 Walking around Cordoba’s sleepy alleyways these days it can be hard to imagine that this was once one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, a centre of learning and trade that was rivalled only by Damascus and Baghdad. This Andalusian city of 300,000 is justifiably proud of its Roman and Moorish history, the wonderful tangle of its old Jewish quarter and its wealth of churches and chapels. But it has long been overshadowed by the charms of Seville and Granada, and the tourists who make the journey up here, to the higher reaches of the Guadalquivir River, are lured only by a desire to see the Great Mosque.
Mention ‘La Mezquita’ (The Mosque) to a Spaniard anywhere in the country and he will know exactly which mosque you are talking about. It is almost as if, even today, there is still only one worth mentioning west of Mecca.
Entering La Mezquita from the sun-dappled courtyard of Patio de los Naranjos, you find yourself in a forest of cool marble columns. It takes a minute for your eyes to adjust to the shadowy light, and still longer for your mind to make sense of the rows upon rows of columns that march into the distance. From any point you can see perhaps four hundred pillars. Each has been polished by the caressing hands of over a thousand years of visitors but many date back much further, to Visigoth churches and Roman temples in Spain, Portugal and Africa. Above the pillars double sets of red-and-white striped arches fan out, creating an illusion of weightlessness and giving the impression that you have entered an immense grove of petrified palms.
 Building began on the mosque in 786 and during the next two centuries it was extended to accommodate the Muslim majority of a city that may have boasted a population of almost a million. Incredible as the building is today, you strain to imagine what it must have been like when this was a forest of 1,013 pillars and was open at all sides so that the bright Andalusian sunlight filtered in. It is perhaps surprising that the building survived the initial destruction when the Christians drove the Moors out in 1236 but it was not for another three hundred years that the ‘transparency’ of the mosque was finally overwhelmed. Then, in 1523, the last of the outer arches were bricked up to make space for the dusky alcoves of fifty minor chapels and the central 150 pillars were replaced by the great bulk of the main cathedral.
Emperor Carlos V anticipated the comments of countless modern-day visitors when, shortly after the construction of the cathedral’s (admittedly handsome) main altar, he complained: “What you have built here may be found in other places, but what you have destroyed was unique in the world.”
Set into the south-eastern wall you can still see the Mihrab (the ‘inner sanctuary’ that points the way to Mecca) but for almost eight hundred years the Great Mosque has been a cathedral, reserved solely for Catholic worship. Then, last year, the president of the Islamic Junta of Spain, Mansur Escudero, travelled to the Vatican to issue a petition for the rights of Muslims to pray in a part of La Mezquita.
 “After five centuries of persecution, religious freedom is now a part of the Spanish constitution,” Escudero explained when I met him at his headquarters in the village of Almodóvar del Río. “Cordoba is a World Heritage Site - supposedly a paradigm of coexistence, as it was in the time of Al Andalus - and it creates a very negative impression that Muslims are not allowed to treat the Great Mosque with the respect it deserves.”
Back in the Patio de los Naranjos I had met Gzaia Altrabeen, an Israel Muslim student. Unaware of the restrictions enforced by the church authorities, Gzaia had been reprimanded by cathedral security guards when she tried to kneel twice as a sign of respect upon entering the mosque.
“It seems very strange to me,” she said, “it’s like forbidding a Catholic to cross herself when she goes in.”
One of the cathedral guards admitted that such incidents happen virtually every day and that occasionally the restrictions lead to forced evictions.
But there have been several notable exceptions to these rules over the years. In 1974 Franco gave permission for none other than Saddam Hussein to pray in La Mezquita, and in 1983 the doors were opened to Cordoba’s Muslim community (then numbering scarcely two hundred) to celebrate the ‘Feast of the Lamb.’
At the height of Cordoba’s fame - when the Guadalquivir was a navigable river for 400 miles to the sea - the city was said to have 1,600 mosques. Today it might be almost as rich in churches, chapels and the numerous shrines to Cristos and Madonas that adorn the city’s glaring white-washed walls. Even in a country where 97% of the population is baptised into the Roman Catholic Church, the Andalusians are renowned for being particularly fervent worshippers.
 There are an estimated half-million Muslims in Spain today and inter-racial tension has increased as immigrants (mostly from Morocco) have swarmed into agricultural areas of Andalucía. In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s call to ‘reclaim Al Andalus’ Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Vatican’s Pontiff for Inter-religious Dialogue, voiced worries that the Islamic Junta’s petition could be interpreted in a ‘spirit of Muslim revenge or re-conquest in Al Andalus.’
Just as the church authorities claim that there are insurmountable problems involved in using a consecrated Cathedral for other religions, so there are Muslims who say that an edifice which houses icons and effigies, specifically of animals - not to mention the statue of Santiago ‘the Moor-slayer,’ smiting infidels from horseback - is unfitted for use as a mosque.
Mansur Escudero disagrees: “When the Moors first arrived in 711 there was a Visigothic Church on the spot where La Mezquita now stands and, for three generations, Muslims shared the building with the town’s Christian population. It was only when it got too overcrowded that Abderramán I bought the Christian half and built the mosque. The Cordoba of those days was famed for a spirit of co-existence in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony and mutual respect.
“It is something to be ashamed of that, at the beginning of the new millennium, we have drifted so far from the ideals that were considered obvious in Al Andalus as to think that such co-existence is now impossible!”
Five other great relics of Al Andalus:
1) Alhambra, Granada
Granada was the last Moorish city to fall to the Christian conquerors (in 1492) and the Sultan Boabdil wept as he and his army retreated over the mountains back to Africa. The Alhambra palace with its gardens, fountains, soaring red walls and beautifully sculpted ceilings, as fine as petrified lacework, remains the greatest sight of Moorish Andalucía.
2) The Alcázar and Giralda, Seville
The royal palace of the Alcázar dates back to 913 but its greatest era came with the taifa rulers of the 11th century when it was known as Al-Muwarak (The Blessed). The 91m Giralda minaret, now the bell-tower of the cathedral, was the prototype for all Moorish minarets and its dimensions were reproduced even in the Koutoubia minaret of Marrakech.
3) Medina Azahara, Cordoba
Founded by Abd al-Rahman III in 936 the palace-city of Medina Azahara may be the greatest that the world has ever seen. Contemporary chroniclers said that the roof was supported by 4,313 pillars, that the sultan had 400 rooms here, and that there were quarters for 4,000 domestic slaves and 6,000 women. A munitions factory was said to turn out 20,000 arrows a month…but this was apparently insufficient to fend off the Berber rebels who sacked the palace in 1010. (Much of Medina Azahara is still to be excavated).
4) Albayzín, Granada
With its labyrinth of steep cobbled alleyways, Granada’s Albayzín quarter remains Andalucía’s most atmospheric and complete medina. The windows of old noble houses (now private villas) are still jealously guarded by Arabic lattices, and palms and cypresses rise out of typical Moorish courtyards that are known here as Cármenes.
5) Alpujarras
Nobody who has travelled among the flat-roofed, tightly-knit hamlets of Morocco’s Rif Mountains can fail to see the unmistakable kinship between these communities and the white villages on the southern flanks of Spain’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. The lower slopes of Mount Mulhacén, painstakingly terraced for almond, fig and olive trees, are still watered by complex irrigation systems that were perfected by the desert people who farmed here for almost eight hundred years. |
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