San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
SPAIN Cultural contrasts embedded
Muezzins, who call Muslims to prayer, have not sounded from the Christianized minarets of Andalusia, Spain’s largest region, for centuries. But the duende of flamenco happens to sound much the same — and maybe not by accident. Duende is a complex Spanish word that means “spirit, magic, passion.” It is also the name for the plaintive, wordless singing in Spain’s signature folk music.
Musicologists are unsure of flamenco’s origins. One etymology proposed by 19th-century Andalusian historian Blas Infante is that the word flamenco comes from the Arabic words for rural wanderer. Certainly, the emotional keening evokes the human and cultural loss and ghosts of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims thrown out of Spain after seven centuries of coexistence.
Córdoba’s Mosquecathedral, or La Mezquita, is another UNESCO World Heritage site. Here, the physical and spiritual contrasts between Islam and Christianity are embedded in the walls. The massive mosque, covering nearly 261,000 square feet, was built in 784 and then expanded by succeeding generations of Muslim rulers known as caliphs. It was one of the first and grandest mosques in Europe, a forest of 856 columns supporting 365 red-and-white-striped arches. The arrangement of the pillars gives the illusion of shifting diagonal lines. The simplicity and vastness suggest an unadorned void, ideal for contemplating eternity. Standing before the one center of color, the glowing, surreal mihrab (the Mecca-facing prayer niche found in mosques), inlaid with precious stones, is like staring into the sun.
In the midst of this icon of Islamic architecture, 16thcentury Spanish Catholics implanted a Gothic cathedral. Today, in the heart of this forest of arches, Christ on the cross hangs over a central nave lined with tall silver and gold candlesticks. Crowned, gilt-plaster Madonnas peek out of Islamic keyhole-shaped niches. Dozens of porticoes along the outer walls are bricked in and divided into dark, gated rooms holding saints’ bones and candlelit altars. Viewed from the top of the nearby bell tower (the former minaret, which one can climb for a few euros), an alien Gothicbuttressed spaceship appears to have landed in the middle of the roof.
Muslims are prohibited by the Catholic Church from praying inside the Mosquecathedral. In the early 1970s, the Saudi government offered to pay Spain millions of dollars to move the cathedral out of the mosque and construct it nearby. Spain’s former dictator, Francisco Franco, supported the idea, but the cathedral’s bishop and others opposed it, and ultimately the plan was shelved.
At its zenith, from roughly the late eighth through the 10th centuries, Córdoba was a place of unusually peaceful coexistence between Christians,
Jews and Muslims. Sometimes called “la convivencia” during this period, Jewish and Christian intellectuals from all over Europe came to this Moorish seat of power, translating classical texts from Hebrew, Greek and Latin and advancing studies of medicine, philosophy, math and astronomy.
Historians are not in full agreement about the extent of Andalusian tolerance then, and even today, conflicts persist over who gets to pray inside La Mezquita. But in an interview with me over coffee, not far from the Mosque-cathedral, the Córdoba University lawyer and historian Antonio Manuel Rodríguez Ramos argued that la convivencia was real.
“Here in Córdoba, within 500 meters, you find the mosque, the chapel of St. Bartholomew and the synagogue. They prayed together. The convivencia existed, and it ended when Jews and Moors were expelled.”
A castle in the clouds
The crown of all Moorish castles is the magnificent Alhambra in Granada. It hovers above the city like a mirage, a castle in the clouds. Strolling this labyrinth of muqarna (a honeycomblike, ornamental vaulting) and ornate white stucco walls is like a surreal trip into a giant vitrine of carved ivory. The vast complex is said to be laid out as a complicated geometric game. Evidence of an intense focus on math is everywhere. The placement of starlike patterns embedded in the arched ceilings, for example, required countless complicated calculations — by human brains, not machines.
British and American writers, including Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, have waxed lyrical trying to describe the (usually moonlit) splendor of the Alhambra. Some of them even spent a night or two sleeping on tiled floors among its trickling fountains and delicate arched porticoes.
We stayed in a small hotel with a Moorish-style central courtyard, called the Casa Morisca. It’s perched on a hill across from and far below the castle, where the Darro River that once sustained the great compound trickles along the outdoor cafes of the Paseo de los Tristes.
The Alhambra was the final stronghold of the last Muslim rulers in Spain, the Nasrids. Their handover of its keys to the Catholic rulers — with Christopher Columbus present at the ceremony, about to set off for the West — marked the end of 781 years of Moorish Spain. It is also a name that still resonates in the Arab world, where generations of people like my mother, a Christian raised in Muslim Iraq, grew up hearing of this storied place, but who, like her, never visited.
Below the towers, Granada bustles with university students, tapas bars and outdoor cafes, a shopping district, even a covered souk. Here you can smell the azafran (Arabic and Spanish for “saffron”) emanating from tiny, clear plastic containers. Only in Granada did I see tourist shops selling souvenir T-shirts with the town’s name in Arabic script.
On the final leg of the journey, we drove south as far as we could go. The outlines of the edge of another continent — the North African homeland of the original Moors, and the land to which many of the expelled Jews and Muslims fled — slowly appeared in the haze across the Mediterranean.
Passports in hand, we boarded a ferry in the little port of Tarifa, (named after the Moorish military commander, Tarif ibn Malik, and origin of the English word for import taxes, the tariff). The short, storied crossing between two continents had long been a dream of mine. For 45 minutes, I was transfixed by the waves lapping the side of the ship, thinking of the water’s role in centuries of migration and blended cultures. We left Europe behind and docked in another world, in Tangier, Morocco, an Arab city whose streets, like the Baghdad of my memory, smell of orange blossom and diesel.
Descendants of those expelled from Spain still live in the northern coastal regions of Morocco (covered in a new documentary, “Children of al-andalus”). Some even possess real or symbolic keys to their lost houses. One of these descendants, Abdel El Akel, has a large iron key passed down for hundreds of years through the eldest male of this family. According to family lore, the first El Akel was a wealthy Nasrid builder who fled Granada in 1492 and built the first mosque in the Moroccan city of Chefchaouen. El Akel is also the name of the mosque.
Spain has offered to repatriate descendants of the expelled Jews, but it has not extended that invitation to Muslims, although some have asked. El Akel said he has no desire for Spanish citizenship. The family doesn’t even know what building their key supposedly once unlocked. But El Akel, a lean, quiet, retired architect and banker who invited me to meet at his summer home near Tétouan, on the Mediterranean coast, kept his family heritage alive by educating his three children in Spanish schools from childhood. They attended universities in Spain. All three are now living and working in Granada — the first members of the family to return after four centuries.
The key stayed in Morocco. have village markets a couple of times a week where a nonskier can while away the hours sampling cheeses, sausages and cakes.
Cuddle up by the fire
When all else fails — or, for bookworms, when your dream comes true — prepare to get cozy by a fire and settle in with a good book or three.
Plaskitt said sometimes a client is set on a particular resort without much to do beyond skiing.
“We’ll say, ‘Make sure your nonskier brings a really good book, and a couple of them,’ ” she said. “By the time they’ve exhausted the two shops in the village and the ice rink, there’s not a lot of other things to do.”