Un cuento de dos mezquitas

I’m going to combine my long-neglected Córdoba post (we were there about a month ago) with my morning, today. The common factor? Mosques!

Today is Friday, which means I don’t have class, which means I should have been enjoying the luxury of sleeping in (during the other weekdays I have to get up at seven). But no, I had to get up at eight—and I was so excited to do so. The reason is because in my Islamología class (the study of Islam, and sometimes also the study of the study of Islam), which is the class I’m taking at the University of Granada, we were having a morning field trip to the city’s showcase mosque.

The mosque is located right next to the Mirador de San Nicolás, which is possibly the most touristed place in Granada, besides the Alhambra; it’s a lookout point in the Albayzín that has a wonderful view of the city below, the Alhambra, which is on the opposing mountain, and the Sierra Nevadas beyond. It’s a gorgeous place, and always packed with people. (Interestingly, locals go there a fair amount, too.) To have the mosque there, then, seems to me to be prime realty. I’ve passed the mosque a thousand times, but I didn’t think it was open to the public so I’ve never gone in. To get a chance to go—well, for me, nothing could be more fun or exciting!

The mosque is unassuming, but pretty; white, in classic Andalusian style with a red-tile roof. It has a quiet, lovely garden out front which features, obviously, the exact same view everyone swarms to take pictures of at the next-door Mirador. It also has a minaret (rectangular, not very high—originally it was going to be much higher, but people complained that it would be higher than the neighboring church of San Nicolás), and I’ve read that they have a live muezzin for the call to prayer, which is something I’d love to see. (They don’t have speakers to project the call because neighbors complained.)

I’m not sure what the exact position in the mosque of our tour guide, but he was part of the organization, somehow; he was youngish, white, non-Arab, in his early thirties, well-dressed and with a well-trimmed beard. His Spanish intrigued me, because he spoke very fluidly, at a high, academic level, and had a very good accent, but he would also make some very basic errors (“un otro,” for example), so the mix was interesting. He was a French convert, I later learned.

The first room of the mosque was the open-air, enclosed patio, which was breathtaking. Everyone oohed and aahed over it: floor and walls all a perfect, pure white marble, sparkling clean, with two big drains in the middle. Off to one side was a simple fountain decorated with the colored geometric ceramic designs that are ubiquitous here, and on one wall was a gilded version of the Nazarí family motto, which can be found all over the city and in every room of the Alhambra: it translates to “there is no conqueror but Allah.” The patio with a fountain is an essential feature of a mosque, for the requisite ablutions that Muslims make before prayer.

The next room was the prayer hall itself. (It’s so strange to be writing these terms in English; I’ve grown so accustomed to hearing/saying them only in Spanish: “la sala de la oración.”) Interestingly, I already knew what it looked like inside. Over winter break I watched a fantastic documentary on PBS that I think was called “The Five Pillars of Islam,”  which featured five Muslims from around the world, including a young Granadan man, with the footage showing him praying in this very mosque.

The mosque is actually only ten years old, although the city’s Muslim community has owned the land for longer (they had trouble raising funds—eventually the emir of the U.A.E. gave them a hand), and the prayer hall does feel fairly young, or modern, with the slanted angle of the ceiling, although the designers tried to incorporate traditional motifs as well, with a mihrab (the decorated wall that shows the qibla, or the direction of Mecca) which has borrowed elements from the famed mihrab of the mosque of Córdoba.

Like any mosque, there’s no furniture in the prayer hall, just a vast tract of flat carpet; this carpet was a rich red color, with ornamental lines marking row guidelines. (There must have been something underneath the carpet, too: it was impressively comfortable and squishy.) The mihrab featured a caliphate horseshoe arch (un arco de herradura califal), as I’ve learned from my Islamic Art and Architecture class, with carved wood in flowery (ataurique) designs.

We stayed there awhile while our guide gave us a history of what sounded like an Islamic Renaissance in Andalucía: in the mid-seventies in southern Spain a small group of truth-seekers (hippies and the like) converted to Islam and formed a small community of about forty people, half of them men, half women. They received some unexpected publicity when, in the early eighties, they asked the leaders of the cathedral of Córdoba (the cathedral that once was the mosque of Córdoba) if they could pray there in the building. The powers that were agreed, but, completely unforeseen by the small group of Spanish Muslims, just when they went to the cathedral a giant tour group of hundreds of Turks came in. The delighted Turkish Muslims joined them in prayer, and the newspapers printed pictures of hundreds of Muslims filling up the hall. 

The movement has since grown and the original converts now have grandchildren. In fact, the twenty-seven year-old son of one of the original “founders” is now the Imam of the mosque in Granada. He’s fluent in Arabic and is a Hafiz, a special distinction in Islam for one who has memorized the entire Qur’an. Despite the efforts to homegrow Islam, replanting the Muslim roots that were severed here by the Moorish eviction five hundred years ago, a lot of the congregation is pulled from Spain’s considerable immigrant population, North Africans and Middle Easterners, etc.  

Later we toured the other half of the mosque, which you can only get to by going all the way around the block. It includes a library for Islamic studies, which featured the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen: shelves and shelves of books in series which were meant to be set together, because their spines featured exquisite gilded Arabic calligraphy that could only be read when the books were lined up in order. There were countless series of books like this, with the writing flowing out over twenty different books’ spines. Absolutely exquisite.

There was also a conference room and a multipurpose room, the latter of which we sat down in. The room was carpeted in Persian style, with movable cushions for sitting on. Our guide told us that later in the day they were going to be having a meal for over two hundred people there in the mosque, and the men would be eating in this room. (Yes, he told us, the men and women would be segregated. He went on and on, explaining why this was a good thing, but several in our group—myself included—didn’t seem convinced.) We could smell them preparing the couscous—it smelled incredible. A nice man brought out some ultrasweet Moroccan-style tea for us. And our guide talked.

When our guide had spoken to us in the prayer hall, it had been a bit long-winded, but okay; but this time he just went on and on on a rant about various pointless, but controversial, topics (how Jews were bankers because they were allowed to practice usury; how anarchists are dumb; how Wahhabi Islam—that sanctioned by the Saudi government—sucks; that Protestantism leads to Secularism and the breakdown of religion [uh, what?!--well, okay, maybe that's true in France, where 'Secularism' is anti-religion], etc.). The whole time he was a bit too impassioned, too much telling us about the joys of Islam (just the same as evangelical Christians do), just too much overall. (“We Muslims are the most inclusive because we recognize all the Prophets. That’s right, we recognize Jesus. We even recognize the virginity of Mary. Protestants don’t. So we’re more Catholic than the Protestants!” [He said that word-for-word. But no, I didn’t correct him. He was really into his rant and I didn’t want to tangle with him.]) Part of it was also that this is a class of all Arab Studies majors (except me), and everyone’s studied Islam extensively; but he didn’t know that, and made it his personal mission to educate us on how Islam had been misrepresented in the Occident, as if we all thought that Muslims were terrorists or whatever. 

Well, after we’d been at the mosque for two and a half hours, and about half an hour into our guide’s second big rant, our professor cut in and apologized but said we had to go because we were going to be touring the hamam and we had to get going. I thought we were going to the baths, because in class our professor had mentioned we might see some other Islamic places of interest around the Albayzín after the mosque (I went to the hamam a while back—nothing to see, actually); but as soon as we’d rounded the corner, our professor turned to us and said, “Whew! God! Obviously we’re not going to the hamam. I just told him that to get us out of there. Now, who’s up for churros?”

Hilarious! I practically died with laughter. So, we went down the street and all got churros and chocolate, and as we were eating my professor and a few of the students went on rants about our guide, the parts of his monologues they’d taken offense to, etc. We’d all been extremely polite in the mosque, of course, but I guess we’d all been thinking the same thing all along.

Now, to Córdoba. We were only there for a few hours, all of which were spent at the mosque-cathedral (which is often referred to in that way, in the hyphenated form). But hey, if you’ve only got a few hours in Córdoba, obviously that’s what you need to see.

The mosque-cathedral of Córdoba is the oldest preserved mosque in Spain, and the only that dates back before the year 1000. In fact, the mosque began to be constructed in 756, with the ascension of ‘Abd al-Rahman I, the Umayyad prince who escaped from Syria where the Abbasids were slaughtering all the Umayyads in a power grab. Muslims had already been in the Iberian peninsula since 711, but ‘Abd al-Rahman I marked the beginning of the Independent Umayyad Emirate (as opposed to the “Dependent” emirate of prior). The mosque was built on the ruins of a Visigoth church (so it goes). Construction continued for two hundred years, most markedly under the supervision of Hixam I, ‘Abd al-Rahman II, Al-Hakam II, ‘Abd al-Rahman III and Almanzor.

Almanzor, who wasn’t part of the dynasty at all, was something of a usurper; the heir to the sultanate was a preteen, and the regent Almanzor took the throne for himself. Well, under his rule Al-Andalus devolved into a civil war, and that was the end of the caliphate right there, at least for a few hundred years. 

All these various sultans were responsible for significant add-ons and modifications to the mosque. I give Al-Hakam II credit for the prettiest room, with the unique double mihrab he designed (mihrab = the wall that shows the orientation towards Mecca) which features amazing “intercrossed arches” (arcos intercruzados). 

[An interesting note: the mosque is actually not correctly oriented towards Mecca: instead of pointing East, it points South. There are various theories about why this is the case, with some believing that ‘Abd al-Rahman I chose for it to be that way is because he wanted it to point instead to Syria, his homeland.] 

Almanzor gets credit for the biggest addition of all, doubling the entire place; but his work is by far the shoddiest, just rows of identical columns copied from the previous rooms, and because he had a strained budget, instead of using brick for the red-white striped arch design, he just had them paint the arches red to look like brick. Seriously cutting some corners there! 

‘Abd al-Rahman I’s original prayer hall gets second place after Al-Hakam II’s; what makes it especially cool is that all the columns were “recycled,” taken from older, preexisting buildings. Which means that some of them are Roman or Visigoth, and no two columns are alike.

Why the grand mosque in Córdoba? Well, Córdoba was the capital of Al-Andalus (Muslim-ruled Spain) up until the dissolution of the caliphate in the civil war around the turn of the eleventh century, at which point Al-Andalus fractured into various city-states. Makes sense to make your grand mosque in your capital city the greatest of them all. 

Many of the old churches you can visit today in Andalucía were built on top of mosques once the Christians swept through with the “Reconquista” (a controversial term). The cathedral of Granada, for instance, was built over the “head mosque” (is there a term for that in English? In Spanish you’d say “la mezquita aljama”—basically, the cathedral-equivalent), and same goes for Sevilla, with the famous tower of Giralda constructed from the mosque’s minaret. Oftentimes the mosques would simply be demolished to make way for the churches (nice symbolism in that), but the Christians were also practical, too, and in other cases they used the preexisting structure and just built the churches over the mosques. In the case of the mosque of Córdoba, the reason we still have it today is because it was so pretty the Christians couldn’t bear to tear it down, and instead just built their cathedral inside it.

Which brings us to the extremely weird thing about this building. You’re walking along in this quiet, dimly-lit, cool place—it’s all marble, rows and rows of columns and arches (there is a row of arches built on top of the first row of arches, and they’re all in alternating red and white stripes of brick and marble respectively)—and suddenly you emerge beneath a blindingly-bright dome, enormous with windows letting in light galore, and everything is painted white and glows. This is the cathedral. Everything is ornamental and gilded and carved marble, just like you expect to find in cathedrals. There are saints and cherubs. One chapel area was all extremely dark wood, almost black, which provided an interesting contrast.

The cathedral was jarring, compared to what surrounded it, and unremarkable for me in comparison to the mosque (big and like any other cathedral I’ve seen), but I guess I should be grateful for it, because otherwise the mosque wouldn’t have survived. I can’t feel bitter towards the Christian conquerors, either, because that’s the story of Andalucía: everyone gets conquered and reconquered (remember, the mosque was originally built over a church), and that’s the way it is.

An incredible building, and extremely unique. Really a wonder of the world.

(I know all this thanks to my wonderful Islamic Art and Architecture class. I’ve really learned and retained a lot from it.)

Much love!