Iberia (32 page)

 

If I had been disappointed in Córdoba’s Great Mosque, the
contrary was true in Granada, for the Alhambra was much lovelier
and much more Muslim than I had anticipated. I think what
pleased me most in the buildings was the subtle manner in which
one memorable room or hall led quietly into the next, as if an
intricate musical composition were unfolding with always the
right notes appearing where they were needed. One moves
through this extensive collection of architectural highlights as if
he were in a dream, in which one gentle surprise lures him on to
the next.

 

It is not my intention to describe the buildings of the Alhambra,
since it has already been well done. I was amused, however, to
discover in an alcove of the Courtyard of the Myrtles, with its
large reflecting pool, the shell of Santiago used as an ornamental
device. There it was: the symbol of the force that would drive
Islam from Spain built into the final palace, as if the Muslims had
foreseen their own expulsion. And in a room off the Courtyard
of the Lions, I found the Star of David, because as I said before,
in Spain one finds old memories at unexpected places.

 

I think the most beautiful thing I saw among the buildings was
the passageway leading from the Courtyard of the Myrtles to the
Courtyard of the Lions, because here the architect was faced with
a universal problem: how to relate two unrelated spaces? He solved
it by placing two doorways of radically different widths side by
side, then uniting them with one lintel, whose ends dropped down
around the sides of the doors, and covering the entire with
handsome carving. When I looked at the two doors everything
about them seemed wrong; a child could have designed them
better, but only a great artist could have juxtaposed them so as
to achieve an effect so right and good. I studied them for a long
time, because in my own work I have often tried to attain a similar
result. It seems to me that any writer should be able to produce
‘a well-constructed English novel’; it takes someone like the
Alhambra architect to slap together disparate items and make
them sing, and if I have not always been successful in my own
efforts, I know success when someone else achieves it.

 

I was surprised at the flimsy construction of the buildings. Is
there another structure of comparable importance put together
with such contempt for permanence? The ceilings, whose stalactite
traceries are so exquisite, are nothing but stucco whose points
one could knock off with a knuckle, and the walls of delicate
geometric pattern are built up of plaster exactly as one would
build up the decoration of a wedding cake and of not much greater
permanence. That the palaces of the Alhambra have survived for
seven hundred years is astonishing; when one sees how fragile
they are, one better understands how vast areas like Medînat
az-Zahrâ and caliphate Córdoba have vanished. The surprising
thing is that any Muslim remains have survived.

 

The Courtyard of the Lions was as pure a work of art as I had
been told, for there the inventive architects had converted a
collection of slim marble columns and filigreed arches into a
garden of stone which includes that handsome twelve-sided
fountain protected by a pride of granite lions who look more like
friendly puppy dogs than jungle beasts.

 

Turning a corner on one of the upper floors, I came upon the
plain notice: ‘In these quarters Washington Irving wrote his
Tales
of the Alhambra
in the year 1829.’ It was easy to visualize the
bachelor lawyer, embassy official and future ambassador to Spain
ensconced in these rooms with their cloistered balcony of marble
columns overlooking the hills and caves of Granada. The
workroom looked onto a patio with tall cypresses and a chattering
fountain built up from a square inscribed with a circle, and it
must have been a romantic place for a man with Irving’s
imagination; one can understand the flowery visions he
entertained here.
Tales of the Alhambra
, composed in a few weeks’
time, swept the English-speaking world and made its author
famous. Irving was partial to the Muslims as contrasted to the
Christians, and his slight tales, often no more than mood pieces,
had considerable effect upon subsequent historical judgment;
one could not read Irving, especially his more substantial
Conquest
of Granada
, without becoming an advocate of Islam and a
mourner over its expulsion.

 

There is no place better, I think, than Irving’s rooms in the
Alhambra for weighing the moral significance of the Muslim
occupation of Spain, and here I tried to reach a judgment. I had
always been much disposed toward the Muslims, both in Spain
and elsewhere, and I had once written an essay on Muhammad
that had gained approval in various countries of the Muslim
world. I had lived in six different Islamic countries—Turkey,
Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Malaya and Indonesia—and had
visited half a dozen others. I had schooled myself in at least the
outlines of Islamic philosophy, poetry and art and found myself
sympathetic to the Muslim view of life.

 

I was therefore susceptible to the Washington Irving point of
view that Spain had called down upon herself a sad retribution
when she expelled the Moors; special damage had been done to
her intellectual and agricultural life, and from this she had not
recovered. Certainly, post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning
sustantiated this: as long as the Muslims were in Spain and making
their contribution to Spanish life, Spain stood at the head of
nations, but coincident with the expulsion of the Moors, starting
in 1492 and ending in 1609, began that long decline which the
country has not yet reversed.

 

In an out-of-the-way inn in a different part of Spain, I had
come upon a three-volume book of travels published in 1829,
entitled
A Year in Spain
and attributed to ‘A Young American.’
Who he was I did not know, but whatever college he attended
had taught him fine writing; his sentences were some of the longest
and most polished I had read and his reflections on the Conquest
of Granada were typical of the attitudes which I had inherited:

Though this victory of Ferdinand and Isabella was a Christian
triumph, in name at least, it was not a triumph of humanity; and
if the philanthropist or the colder economist, speculating with a
view to utility alone, were to inquire what use Christian Spain had
made of her dear-bought conquest, and how far the aggregate
happiness of mankind and the interests of civilization had been
promoted by the extermination of an heroic, ingenious, and
industrious people, a picture of fraud, cruelty, and oppression
would be presented, as frightful as the world has ever witnessed,
and followed by consequences equally ruinous to the oppressors
and the oppressed.

(Upon my return to America, I learned through the kindness of
the librarian at The Hispanic Society of America that the author
of this book was Alexander Slidell [1803-1848], the younger
brother of that famous John Slidell of New York City, who, after
graduating from Columbia College in that city, wound up as
United States senator from Louisiana, a post he surrendered when
Louisiana withdrew from the Union at the start of the Civil War.
As a diplomatic representative of the Confederacy, the older Slidell
earned a place in history when the northern navy lifted him from
a British ship in which he was traveling to Europe, thus
precipitating an incident which nearly brought Great Britain into
the war on the side of the Confederacy. Alexander Slidell published
his book on Spain at the age of twenty-six; three years later, on
August 20, 1832, the Spanish King Fernando VII issued a royal
decree banning him from Spain because of intemperate remarks
he had made against the country. In 1838 Slidell added the name
Mackenzie and was henceforth known as Slidell Mackenzie. In
1842, after three of his sailors were detected in a mutiny,
Mackenzie hung the trio from the yardarm of his ship, thus
involving himself in a scandal, since one of the hanged men was
the son of the Secretary of War. Seven years after the publication
of his first book on Spain, he issued a second,

Spain Revisited
,
which would indicate that the ban against him had been lifted
after the death of King Fernando.)

By training and inclination I was disposed to agree with Slidell
Mackenzie’s attitude on the Muslim expulsion, but recently I had
come upon Bertrand and Petrie’s refreshing history, and
Bertrand’s austere judgments on Muslim Spain derived from his
experience and study in the Muslim colonies of French North
Africa. Bertrand knew Muslim culture and history in a way that
Washington Irving and the anonymous ‘Young American’ never
did, and his acerb views are a corrective to their romanticizing.
One of Bertrand’s repeated cautions is that we must be suspicious
of pro-Muslim writing because its real intention is anti-Catholic;
Protestant writers had found in the banished Muslims a
convenient club for beating Spaniards: ‘To judge Islamic
civilization reasonably, it is important not to let ourselves be
carried away by the hyperbolical admiration, the preconceptions,
and the prejudices of those who exalt Arab-Spanish culture to an
exaggerated extent only in order to degrade Catholic Spain in
proportion.’

I recommend especially Bertrand’s four-page chapter ‘The
Balance-Sheet of the Arab Conquest,’ in which he summarizes
his conclusions: Spain owed three positive debts to the Muslims.
The concept of the university was Muslim, even though the
teaching was “terrible in its verbalism and almost entirely
theological.’ Muslim art also exerted a strong influence, as did
Muslim poetry. More important, however, were the negative
influences upon Spanish character, and these manifested
themselves in various ways. The excessive individualism of the
Spaniard, his tendency toward anarchy, is a Muslim inheritance
‘to such a point that half a dozen Spaniards could not find
themselves together in a fort or a caravel without at once forming
two or three parties bent upon destroying one another.’ Especially
destructive to the Spanish character was ‘the sinuosity of these
Africans and Asiatics,’ for from this developed the Spaniard’s
tendency toward bad faith and the breaking of his word. The
bloodthirsty rapacity of the Spaniard and his lust for gold are
directly attributable to his contact with the Muslim, as is the
custom of keeping women behind bars. The worst of the borrowed
characteristics was the parasitism of the nomads whereby living
off one’s neighbor became an acceptable practice, but almost as
bad was the habit of putting the conquered to fire and sword
which the Muslims introduced into the peninsula. Bertrand
concludes his dismal summary by citing two influences that were
particularly destructive and persistent: the cruelty of the Muslim
warrior, which became the cruelty of the Spaniard, and the
incapacity of the Muslim to organize a government or to run it
methodically. ‘The traveler through the mournful solitudes of La
Mancha feels only too intensely that the Berbers of Africa have
passed that way.’

Elsewhere he makes an additional point of great importance.
Conceding that agriculture declined when the Moors were
expelled, he warns against interpreting this as proof of Muslim
accomplishment, because wherever the Moors went they destroyed
agriculture; they did not promote it. The secret was that the good
agriculture of the Moorish period was attributable to Spanish
farmers using Spanish methods. They had converted to Islam,
but when the Moors left, they left too, out of loyalty to their new
religion. Bertrand’s final comment is unqualified: ‘On balance,
it can fairly be said that the Muslim domination was a great
misfortune for Spain.’

If I were forced to choose between the sentimentalities of
Washington Irving and the hard analysis of Louis Bertrand, I
would be inclined toward the latter, but I suspect that Bertrand’s
strictures are somewhat more harsh than truth would dictate, for
I detect in his argument more a defense of France’s contemporary
policy vis-à-vis the difficult Muslims of North Africa than a
concern for Spain’s historic problems with those same people. It
seems to me that Bertrand underemphasizes the artistic
accomplishments of the Muslims while overstressing their cruelty;
but on one point he is eminently sound and it is one that has not
been stressed before: that Spain’s proven incapacity to govern
herself in the responsible French-English-American pattern is
due primarily to her extended experience with Muslims, who
fragmented their own holdings into a score of petty principalities
and who prevented Spain from doing otherwise until the habit
became so ingrained that regional economic separatism became
the curse of Spanish life, whether in the homeland or in the
Americas. It is this dreadful heritage of anarchy that keeps the
Spanish republics of our hemisphere in confusion.

I was restrained from accepting all of Bertrand’s conclusions
by a curious experience I was having in the Alhambra. Whenever
I was tempted to agree that the Moors were as bad as Bertrand
said, I would close my books and walk out into the gardens, and
there I would find myself face to face with that hideous stone
palace which Carlos V had caused to be built in the middle of the
grounds and juxtaposed to the loveliest of the Alhambra palaces.
One sight of that monstrous edifice, better suited to a cliff along
the Rhine than to Granada, satisfied me that although the Moor
may have had faults, he also had taste; this castle was so alien to
the spirit of the Alhambra that no reconciliation of Spanish ideals
and Moorish was possible.

The castle boasts a façade that is grotesquely ugly, as if someone
had set out to burlesque the worst taste of the time. Its lower
ranges consist of massive stones cut in that style which leaves the
central area six or eight inches higher than the edges, producing
an effect of brute strength, while the upper portions consist of
some of the heaviest and most overly ornamented windows I had
ever seen. Since the sides of the building form a square, what one
has is an undigested cube of rock, and whoever designed it failed
to realize that when plumped down beside the delicate Moorish
palaces upon which it encroaches, it could only look ridiculous.
There were reasons to forgive the intrusion of the cathedral in
the middle of Córdoba’s Great Mosque, but the Carlos V castle
in the Alhambra can have no justification.