortlessly into his theme; it was as though he could read my mind. This was exactly what I hoped to find out more about.

  ‘So how is this influence still felt today?’ I asked.

  ‘Europe – and Spain,’ he explained, ‘see themselves as the product of Judeo-Christian culture built on Classical foundations.’ It was a familiar image, one that had been reinforced by the Renaissance and which perhaps only today had begun to weaken – the Greek and Latin worlds had essentially combined with Christian beliefs and the result was what we termed the West. There was a gaping hole in this picture, though.

  ‘The debt to the Islamic world is greater than most people are aware.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Zine.

  ‘Europe was lifted out of the Dark Ages precisely because Muslims, Christians and Jews integrated in Spain,’ Pedro carried on. These three religions had been at each other’s throats since before the Crusades. You just had to look at the situation today, with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, war against Al-Qa’ida and US troops swarming down on the Gulf. Things hadn’t changed, it seemed.

  ‘Yet a great moment in human history took place right here in Spain when they got together.’ It had begun in the late eleventh century. Christian forces in the north of the peninsula took advantage of internal divisions within the Moorish state and launched a major push south, securing their first important victory with the conquest of Toledo, the former Visigothic capital, in 1085. This was in the years just before the first Crusade, and was the first significant episode in the Reconquest. Yet it also sparked off one of the most important periods of interchange between Christians, Muslims and Jews: after falling into Christian hands, Toledo became a major centre of translation into Latin of Arabic learning, and for the first time Europeans had access to works by Muslim mathematicians such as Al-Khwarizmi and polymaths such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna, as he was called in Europe, known for his writings on medicine and music). For the first time they could also rea
d Aristotle and Plato, whose books finally made it into the European lingua franca, having been translated two hundred years earlier from Greek into Arabic. This learning laid the groundwork for the later ‘rebirth’ of Europe.

  Having studied Islamic history, I knew something of what Pedro was saying. But few people at university had ever stressed its importance as he did. The Moors were often regarded as a detail in Spanish history – ‘important but not fundamental’. The Inquisition – the precursor to many of the acts of mass terror, racism and ethnic cleansing that marked the twentieth century – had done its best to wipe out the Jewishness and Moorishness of Spain: a continuation of the Reconquest on the home front once the military battles had been won. ‘Hearts and minds, they would call it today,’ Pedro said. Four hundred years after the Toledo experiment with intellectual diversity, a religiously unified society was deemed necessary for the new imperial state. Spain was expanding into America, it was the richest and most powerful country in Europe in the sixteenth century, yet it felt insecure: threatened both by Muslim Turks and by religious reformist movements in Europe. Spanish society itself, with its large Moorish and Jewish minorities and long tradition of liberal thought, could well prove to be the state’s worst enemy – a myriad of fifth columns waiting to be activated from the outside. Paranoia set in: all religious difference must be eradicated, free thinking snuffed out. And the instrument for doing this was the Inquisition, with its bonfires, instruments of torture and spreading of fear. Spain has been in denial ever since.