Spain's Islamic Past
Sohel Q. Khan
--
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.
Arabic designers paid great attention to detail
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.
Written by Gerald Butt of BBC world service.
Shamim A. Khandekar
bou...@aol.com
sk...@washington.engr.ukans.edu (Sohel Q. Khan) wrote:
>
> 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.
>
The guidebook ir right in doing so. The arabs garnered, if not stole, most
of the above from hindoostan. Their Hindsa is a living example of that. The
Arabaic numeric system is actually hindoo numeric system....cotton surely was
first cultivated in hindoostan....etc etc...To imagine that Mathematics could
have developed in Berber/Moor mind is ludicrous....
As for flamenco, it is influenced by the gypsies...the wandering tribes of
India.
SR
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