Andalus

by Jason Webster

  The Alhambra is much more than that, though, as most visitors will tell you. In fact for many, both Spanish and foreign, it symbolizes not only Al-Andalus but the very best of that period of the country’s history; it is one of the greatest buildings in the whole of Europe as well as in the Islamic world. Without the Alhambra the Moors might never have existed in most people’s imagination: like a fairy tale, it is, in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, a primer for a certain picture-language of the soul. And it is one of the few places I have been to that can effect profound changes on people, even from a distance: my own interests in Spain and the Middle East had been sparked as a teenager by a chance discovery of some old photographs of the Alhambra – five idle minutes that later went on to change the course of my life. Something about its form, the elegance of its needle-like paired columns reflected in rippling pools of water, its ceilings of fine sculpture like snow, secret archways and infinite Arabesques, appealed to an uncommon force within me, as if I were discovering a new pulse beating to a slower, deeper rhythm.

  ‘This place is timeless,’ an elderly Englishman once explained to me as we both sat trance-like in the Patio of Myrtle.

  The effect of the place was visible on people’s faces: even a small boy, clutching his soldier-doll and grizzling, quietened as he stepped out into the brilliant light of the square, sliding his feet on the marble-slab floor as he raised his eyes to the incomprehensible geometrical squiggles on the capitals above. Others would momentarily break away from the confines of their guided tour to stop and stare and absorb something of the place. Who could resist wanting to capture a spark of this light and take it back home with them?

  I had walked up the Cuesta de Gomérez at least a dozen times before on my way up to the Alhambra. Yet now, as before, the experience felt as new as if it were the first time. As we walked through the Pomegranate Gate, water gushed like a great sigh down cobbled gullies on either side of the road, while elms and horse chestnuts formed an arch of green above the path up the hill to the entrance. A sense of peace descended on us.

  ‘Al-hamra, Al-hamra,’ Zine began humming to himself as the gravel crunched beneath our feet. ‘There’s a song my mother used to sing about the Alhambra, but I can’t remember the words. Old people used to sing it. How it used to be ours, and now the faranj – the Franks – have taken it.’

  ‘Have you come to reconquer?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said with a smile, pretending the thought had never entered his mind, ‘maybe.’

  Powerful and beautiful, like so much to do with Moorish Spain, the Alhambra was also a bizarre mixture – a blend of styles and architecture from different ages, both Islamic and Christian. The fourteenth-century Nasrid palace, the most famous part of the castle complex, stood next to a fort built some three hundred years earlier, unremarkable save for its red colour and the views out over the city and the surrounding vega. Then there were the gardens of the Generalife stretching to a white summer palace further up on the hillside; the remains of the medina, the citadel, with the outlines of former streets and houses. And in the middle of it all a gigantic Renaissance bull-ring-like palace built by the Emperor Charles V. Heavy and squat, it sat as a permanent reminder of his grandparents’ conquest of the city for Christendom; a statement of superiority at the heart of a once-proud civilization that said, ‘This is ours.’ Where the Nasrid palace was elegant and delicate, this was massive and hard, the walls built of gargantuan rocks, while the iron rings bolted on the outside looked better suited for tying up elephants than horses. It was said that in a different context it might have been a attractive building, but here the contrast with the subtleties of its neighbour meant it clashed inharmoniously.

  Zine and I went straight into the Nasrid palace – with the millions of visitors passing through every year you were given a specific slot at which to arrive, and our allotted time was close to running out. The first room, the Mexuar audience hall, was full of tour groups peering up at the walls, where escutcheons of Charles V had been painted over the original Moorish walls. I pushed through and walked on to the outer courtyards, the gems of the place, leaving Zine to look around on his own.

  Passing through a Z-shaped corridor, I stepped out into the blinding white of the Patio of Myrtle, the light of the sun reflected from all quarters and shining with a sea-like brilliance. I stopped a second to allow my eyes to adjust, but as before when crossing into this space, there was a sense of entering a different world. Not just the light: some subtler change seemed to take place as well.

  Wa la ghalib illa Allah – No Conqueror but Allah. The Nasrid motto was repeated on the walls in sweeping Arabic script. The first Nasrid king, according to the legend, had been hailed as a hero when he returned from helping the Christian King Ferdinand III to take Seville in 1248: the price he had to pay for keeping Granada in Muslim hands. But Muhammad had protested when the people called him a conqueror. No, he said. There is no conqueror but God. And so the phrase had stuck. Ironic, perhaps, for a city best known for its eventual conquest by the Christians in 1492. Ferdinand and Isabel had worn Moorish clothes when they’d come to take possession of the palace.

  I sat down on the ledge of a doorway in a corner of the patio, watching the dog-fighting martins reflected in the dark waters of the pool below. People filtered in slowly with a look of awe and puzzlement on their faces. Such was the quality of time, you felt you could watch the whole world passing through if you sat there long enough, like an ancient tree in a long-established garden, with each new generation of children climbing its branches to reach for its fruits.

  It took me a moment to react when I saw Jasmin. Surely, I thought in my dream-like state, she was just one of several people I hadn’t seen for years who would eventually come through the doorway if I remained in that same spot. She stood close to me, her trademark dyed-red hair just as it had been in Egypt, wearing big sunglasses and plenty of lipstick. Ten years, and she hadn’t changed a bit.

  ‘Jasmin?’ I said, looking up at her.

  We embraced. A former student of Arabic with me at Alexandria University, she was staying with friends on the coast and had come up to Granada for the day. But the Alhambra had already worked its effect on her, for she seemed as unsurprised as I was that we should meet here. Such things were only normal in the Nasrid palace. Either that, or she was still the laid-back German hippie she had been before.

  Memories of when we had been in Egypt together flooded back. Strange that we should meet now as yet another Gulf War was getting under way. I remembered late-night parties at her flat, discussing the various ‘nightmare scenarios’ people had picked up during the course of the day. Would Saddam Hussein launch a chemical weapons attack? All-out Arab war might ensue. We could be on the threshold of Armageddon.

  After a few glasses of Omar Khayyam wine, or Egyptian gin that tasted of bananas, things could start looking pretty bleak. At some point in the evening Judith, another German girl, would sit in the corner of the room and start muttering drunkenly about the end of the world, while Peter would put on a Bob Dylan record, light his hookah and tell everyone quietly to ‘just relax’.

  ‘Relax?!’ Sara the Italian would screech. ‘How relax when you can be hit any minute by a squid?’

  ‘You mean Scud,’ Peter would say.

  ‘Squid. Scud. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Talk to your embassy if you’re worried.’

  ‘I can’t. They’ve already evacuated.’

  True to form, the Italian diplomatic corps had already retreated before a shot had been fired, leaving poor Sara on her own.

  ‘We get married, then you will have Egyptian passport,’ Ahmed would butt in. No-one was quite sure where Sara had picked Ahmed up from, but he was a permanent feature at Jasmin’s soirées, and plainly infatuated with Sara.

  ‘You must help me. She is of white flesh. How can I win her heart?’ he once whispered to me conspiratorially.

  I never found the courage to tell him she had a fiancé waiting
for her back in Genoa.

  The build-up to a war is a strange period. Growing tension and fear, obsessive following of the news, a sense that the weight of the world is forcing itself upon your own life. Uncertainty about what horrors, if any, are to come. It is like a black form of flirtation. The flip side of the coin. Part of me had even been excited back then at the thought of war. Wasn’t that why they existed in the first place? Because something in us sought to be pushed to the edge? It was a thrill. Deadly and horrific, but exciting.

  This time, though, it felt different. Perhaps because I had changed, or the general mood had. But the build-up to this war was infused with a sense of dread.

  We said our goodbyes and Jasmin walked on to see the rest of the palace.

  Zine joined me shortly after, and together we passed from the Patio of Myrtle to the Patio of Lions. It was the most photographed piece of Al-Andalus, the Mount Fuji of Moorish Spain, with its intricate icicle-like muqarnas ceilings and the central fountain encircled by twelve stone lions, looking like beasts from a medieval manuscript expanded into three dimensions.

  ‘This used to be the king’s harem,’ I told Zine with a grin.

  He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Ha! Imagine all those girls!’

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ I said under my breath. From his low point in Almería, he seemed to be fully back on form.

  ‘Who needs imagination anyway?’ he said. He took a look around at some of the female tourists dotted among the columns. I was glad to see Jasmin had already gone. It would be too much if he tried to move in on her.

  ‘This is a sacred place. For women only. They shouldn’t let men in here,’ he said with a mock frown. ‘Except me. Of course.’

  He began to move away, the look of a hunter searching for quarry shining in his black eyes.

  ‘Make love, not war, Jasie. Wow, look at her.’

  And he vanished into a crowd of Italian girls, their expensive leather rucksacks pulling white T-shirts tight across their young breasts.

  Nasrid Granada had been a hedonistic place, the final gasp of a culture that had often been on the more liberal side within the Islamic world. Al-Andalus, at least until the invasions of fundamentalist Almoravids and Almohads, rarely shied away from worldly enjoyment, and was far from strict in adhering to Islamic prohibitions on alcohol, for example. The Moors even introduced certain wine grape varieties still used today, such as verdejo in the Rueda area of Castilla-León.

  But Islam had never really had any ideas along the lines of ‘original sin’, and Granada in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, having freed itself from the austerity of the Berber Almohads and perhaps somehow aware that it was living the end of an era, hit the Epicurean accelerator big time.

  ‘In Nasrid Granada the use, and abuse, of wine and hashish along with prostitution and sodomy extended to all levels of society,’ one historian of Andalusi sexuality, Antonio Arjona Castro, had written. A culture that developed erection creams out of musk, mustard and the oil of lilies, or birds’ brains mixed with jasmine, was one that clearly paid these matters much thought. Al-Andalus had, in fact, produced some of the greatest medical minds of the Middle Ages, and sexuality was an area of study they applied themselves to rigorously. Although some might have baulked at their prescription of elephant dung as a contraceptive.

  The writings of these ancient medics were often illustrated with interesting case studies. Abd al-Rahman III’s prime minister and physician, Yahya ibn Ishaq, had once had to cure a peasant with a swollen penis.

  ‘Help me, O Minister, for I am about to die,’ the poor man said, bursting into his surgery.

  Ibn Ishaq saw that the man had a lump in his urethra. He called for a stone to be brought and placed it on the table, putting the man’s penis on top. He then smashed his fist down, squashing the penis like a pancake. The peasant duly fainted, but shortly afterwards pus began flooding out, then urine.

  ‘Go!’ said Ibn Ishaq when the man woke up. ‘You’re cured.’ The farmer thanked him. ‘But don’t go buggering your animals any more,’ the doctor added. ‘You got an oat from the beast’s faeces stuck down your hole – that’s what caused the lump and infection.’

  The man confessed his guilt, then returned to his village.

  Granada’s greatest sexologist was a man called Ibn al-Khatib, doctor, historian, poet and, like Ibn Ishaq before him, a politician. A man ahead of his time, he stressed the benefits of sex for overall health, and the importance of female sexual enjoyment.

  ‘A man must satisfy the needs of a woman more than his own,’ he wrote in the 1300s, ‘as it is common for women in this regard to be left with mere failure and disappointment, except, occasionally, by accident.’

  Ibn al-Khatib also handed down details of the sex lives of some of the rulers and high officials of Granada, usually satirizing their homosexuality. He recorded one of the poems of the time:

  O you who have made such fortune from your anus

  You got wealth through one door and forgot to close it.

  So much advantage did you wish to gain

  You can’t even push a finger through it now.

  From Ibn al-Khatib’s writing you got the impression that sexual corruption in the Granadan court was rife. The Sultan Ismail II was characterized as indolent and effeminate, with a penchant for dressing in women’s clothes, and always happy to accept sexual favours in lieu of debts owed to him.

  Ultimately, Ibn al-Khatib himself fell victim to court intrigues. In 1375 he was imprisoned after fleeing to Morocco, and strangled to death on the orders of his enemies. Yet his memory lived on in the Alhambra itself, whose walls were decorated with verses from some of his less bawdy poems.

  I was victorious over the beauties in grace and crown,

  Now the signs of Zodiac come down to me.

  It was hard to quantify what the legacy to modern Spain was, if any, of Moorish attitudes to sex. Sexual relations between the two communities had been commonplace: during the first centuries of Muslim rule, intermarriage had been the norm, many of the Arab and Berber arrivals settling down with local women. Yet in the latter period of Al-Andalus, strict laws had been drawn up in an attempt to prevent intercourse between Moors and Christians, both sides worried about their womenfolk being seduced by the others: death by stoning was the usual punishment. There were even cases of Christian prostitutes refusing to sleep with Muslim clients. Nonetheless, there were plenty of tales of love affairs across the religious divide, many romanticized in popular literature – one of the most famous, the tale of Abencerraje and Jarifa, was published as late as 1565. Many Spaniards today still refer to their partner or lover as their ‘half-orange’, a legacy from the Moors, for whom an orange was a symbol of perfect love, the idea having been developed in Baghdad from Platonic concepts about sister-souls uniting to form a sphere.

  Beyond that, the slang word for vagina, chocho, came from the Arabic shusha, but you didn’t hear of politicians turning a blind eye to tax evasion, say, in exchange for a quick one. Corruption in high office, of which there was plenty, was usually of a financial nature. There was, though, a considerable lack of squeamishness about sex for such a Catholic country. Sex and sexuality were accepted as being natural, something to be enjoyed fully, even at ages younger than was commonly accepted in the rest of Europe – the age of consent here was thirteen. Pornography was everywhere, even on terrestrial TV channels, where at two o’clock in the morning you could easily find hard-core films with all kinds of variations on the usual theme. At the same time, however, there was little sense of living in a country of perverts. Physical contact was much closer than in any other European country I’d known. English friends of mine were shocked once to see a grandfather teasingly squeezing the sprouting breasts of his pubescent granddaughter on the beach. Here there was nothing ‘dirty’ about such behaviour – it was just playful fun, and a clear example of the reduced physical barriers between people.

  Zine had vanished again. I carried on with the
tour, past the Sala de los Abencerrajes. The shadowy room, decorated with fine icicles of yeso plasterwork, had been named after the slaughter of the Banu Sarraj clan that was said to have taken place there after one of their members was caught with the sultan’s wife. Guides told you the red marks on the marble of the central fountain were the bloodstains from the massacre.

  Finally I emerged into the gardens that stretched towards the Generalife further up the hill. It was a relief of sorts to get away from the crush of people, but although the rose bushes, cypress trees, interconnected pools of water and general lushness of the place continued the paradise-like effect from inside the palace, there was a sense of sadness that the experience had come to an end. It was at once sensual and other-worldly, unlike any other place I knew, and part of me was already longing to return.

  I headed up and away into the maze of bushes and trees. Some areas were roped off but I slipped underneath, wanting to find a quiet corner somewhere just to sit for a moment, feel the sunlight filtering through the trees and let my mind wander. Later I would find Zine and ask him what he thought about the place.

  I came across him sooner than I’d expected. Pushing through some foliage in my quest for a hidden grove I heard hurried, excited voices and violent crunching of gravel underfoot. With a jolt I thought I’d been caught by some guards watching out for stray tourists, and quickly began inventing excuses to explain my ‘crime’. But the girl who suddenly appeared from behind the trees simply ran off, fiddling with the buttons on her blouse. A second later Zine emerged, shirt open, his face flushed. He looked at me with horror. Then he swore, swinging his hand up and down in frustration.

  ‘Jasie! Why didn’t you say it was you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought we’d been caught,’ he said.

  ‘Who was that girl?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, never mind. Shit, Jasie. Why didn’t you say?’ He began to smile, despite his anger.

  ‘Zine, for Christ’s sake. You weren’t … Were you?’