Once ruled by its own Umayyad caliphs and then by successive dynasties based either in North Africa or in cities in southern Spain, Al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, began with the conquest of much of the peninsula by Arab forces in the eighth century CE and ended with the final expulsion of its Muslim population in 1492.
During this period of some seven centuries, Spain’s Muslim regions grew and then declined in size, reaching their greatest extent in the 10th century before shrinking by the late 15th to the single city of Granada in the south of the peninsula and the region that still bears the name of Andalusia today.
It is the major cities of Andalusia, among them Cordoba, Granada, and Seville, that are now most associated with Muslim Spain. Anyone visiting them today will at once be struck by the architectural and other memories of this period in Spanish history, along with the ways in which these memories, blended later with Christian rule, have produced a strikingly thought-provoking historical layering of civilisations.
Surviving Arab palaces jostle for space with palaces from Spain’s later Golden Age, former Islamic mosques house Christian churches, and the buildings of one civilisation are refunctioned by another, all against the background of a region that is also famous for its later history and its quintessentially Spanish art de vivre.
Starting out in Granada during what turned out to be a travel window before the spread of the omicron variant of Covid-19 began to see restrictions re-introduced Europe-wide, Al-Ahram Weekly tour of the region late last year took in the main Arab tourist sites, with Granada itself and above all the Alhambra Palace Complex in the hills above it providing an ideally atmospheric introduction.
Moving from Granada to Cordoba to Seville, sometimes using public transport, sometimes driving on the region’s excellent roads, the tour was an opportunity both to discover why this Spanish region has become one of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations and to find out more about Muslim Spain and its links with neighbouring North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the wider Arab world.
THE ALHAMBRA: While most of the palaces of the mediaeval rulers of the Arab world have long since disappeared leaving only written accounts of their magnificence behind, the Alhambra Palace Complex outside Granada still survives as striking testimony to the domestic architecture of the ruling dynasties of the western part of the mediaeval Arab world.
Mostly built in the 13th and 14th centuries with various additions and reconstructions since, the palace complex gives visitors some idea of the private lives of Spain’s mediaeval Arab rulers. Much has to be left to the imagination, but following the visitor circuit through the interconnected buildings of the Alhambra, it is possible to get a sense of how people might have lived many centuries ago.
The modern complex is well organised for visitors — it sees some two and a half million in a normal year — and the arrival point is a ticketing area leading into the Alhambra itself overlooking the surrounding city. Access from Granada is perhaps best carried out by local taxi, the Weekly’s solution, but there are also buses serving the area. Arriving at the Alhambra around midday with visitor numbers already beginning to swell despite far fewer than in a normal (pre-Covid) year, it was just as well that our tickets had already been booked in advance together with the services of a local guide.
Built on a spur in the hills surrounding Granada, the Alhambra is composed of a set of buildings within a high-walled fortress, with these buildings having been built by different rulers, at first Muslim and later Christian, and each having its own particular form. They include above all the Nasrid Palaces, named after Granada’s mediaeval Nasrid Dynasty, which include such well-known spaces as the Court of Myrtles, the Hall of the Ambassadors, and the Court of Lions, built under the 14th-century Nasrid ruler Muhammad V.
As British Arabist Robert Irwin notes in his guide to the Alhambra, debate continues on how many of these spaces were originally used. Some of the uncertainty is reflected in the names that have attached to them, with the Court of Lions, for example, being named after the stone lions supporting a central fountain. While the Hall of the Ambassadors was unmistakably an audience chamber, Irwin writes, surrounding rooms off the Court of Myrtles could have had all manner of functions from offices to bedrooms.
“We simply do not know how this place was inhabited,” Irwin writes, adding that “it was not all that common for rooms in Islamic palaces to have specialised functions,” and their use may have been defined as occasion arose. While today the rooms are bare, they would originally have been “lavishly furnished with carpets, cushions, and hangings”, as perhaps suggested in descriptions of palaces in the Thousand and One Nights.
Many of the interior spaces of the Nasrid Palaces are decorated with characteristic Islamic tilework and carved stucco panels bearing inscriptions from the Quran and the 14th-century Andalusian poets Ibn Al-Khatib and Ibn Zamrak. “Wall hangings were designed to resemble stucco panels and vice versa,” Irwin writes, and “the stucco work often makes play with the polyphonic music of decorative interlace, as strap work is made to seem as if it is weaving over and under itself to cover the wall surface.”
Alhambra of course is a version of the Arabic word al-hamra, meaning red, with the reddish colour of many of the complex buildings, particularly the fortified outer walls, perhaps explaining the name. However, even those able to read Arabic fluently might have difficulty deciphering the decorative script used in many of the Alhambra inscriptions, even supposing that the mediaeval poetry can be readily understood by modern audiences.
Some of the inscriptions are readily understandable — the Nasrid device la ghalib ila allah — there is no victor but God — appears in decorative panels throughout the complex — but others are more challenging for beginners to understand.
Everyone will have their favourite memories of the Alhambra, and the Weekly was lucky, visiting in the winter months and in a highly unusual year, to be almost alone in some of the complex’s most iconic spaces. Perhaps the most memorable part of the whole experience, though, was the adjoining gardens leading to the Generalife, a summer palace built by the Nasrid rulers to the east of the Alhambra Complex.
These were blooming even in the weak winter sunshine, and from them there are marvellous views to be had of the Alhambra and of the city of Granada below.
TO CORDOBA: The next stop was the city of Cordoba, easily accessible from Granada by road. Having never visited this city before, we decided to stay in the historic centre.
While all the major cities of Andalusia are visitor-friendly, even to those not speaking a word of Spanish, it is probably better for first-time visitors to stay in the historic centres. Not only does this make it possible to explore the cities on foot, with nothing more than a few minutes away, but it also means that one is well-provided for in case of last-minute changes.
In Cordoba itself, the main destination must be the Mezquita-Catedral (mosque-cathedral) in the centre of the old city. Like so many cities in Spain, Cordoba was originally a Roman foundation that was later taken over by the invading Visigoths on the fall of Roman Spain and then by the peninsula’s Arab conquerors in 712 CE. It later became the capital of the region’s Umayyad caliphate, and it was during these years that the city’s Great Mosque was built, repurposed after the city’s fall to Christian forces in 1236 as the Mosque-Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, the cathedral church of Cordoba.
The Mosque was built between the 9th and 10th centuries CE, in other words during the height of the Umayyad caliphate, and according to UNESCO — the monuments of Cordoba like others in Andalusia are on the UN organisation’s World Heritage List — it is both “irreplaceable testimony of the caliphate of Cordoba and the most emblematic monument of Islamic religious architecture.”
However, this can give no real sense of the impression the mosque-cathedral makes on entering it, with the sheer size of the space and the repeated columns like a forest of trees emphasising the building’s depth. The design of the supporting columns — a lower tier of horseshoe arches and an upper tier of semi-circular ones all made of alternating red brick and white stone — emphasises the roof height and makes an unforgettable visual impression. Set within the original prayer hall are the nave and transept of the cathedral’s main chapel.
Once again, it is best to book tickets in advance for the mosque-cathedral, since even in the winter months Cordoba is a major tourist destination, and of course all visitors to the city will want to visit the building at least once.
Most will also want to visit the remains of the Medinat Al-Zahra, the Shining City, some seven km outside the modern city and accessible by shuttle bus. This city was built by the Umayyad caliph Abdel-Rahman III, one of the builders of the Cordoba Mosque, and his son Hakam II, according to legend in memory of a particularly favoured concubine.
Modern authors tend to discount this explanation, however, preferring to point to the habit of many mediaeval Muslim rulers to found new cities — the Fatimids founded their city of Al-Qahira, one of the cities making up modern Cairo, some years later in 969 CE — as well as to the need of Umayyad Al-Andalus to build a city reflecting its political aspirations and cultural splendour.
The new city was founded in the 930s or 940s, and from the first it was meant as a full-scale settlement, or at least one having both official and residential quarters. Built over the course of four or five decades, most sources saying that construction stopped after the death of Hakam II in 976, the city was later abandoned during the period of civil conflict that overtook Al-Andalus with the collapse of the Umayyad regime in the early 11th century and the fragmentation of Muslim Spain into various muluk al-tawaaif or “party kingdoms”.
Visiting the site of Medinat Al-Zahra today, visitors are likely to be struck by its marvelous situation in the foothills of the Sierra Moreno Mountains looking out across the Guadalquivir River plain. The city was built on terraces up the mountain side, with the palace area being on the topmost terrace looking down and across the city below. Water would have been brought to the city from the nearby river using a system of aqueducts adapted from the remains of the Roman ones that had once served Cordoba.
Perhaps too lazy to walk through all the excavations — but more likely fixed in place by the view out across the river plain — the Weekly party remained on the upper terrace in the palace area to enjoy a moment’s reflection before returning to Cordoba for the next stage of the tour.
IN SEVILLE: Getting from Cordoba to Seville is easy using one of this Spanish region’s comfortable trains. Once again, on arriving in this city of around one and a half million people, the Weekly party decided to stay in the historic centre, wanting to move around on foot as much as possible.
Seville is of course famous for far more than just its Arab heritage, and many people when thinking of the city may light upon a mixture of the French composer Georges Bizet’s 19th-century opera Carmen, set in and around the cigarette factories for which Seville was well known, the tradition of flamenco dancing, a significant expression of the region’s modern cultural heritage, and the role the city played in Spain’s 16th-century Golden Age, when it was the main entry point for the wealth flowing from Spain’s possessions in South America.
These aspects of Seville are all much in evidence in the modern city, with the General Archive of the Indies, which once contained documents detailing Spain’s 16th-century conquests of the Aztec and Inca Empires in Central and South America and the subsequent establishment of its own empire, standing close to the other main buildings of the historic centre. These include the vast 15th-century cathedral and the Alcazar — a Spanish version of the Arabic word al-qasr meaning palace — the former royal palace of Philip II of Spain, emperor of much of South America, king, however briefly, of England, owing to his marriage to the English queen Mary I in 1554, and commissioner of the famous Armada that in 1588 later attempted to conquer the same country.
The cathedral is built on the footprint of the former mosque that once stood on the site before the Christian conquest of the city in 1248. Standing next to it is the Giralda, the Cathedral bell tower, originally built as the 100-metre minaret of the former mosque and now open to the public to climb. The Weekly party did so, intrigued to learn that the ramps winding around the tower’s core that are used to go up it were apparently designed so that donkeys as well as people could use them.
The minaret-bell tower is built in the style of the minaret of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh in Morocco, revealing its origin as an expression of the new styles of architecture brought by the dynasties that ruled both North Africa and Al-Andalus after the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate and the period of the “party kings”.
The first of these, the Almoravids, an originally Berber dynasty based in present-day Morocco, entered Al-Andalus in 1086 to defend the Muslim kingdoms against Christian encroachments, eventually absorbing Muslim Spain into an empire based in Marrakesh. The second, the Almohads, had a similar history, being another originally North African dynasty that first defeated the Almoravids in North Africa and then extended their rule across the Maghreb and by the early 13th century the whole of Muslim Spain.
Across from the cathedral is the Alcazar, built on the site of an earlier Arab palace and in its design and decoration reflecting the so-called mudejar style used in early Christian Spain and derived from earlier Arab buildings. Wandering through the palace, it is easy to think that one is indeed in an Arab palace, so reminiscent are certain spaces, notably the Patio de las Doncellas, and the Salon de Embajadores, the Patio of the Maidens and the Hall of the Ambassadors, of equivalent ones in the Alhambra.
Whereas in the Alhambra, the device of the ruling Nasrid Dynasty features in every room, in the Seville Alcazar it is the device of Spain’s Catholic monarchy that predominates, with its device, Plus Ultra (“further beyond” or “ever further”), featuring throughout the palace.
HERITAGE: Introducing her essay collection The Legacy of Muslim Spain containing pieces on every aspect of Muslim Spain in 1994, Palestinian writer Salma Khadra Jayyusi wrote of a nostalgia for Al-Andalus, sometimes seen as a place of longing for later generations.
The 20th-century Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi writes of this aspect of it in poems written during his exile from Egypt in southern Spain, and Jayyusi also mentions poems by later Arab poets Nizar Qabbani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Abdel-Wahab Al-Bayyati and the 20th-century South Asian intellectual Mohamed Iqbal as expressing similar themes.
Standard histories of Al-Andalus, among them British Arabist W Montgomery Watt’s classic A History of Islamic Spain, all contain sections on the cultural achievements, as well as the surviving architecture, of Muslim Spain. It is not only the political or economic successes of Al-Andalus that are so striking, as there are also its cultural ones expressed in its surviving architecture and literary achievements.
Major names include the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), born in Cordoba, the religious figures Ibn Arabi and Jewish philosopher Maimonides (Moussa bin Maimon), the writers and poets Ibn Hazm, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Zamrak, and, born in Tunis, but living for part of his life in Muslim Spain, the historian Ibn Khaldoun. Muslim Spain was a centre of translation from Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages, and it was one important route by which the works of Aristotle and others, lost in much of Europe, re-entered European consciousness.
Writing of the overall significance of Al-Andalus, Watt says that it was always very much part of the wider Islamic world despite its distance from major centres such as Baghdad and Cairo, but that it was also a formative influence on the intellectual life of mediaeval Europe. There was the “magnificence that impressed the somewhat backward mediaeval Christians”, he notes. There were the cultural and other achievements that made Al-Andalus “a noble facet of the total experience of mankind”.
The region’s history can be mulled over by those not able to make the trip to Andalusia to visit the surviving heritage sites of Muslim Spain. But for those who can make the trip, as the Weekly was late last year, visiting destinations such as the Alhambra, the Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral, and the Giralda and Alcazar in Seville can bring home the achievements of Al-Andalus in a particularly direct way — while at the same time providing the ideal excuse to visit one of Europe’s most seductive tourist destinations.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 20 January, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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