Andalus

by Jason Webster

  In 1085 King Alfonso VI conquered Toledo, a city in which he himself had previously been given refuge by the Moorish rulers during fraternal in-fighting at the Castillian court. For the following two hundred years it became the intellectual capital of Christian Europe, a concentration point through which learning from the Islamic world passed into the West. As the main centre for translation into Latin of Arabic and Greek science, it laid the essential groundwork for the Renaissance. Europe in the Dark Ages had lost touch with Classical learning – Greek was virtually unknown. As Arab, Jewish and Christian scholars in Toledo reintroduced a wealth of Greek texts – Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy: writings we take entirely for granted now – the Classical world became available for ‘rediscovery’ later on. No Toledo, no Florence.

  The Moorish role in this was crucial: Greek texts had been preserved by being translated into Arabic in the ninth century in Baghdad. It was from these manuscripts, then, that the Toledo scholars worked, translating from a translation into Latin.

  Just as importantly, though, the Toledo school also translated a huge body of mathematical, philosophical, medicinal and scientific scholarship from the Arabic corpus, much of which had been built on Greek learning, but which combined elements from all over the Islamic empire and beyond. Hi-tech knowledge about astrolabes and abacuses had already seeped through into Europe from Al-Andalus, thanks partly to the magician Gerbert, later Pope Sylvester II, who travelled to Moorish Spain as a young man seeking ‘wisdom’. Now, though, came concepts such as ‘algebra’, from the Arabic al-jabr – ‘the bringing together of broken parts’ – and ‘logarithms’, named after their Afghan originator Al-Khwarizmi. Arabic numbers also arrived, adapted in Baghdad from the Indian numerical system, and including the revolutionary concept of ‘zero’, from the Arabic sifr.

  The ‘school’ of translators, originally gathered around the Archdeacon of Segovia Dominico Gundesalvo, a Christian Jew, was in fact a largely unstructured movement under church patronage that lasted for some 150 years, converting as much of the body of knowledge on the other side of the religious divide as possible into a more accessible format. The school itself, however, was a model of convivencia, an example of Moors, Christians and Jews coming together peacefully in cultural and intellectual pursuit. The translators would work in teams: an Arab speaker – sometimes a Muslim, sometimes a Jew – rendering the text into vernacular, i.e. early Castillian Spanish; a Christian scholar would then turn this into Latin.

  The story of one of these Christian scholars – Gerard of Cremona – gave a feel for the kind of place Toledo was in those times. Gerard arrived in 1140 looking for a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest, having been unable to find one in his native Italy. Amazed at the wealth of material available in the city, he stayed, learnt Arabic and ended up translating over seventy books into Latin: twenty-four on medicine; eighteen on astronomy and alchemy; seventeen on maths; eleven on philosophy; and three on logic.

  ‘In this way,’ his students wrote of him when he died in Toledo some fifty years later, ‘he passed on the Arabic literature in the manner of the wise man who, wandering through a green field, links up a crown of flowers, made not just from any, but from the prettiest. To the end of his life he continued to transmit to the Latin world, as if to his own beloved heir, whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and plainly as he could.’

  ‘It was a good farm,’ Zine began. ‘Much better than the other – where you found me. They paid us in cash at the end of every day based on how many crates of fruit we’d filled. Then we were free to go; I went with some other Moroccans to a shelter near by – it was that or sleeping rough near the bus station. You saved money that way, but I didn’t fancy it.’

  Several months afterwards, his decision appeared all the wiser when, in an apparently random act of violence, three Moroccans living in the open in that same area were beaten up; one of the victims later died of his injuries.

  ‘They didn’t segregate us like on the other farm – there were a couple of Ukrainians on our team, and some Poles. And four Moroccans: a man from the Rif in his forties and two kids from Tetouan. I used to stick with the Rifian – he was from Chaouen. I have an aunt who lives there – I stayed with her once. The Chaounis are tough people: I like them. So we used to talk, the Rifian and I. His wife was pregnant with their third child. There was no work at home, so …’

  There was a momentary silence and I could tell he was thinking of the girl on the beach in Tarifa. The waiter placed our drinks on the table, sweeping the crumbs left by the previous occupants onto the floor with a single motion of a damp cloth.

  ‘I thought: this is someone I should listen to,’ Zine continued. ‘He had no fear, this man. He did what needed to be done. He needed work, his wife was pregnant, so he went and found work. It was the third time he’d been in Spain. They’d thrown him out twice before, but he just came back whenever he could and earned money until they got hold of him again. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. He told me, anyway, the Spanish police are usually very friendly. They send you back home but they look after you while you are with them. I think this is very Spanish. It is the moro in them.’

  I laughed.

  ‘I thought you’d like that. Their humanity comes from us, from their Moorish cousins. All this business about war in Iraq. Look outside. These people know it is wrong. But the government is crazy.’

  Outside the rhythmic chant of the demonstrators ebbed and flowed as customers came in and out through the café door. A left-wing party seemed to be organizing things, but I was surprised to see passers-by stopping and reading leaflets being handed out, standing on the edge as though thinking about joining in. Only a few months later, on the eve of war itself, many of them would actually do so.

  ‘How did you know I was in Toledo?’ I asked.

  ‘I called Salud,’ he said, amused that I should be puzzled by something so straightforward. ‘She said you were here.’

  ‘And how did you get here?’

  ‘I got a lift with a lorry driver from the farm.’

  In the back of my mind I could hear Salud laughing.

  ‘I need to be like that Rifian,’ he said with force. ‘With no fear.’

  Now I really was surprised. This was Zine, who had left home and risked his life crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to find work in a foreign inhospitable country, who had risked it again by saving me from the slave farm, throwing away his only chance of work. Zine the orphan, who had such an easy way with women. Zine, who I thought of as anything but fearful. And yet just as clearly, as he spoke those words, I felt I’d understood: not only something about him, but about myself too. We were both trying to overcome fears within ourselves. One of the first things he’d said to me was that fear was meaningless when you knew life itself came to an end. But wasn’t that what we were both trying to prove to ourselves: that we had beaten fear? Taking off, an adventure, life on the road: it was as if we needed daily reassurance that we were no longer frightened – in his case of coming to Spain and leaving Morocco in the first place; in mine, of remaining here for good.

  ‘My uncle, the one who took me in when my parents died, has an export business in Casablanca. He runs it with my two cousins. They wanted me to join when I left school – or at least my uncle did. My cousins, I don’t know. I agreed, but as soon as I could I left. I said I wanted to visit other members of my family – that’s how I went to Chaouen, and then ended up in Tangier. I told them I was making business contacts there. I stayed with a sister of my mother’s. My uncle thought all this would be useful later on when I eventually went to work with him. But I – we didn’t get on. My uncle never liked my mother: he didn’t like my father marrying a Berber.’

  For all the time I had known him I had held back from asking too much about Zine’s past. I instinctively felt I should simply listen to what he wanted me to know. Exiles I’d met in the past were often a complex of closed doors, who reacted unfavourably to people pushing too hard to g
et through. Zine had been no exception. And though not on the run from his home country, he was considered an ‘illegal’ in the land to which he’d chosen to come. Secrets were part of surviving. And fear as well: I could see that now.

  ‘I was in Tangier for seven years,’ he said. ‘My aunt, my mother’s sister, is married to a schoolteacher. They called me …’ He paused. ‘You know … khuffash.’

  ‘A bat?’

  ‘Yes, they called me “the bat” because I was always out at night, never seeing where I was going. Going here, then there. All over. I wanted to leave Casablanca and my uncle, so I went to Tangier. Then in Tangier I dreamt always of Spain and Europe. Some things are very difficult in my country. People have closed minds.’

  I realized in that moment that Zine had not come to Spain because he needed the money. Money in order to survive on an everyday level, perhaps, but he wasn’t an unemployed farmer desperate to keep his family going with no chance of work back home, as was the case with so many immigrants. His coming here was more from an emotional need – escaping a world he felt restricted him.

  He sipped on his coffee, creamy foam sticking to the week’s growth of whiskers on his top lip. He wiped it away, soil from the farm still lodged under his fingernails.

  ‘The Rifian told me a story – about a musician who went to see a doctor. The musician was suffering from all kinds of complaints, saying his arms and legs hurt, and he was unhappy. So the doctor said: “It’s true that you haven’t performed your latest composition in public yet, isn’t it?” And the musician nodded. “Then perhaps you would play it for me now,” said the doctor. So the musician pulled out his oud and started to play, and when he finished the doctor asked him to play it again, and then again, several times over. Then the doctor asked the musician to stand up. “You are cured now,” he said. “What you had inside was affecting your outside. But now it has been released, and you are better.” And it was true – the musician was totally cured.

  ‘You see,’ he continued as I thought a minute about the story, ‘I always wanted to escape, to get away from Morocco. It was inside me, like the musician. I couldn’t think of anything else. But just one change and …’

  As he was talking I was reminded of my father. Having lived in America and the south of England most of his life, he’d returned to his home county of Lancashire when he retired. The rest of the family had raised an eyebrow when he’d told us he was moving back, but ever since I’d noticed a certain centredness about him, as though living in the countryside of his birth, with its hills and brooks, connected him with … what was it? Roots? I wasn’t sure. I envied him in some ways – to feel that somewhere there was a place you belonged. Unable to say where I came from, I’d thought for a while that I’d found something similar here in Spain.

  Zine sighed heavily. ‘I want to come back to Valencia, Jasie.’ The smoke from his cigarette crept up the woollen sleeve of his jumper. ‘I want to be with Lucía.’

  We stepped back outside into the fog, thicker now, and wet, bearing the promise of cold merciless winter. The beat of the marchers’ drum thudded relentlessly, softened slightly by the microscopic droplets of water that padded the air. The demonstrators weaved ghost-like through the square, barely visible now, short bursts of enthusiasm given to their anti-war cry as they began to tire and think of going home for lunch.

  They used to tell a legend about Toledo, and the old Tower of Hercules that had once stood here in pre-Moorish days:

  An ancient king wished to hide away a secret, and so he built the tower and locked the secret inside. Before he died he ordered that every king after him should add a new lock and bolt to the door so that nobody could ever find out what the secret was. Twenty-six kings followed him and carried out his wish, until one day a weak and petulant man ascended the throne. Against the advice of all his ministers, the new king had the tower door smashed open. Inside he found a round room with a gold and silver table placed in the centre. On it he read ‘This is the table of David, son of Solomon, peace be upon him.’ On the table stood an urn. With one swoop, the king knocked it to the ground, breaking it into a thousand pieces. Inside there was a parchment, which said: ‘Whenever this tower is violated and this urn broken, the people painted on the walls of this room will invade Spain, overthrow its kings and subdue the entire land.’ The king looked up at the walls in horror and saw bearded horsemen wearing white and black turbans on their heads, carrying curved scimitars in their hands, poised for deadly attack. The year was 710 and the king’s name was Roderic, the last of the Visigothic kings. Twelve months later he was dead, his kingdom conquered, Islamic armies having swept him aside. It was the beginning of Al-Andalus.

  As I watched the protesters now, their eyes filled with fear, with a kind of millenarian dread of the consequences of the coming war, there was a momentary echo in my mind of the Twin Towers in New York and crazed suicide squads killing people in a frenzy of hate. There was a strong sense that we were at another turning point, the beginning of another chapter in the long, complex and often violent relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds. Would they be telling similar legends about the World Trade Center in another thousand years’ time?

  We crossed the square and went looking for somewhere to eat. I thought Zine might enjoy some typical and decidedly un-Muslim roast suckling pig, so tender you were supposed to be able to cut it into pieces using the sides of two plates. It was a delicacy in Christianized central Spain, a potent symbol of religious ownership of the land, which over the centuries had turned into an innocent culinary speciality: a bit like eating hamburgers in countries which today feel the influence of American culture and might. They weren’t so interested in what the Moors had to offer in Toledo any more, except in terms of tourist revenue as, museum-like, the city showcased its more illustrious past. Craftsmen still produced damascene metalwork – first developed, as its name implied, in Damascus – but these days the black and gold design work was as likely to decorate the scabbard of a Japanese sword in the window of a souvenir shop, or a ‘genuine’ medieval-style pole-axe. The period of translations had eventually come to an end as the whole tone of relations between the different faiths began to change: pogroms against the Jews were whipped up by St Vincent Ferrer in the fourteenth century, the Inquisition took hold in the fifteenth and beyond, and finally the Jews and Moriscos were expelled. Periods of tolerance and understanding, it seemed, came to an end, often a violent one: blips of humanity, before falling back into impoverished barbarism.

  ‘From the beginning of the Renaissance, Arab art ceased to be popular,’ Titus Burckhardt had written of Spain. ‘Above all, there no longer existed the spiritual link between the different religious communities. In the Middle Ages, Christians, Jews and Muslims had inhabited the same spiritual space, for all that their respective creeds varied. This world ceased to exist for the culture of the Renaissance.’

  As we passed through the demonstration, a middle-aged man handed us a leaflet. ‘No War in Iraq,’ it shouted. ‘Stop the Oil War.’

  Zine and I headed away from the square and down the narrow stony streets of the ancient city. The smell of roasting meats issuing from shadowy restaurants was making my empty stomach do somersaults.

  ‘No more farm work, then,’ I said.

  He was silent for a minute, and I wondered if he was ignoring me, or hadn’t heard.

  ‘I love Lucía,’ he said eventually.

  MONTSERRAT

  The rich, forested hills of Catalonia stretched far into the distance as the tooth-like range of Montserrat – the sawn-off mountain – loomed over us in the clearing air. Yellowing oak woods like the fur on an old teddy bear surrounded us, with rivers and waterfalls pushing out of mountainsides like white handkerchiefs. The brilliant sunlight created a chequerboard effect of shade and light at the corner of my eye as we drove past powerful trees.

  From further away the mountain resembled a business chart on a executive’s office wall, but closer up the grey peaks
of this bizarre hill reminded me of the great bony fingers of some of Dalí’s paintings with their broken half-human forms. The spiritual heart of Catalonia, this was the second holiest place in Christian Spain after Santiago de Compostela, and the church and monastery that had been built into the side of this mountain had been the only place Franco had allowed the celebration of mass in Catalan. It was also home to La Moreneta – the most famous of Spain’s mysterious Black Madonnas.

  Catalonia was one last area of Spain I wanted to explore before heading back to Valencia. The Catalan-speaking state of Andorra might have a name derived from the Arabic al-ghandura – the fallen woman – but on the face of it this far north-eastern corner of Spain, on the border with France, had little of Al-Andalus about it. For centuries it had been a border region between Moors and Christians but, ordered and European, it felt a world away from the south and its daily reminders of North Africa. Yet I had an intuition that here, as much as anywhere in Spain, more gems were waiting to be discovered. Zine, back in the passenger seat, would have to wait a couple more days to be reunited with Lucía.

  ‘This is an angry place,’ he said when we arrived at the monastery. ‘People here look angry.’

  It was a Saturday afternoon, and a number of wedding parties were flowing in and out of the basilica in a blur of white veils and taffeta, towards the restaurants and supermarkets that surrounded it. How many of them knew that the material for their dresses had first been brought from the Middle East and that the word was a straight copy from the Arabic tafta, I wondered.

  Zine was smoking his L&M cigarettes, smoke curling away in the wind down into the wet, rainy valley below, dark clouds climbing rapidly towards us up the thickly wooded mountainside.

  ‘I’ve never been to a church,’ he said.

  I took him by the elbow and led him to the entrance.