Granada (1994)
Radwa Ashour (1946-2014)
467 pages
According to the old adage, history is written by the victors. And so it goes with works on Moorish Spain that describe the Arab Conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and the subsequent Castilian Reconquest through to its final victory in 1492. The Moors in such histories seem mainly represented by the designations of the successive groups of warriors that arrived over the centuries from North Africa, and the battles they fought. This continues in the period after the Moors’ final defeat: although texts may acknowledge and describe the increasingly punitive repression Muslim (and Jewish) populations suffered at the hands of the victorious Castilians, the profound impact on everyday Muslims tends to get lost in analytical prose.
The story opens in 1492, as the Muslim king of Al-Andalus, the last region in Spain to remain in Arab control, surrenders his capital, Granada, to the Castilians. Among the population of Muslims experiencing the wrenching overthrow of their world is the bookseller Abu Jaafar, who lives in his ancestral home in Granada with his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren, as well as two orphans he has adopted. With the surrender of Granada to the Castilians, the family suddenly find themselves at the mercy of their new Christian rulers.
When the Castilian regime begins outlawing – and burning – Muslim texts, Abu Jaafar reacts by hiding what books he can in a second home his family owns outside the city, expecting this to be only a temporary setback to be weathered. But, as the edicts against Muslims become even more severe, and Christians begin physically coercing Muslims to convert or leave Al-Andalus, he shrinks inward, crushed by the weight of religious disillusionment at the Muslim’s apparent abandonment by God:
Before going to bed that night he said to his wife, “I will die naked and alone, because God does not exist.”
And he died. (45)
From this opening sequence, Ashour proceeds to tell the story of five generations of Abu Jaafar’s family as they struggle under ever more draconian rules applied to the Muslim population, experience first-hand the seemingly boundless cruelty of the Inquisition and, finally, a little more than a century after the fall of Granada, face expulsion from the peninsula and so the irretrievable loss of the only homes and homeland they have ever known.
From the distance of the dry facts of the history of Moorish Spain, it can be hard to fully grasp the shock the loss of Granada, and so Al-Andalus, had on the Muslim population. Consider, however, that North African armies first arrived in 711, quickly moving to occupy all but a thin, northern sliver of the peninsula. Their ruling presence, at least in Al-Andalus, lasted until 1492, some 800 years, a length of time that perhaps first truly hits home when one considers that it represents more than 30 generations of Muslim families living and working on the peninsula – for Americans: more than two centuries longer than the period from Columbus landing in the New World up to the present day!
Through the lives of Abu Jaafar and his family, Ashour eloquently evokes the incredulity of the Muslim population on the peninsula at the loss of their centuries’ old homeland. Perhaps most disorienting for them, it was not a sudden, complete obliteration of what they had known; in the first years after the surrender of Granada, their lives continued on, changed by their new rulers, but initially not so dramatically: they maintained their homes, their mosques and the ability to practice many of their traditions. The loss of all this came bit by bit, piece by piece, as the Christian regime squeezed them ever harder, making their lives ever more bitter and constrained. The changes came slow enough that the Muslims could continue to hope that a fresh Arab army from North Africa or the Middle East might come to reestablish dominance over the Castilians – support that never came, of course. (Here again an example, I suppose, of what a professor once told me: hope is the last resort of fools and dreamers.)
As someone of western European heritage, and with a (marital) connection to present-day Spain, Granada can be a disorienting read. The sufferings and losses of Abu Jaafar’s family, and the Muslim community more generally, in the presence of the Christian population’s increasing acts of racism against the Muslims and the extreme brutality of the Christian Inquisition with its deadly, Catch-22 trials – truly damned if you admit to anything, and damned if you don’t – inspire sympathy. (This, even in the face of Ashours’ inclusion of a grim subplot, in which one of Abu Jaafar’s ancestors, having escaped Granada to settle in a small village, laments the ostracism and eventual murder of a woman by her family for a perceived shame – a cultural tradition of honor killings that continues to play out even today.)
And yet, sympathy for what the Muslim community suffered and lost comes up against the ineluctable fact that the modern Spanish culture that I know and love wouldn’t be there, at least as I have come to experience it, if the Reconquest had not succeeded.
In that sense, the story also raises a thought-provoking, counterfactual question, based on a recognition of how deeply entrenched the Muslim culture was in the peninsula by the 1400’s: what might our modern world look like if the Muslim rulers had held control of the region? It has been well-documented that a golden age occurred (if admittedly sometimes exaggerated) in the centuries before Granada fell, as described in books such as Moorish Spain (by Richard Fletcher) and The Ornament of the World (by María Rosa Menocal), both of which I read before I began writing these reviews, but that I can highly recommend. The mix of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars in Iberia during this period of Muslim rule led to the transfer of a wide-range of learnings from the Middle East into Europe, including the reintroduction of ancient Greek classics that had long been lost and the spread of important mathematical concepts, helping Europeans finally climb out of the Middle Ages.
If Muslims had continued their rule, would the many scholarly interactions and such relatively peaceful relations on the peninsula between people of the three religious traditions have influenced Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa (and the Middle East) in a way that led to a moderating of the subsequent violent behavior of both to each other, from the Crusades on? Or would full control of the peninsula have merely served as a jumping off point for Arab occupation of larger portions of the continent? The Arabs had been stopped in 732, in a battle in southern France, but perhaps could have eventually renewed their push up into the rest of Europe, if the Reconquest had not been successful.
These just some of the reflections triggered by this wonderful novel from Radwa Ashour. By helping Western readers understand and identify with the disenfranchisement of the Muslims of Al-Andalus as individuals reacting to a homeland suddenly controlled by the Christian Castilians, Ashour opens a window into another culture. Granada takes us beyond histories focused on the broad strokes of power and conflict of the period, revealing the day-to-day indignities and losses suffered by the Muslim population.
Other notes and information:
The effects of the heartbreak and misery experienced by Abu Jaafar’s family, especially as it came to be ever more deeply impacted, reminded me of the profound melancholy evoked by Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s Weeping Song.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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