Granada
The Moorish palace of the Alhambra and its Generalife gardens never fail to enchant. Together they represent one of the pinnacles of Islamic architecture, a fitting last stop to a circular voyage during which Dar al Islam – Islamic civilization – has never been far from view. Conspicuously so in the contemporary, but contrasting, Islamic societies of Libya and Tunisia, below the surface elsewhere. We began our voyage at the Monument to the Discoverers in Lisbon, discoveries only made possible by the legacy of Arab learning that Prince Henry the Navigator had harnessed at his naval school in Sagres. Gibraltar is named after the Moor who used the Rock as a stepping-stone to bring Islam to continental Europe in the eighth century. Even the wonderful palimpsest of a cathedral in Syacusa, in modern Sicily, had once been used as a mosque and in devoutly Catholic Malta the daily mass is now said in the vernacular, Maltese, a Semitic dialect very closely related to Arabic.
Nowhere is our paradoxical proximity to the Muslim world more evident than in a visit to Granada. We began the day, in perfect late summer sunshine, by exploring the Alhambra and the Generalife. To an early twenty-first century cast of minds, skeptical of intellect and sensuous of disposition, the architecture has immediate resonance. We relate in equal measure to the geometrical shapes, stylized calligraphy and clean spaces of the Alhambra and to the voluptuous formality of fountains, blooms and blossoms of the Generalife, the latter an attempt to hint at Paradise. After a traditional lunch we descended to the Catholic city of Granada, built to celebrate the realization of the Reconquest in 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, drove the last of the Moorish rulers, Boabdil, back across the straits of Gibraltar. Visiting the mausoleum of Ferdinand and Isabella in the Royal Chapel is reminiscent of paying one's respects to the embalmed bodies of Lenin in Red Square or Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Entering the Cathedral, we encounter a world that now seems far removed from our ways of thinking: Baroque clutter and ornamental excess, sacred hearts and bleeding wounds, a candle-lit darkness that speaks of the intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition. Yet this is "our" Christian civilization; the Alhambra and the Generalife belongs to "them." How necessary it is to travel to broaden our perspectives, to savor paradoxes and relish contradictions, in a world increasingly dominated by the facile simplicities of the sound bite.
The Moorish palace of the Alhambra and its Generalife gardens never fail to enchant. Together they represent one of the pinnacles of Islamic architecture, a fitting last stop to a circular voyage during which Dar al Islam – Islamic civilization – has never been far from view. Conspicuously so in the contemporary, but contrasting, Islamic societies of Libya and Tunisia, below the surface elsewhere. We began our voyage at the Monument to the Discoverers in Lisbon, discoveries only made possible by the legacy of Arab learning that Prince Henry the Navigator had harnessed at his naval school in Sagres. Gibraltar is named after the Moor who used the Rock as a stepping-stone to bring Islam to continental Europe in the eighth century. Even the wonderful palimpsest of a cathedral in Syacusa, in modern Sicily, had once been used as a mosque and in devoutly Catholic Malta the daily mass is now said in the vernacular, Maltese, a Semitic dialect very closely related to Arabic.
Nowhere is our paradoxical proximity to the Muslim world more evident than in a visit to Granada. We began the day, in perfect late summer sunshine, by exploring the Alhambra and the Generalife. To an early twenty-first century cast of minds, skeptical of intellect and sensuous of disposition, the architecture has immediate resonance. We relate in equal measure to the geometrical shapes, stylized calligraphy and clean spaces of the Alhambra and to the voluptuous formality of fountains, blooms and blossoms of the Generalife, the latter an attempt to hint at Paradise. After a traditional lunch we descended to the Catholic city of Granada, built to celebrate the realization of the Reconquest in 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, drove the last of the Moorish rulers, Boabdil, back across the straits of Gibraltar. Visiting the mausoleum of Ferdinand and Isabella in the Royal Chapel is reminiscent of paying one's respects to the embalmed bodies of Lenin in Red Square or Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Entering the Cathedral, we encounter a world that now seems far removed from our ways of thinking: Baroque clutter and ornamental excess, sacred hearts and bleeding wounds, a candle-lit darkness that speaks of the intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition. Yet this is "our" Christian civilization; the Alhambra and the Generalife belongs to "them." How necessary it is to travel to broaden our perspectives, to savor paradoxes and relish contradictions, in a world increasingly dominated by the facile simplicities of the sound bite.
