|
Spain's Islamic
past
"When the Christians recaptured
Granada, they burnt all 80,000 books from the palace library - as if to expunge
the memory of Islamic rule."
By Gerald Butt
When the Arab and Berber armies
crossed from North Africa into Spain in the eighth century, they thought they'd
discovered heaven on earth.
By the time they were finally
driven out in 1492 they'd actually created an earthly celebration of paradise -
the Alhambra palaces and gardens in Granada.
For desert Arabs, water is luxury.
And in the melting snow of the Sierra Nevada mountains they found what they
wanted. By a series of intricate channels they directed water into the palace
grounds and onto the dusty plains below.
Still today at the Alhambra you
get a glimpse of paradise. Small streams take the water hither and thither to
innumerable fountains and ponds - at one point rushing down channels in the
balustrades of a stone stairway. Everywhere, splashing and gushing water. And
great splashes of colour under the conifers - roses, lilies and sweet-smelling
jasmine.
Not to mention the luxury of the
palaces themselves with their courtyards shaded by trees and cooled by fountains
and with the walls decorated by elaborate Arabic inscriptions and patterned
tiles.
For an Arabist like me, a visit to
Alhambra should have been the experience of a lifetime. But I came away slightly
disappointed. Not at the beauty of what I'd seen - rather with a sense that the
Arab and Islamic character had been somewhat down-played.
When the Christians recaptured
Granada, they burnt all 80,000 books from the palace library - as if to expunge
the memory of Islamic rule. Then they built a cathedral on the site of the great
mosque and put a baroque facade around the main palace.
Today the Alhambra is marketed
very much as a major Spanish tourist site. One Spanish guidebook says that the
Alhambra is to Granada what St Peter's is to Rome or St Mark's Square is to
Venice.
What the guidebook doesn't say is
that the Alhambra is a legacy of nearly eight centuries during which the Arabs
not only occupied Spain but also introduced into Europe mathematics, philosophy
and Greek scholarship. Furthermore, the Arabs brought into Spain oranges,
lemons, rice, sugar, date palms, cotton and much more.
And then there was the elaborate
irrigation system, bringing water to the plains of Andalusia and giving it the
landscape it has today. Even when the Arabs had been expelled en masse, two
families were required to stay in each village to operate the irrigation system.
In other words, the Christians of
Europe were happy to inherit the legacy of the Arab occupation of Spain, but
were reluctant to acknowledge its Islamic origin. The American traveller,
Washington Irving, noticed this when he visited Granada at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. The Spanish, he said, considered the Muslims nothing more
than "invaders and usurpers". And that still seems to be the case today.
Does any of this matter? I believe
it does. Arabs feel bitterly resentful at how they're portrayed in the West - as
ignorant people, lacking the advantages of our history and civilisation. As I
drove away from Granada, I remembered what a retired Jordanian diplomat Hazem
Nuseibeh once told me.
For him, history was like a
medicine. Whenever he felt depressed by the sense of inferiority and failure
that haunts the Arabs today he escaped into history books and read about the
glories of the past, not least the glories of Andalusia.
But escapism can't hide the fact
that the Arabs as a whole feel they've lost their way and lost their
self-esteem. They live, for the most part, under corrupt and incompetent
regimes, and - as they see it - in the shadow of the West.
"The West calls the tune to which
we dance," Rabee Dejani, a Palestinian businessman in Jordan told me, "We hate
the tune and we hate ourselves for dancing".
The accumulation of this
resentment is creating new generations of Arabs who are hostile to the West.
With no political platform on which to vent their anger, they're increasingly
turning for comfort to Islam and to Islamic fundamentalism. And the violent acts
that militants carry out blacken the name of Islam in the West.
Thus the anti-Muslim slogans I saw
daubed on the walls of the ancient caravanseria in the centre of Granada
- and the look of anxiety and suspicion on the face of Hassan, the caretaker of
the small centre nearby, when I knocked on the door.
Mutual suspicion is increasing.
It's a vicious circle that won't easily be broken. But a start would be for the
West to give credit where it's due.
Yes, the Alhambra is a tangible
legacy of a great Islamic civilisation. But there are many other intangible
legacies from the days of Arab rule in Spain, ingredients of our daily lives
that we take for granted. If those debts were acknowledged, Arabs, I believe,
would still go to their mosques in large numbers. But they'll be less attracted
than they are now by the angry rantings of anti-Western fundamentalists.
|
