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photo religion Spain

The Crusades Continue

Of all the verbal gaffes of former President George W. Bush, few come to mind that were more controversial and troubling as his use of the word “Crusade” to describe our war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. [Perhaps to call it a gaffe–rather than a sort of Freudian slip or intentional political ploy–is generous.] The problem with the word is of course that by comparing the war in Iraq to a historical war waged in the name of religion by Christians against Muslims, Bush suggested that the motive for the modern war was also religious, a continuation of some sort of historical feud between Christianity and Islam. And, coming from a man who professed to hold deeply evangelical Christian beliefs and who was supported by most of America’s radically religious right, this–that there was some sort of religious basis for the war–seemed all too plausible (especially after we failed to discover WMD).

(Let me be clear (as our newly-inaugurated President is apt to say): We are not destined to a “clash of civilizations.” Periods of peaceful, pragmatic coexistence are just as common in the past as incidents of religious conflict. And, if you consider every time the banner of religion is carried as a standard into war, there is usually an equally compelling economic or demographic force that lay under.)

At the time of the earliest Crusades, southern Iberia was very much a part of the Muslim world, in full control of the Almoravid and other Moorish dynasties; the Crusades action took place all the way across the Mediterranean. But Crusades-like Christian/Muslim violence made its way to the Iberian Peninsula, and by the end of the thirteenth century, Christian kingdoms had reduced Moorish holdings in Iberia to more or less modern Andalusia. Even before the time Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista with the defeat of Granada in 1492, Moorish rule was reduced to isolated cities surviving essentially as tributaries to the Castilian crown.

Ferdinand and Isabella. Some Spaniards today may think of them as heroes of the Reconquista, and Americans may think of them as the visionaries who financed the discovery of the New World, but I can’t help but think of them as the Milosevic of their day. Putting aside the actual conquest itself–territorial conquest was of course much more of an accepted norm back in those days–the ethnic cleansing that Ferdinand and Isabella undertook, most infamously in the Alhambra Decree that expelled all Jews from Iberia (the Sephardic diaspora). Their tools in creating a Christian Spain were forced conversion and expulsion–of people who were native to Iberia and whose ancestors had lived there for *hundreds* of years. It is no wonder that these were also the rulers responsible for genocide and the institutionalization of race slavery in the New World.

Unfortunately, I am sorry to report, a Crusades mentality continues in the Catholic Church of Spain, at least in Cordoba. As I mentioned in my previous post, Cordoba is home to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, a tenth century wonder of a mosque that celebrated Cordoba’s status as the capital of the Umayyads in Spain. In the early 13th century, after the conquest of Cordoba by the (Christian) Castillians, the church decided to convert the mosque into a cathedral. Perhaps recognizing that no building that they built could quite replace the mosque as an architectural achievement, they cut a huge rectangle into its halls to build a church *into* the building. The effect is somewhat surreal–you enter a mosque and at some point suddenly find yourself in a typical Catholic cathedral–but the construction project was also in its way a sort of compromise between historic preservation and establishing the primacy of the Catholic Church. [See posts of  2008.11.10, 2009.02.01, and 2009.03.23 on reuse of religious sites.]

That said, the Archdiocese of Cordoba has produced a totally reprehensible pamphlet that serves as tourists’ main guide to the building. Perhaps ashamed of the fact that today the construction of the church inside the mosque is viewed as a sort of architectural crime, and that the church inside is of far lesser interest to the average visitor than the atmospheric remains of the mosque, the pamphlet is little more than a religious diatribe commemorating the victory of Christian over Muslim, an “us versus them” that is disconcerting to read in the European Union of today:

“It was a joyful day for the entire Christendom, when the Great Mosque, an Islamic temple without equal in the world, which was renowned for its artistic beauty and its symbolic value for the world of Western Islam in terms of political and religious importance, was purified and sanctified with Christian rites after the reconquest of the city by the hands of Saint Ferdinand III, and transformed into a Church of Jesus Christ, dedicated to the Mother of God.”

“It is a historical fact that the basilica of San Vincente was expropriated and destroyed in order to build what would later be the Mosque, a reality that questions the theme of tolerance that was supposedly cultivated in the Cordoba of the moment.” [It is true that the mosque was built on the site of a former church, but it is likely that there was negotiation–whether completely fair we do not know of course–over the site. The relative levels of tolerance in the age of the Moors and during the Inquisition is beyond dispute.]

“It was a matter of recuperating a scared space that had suffered the imposition of a faith that was distant from the Christian experience. . . . Thus the reforms of the Cathedral were motivated by the need to restore the cult that had been interrupted by Islamic domination, and they were a response to the desire of contemplating Christian symbols, or the inconvenience of celebrating the Liturgy amid a sea of columns.”

“Thus the beauty of the Cathedral of Cordoba does not reside in its architectural grandeur, but in the apostolic succession of the Bishop as a symbol of his pastoral service and the unity of the Church, founded upon the Word of the Lord, the sacraments, and the community of believers.”

This, from the people who were guilty of ethnic cleansing and the many other crimes of the Inquisition.

To end this post, some photos of the Great Mosque of Cordoba:

Outside the main building, a courtyard similar to that in Seville (see post of 2009.02.01) is accented with a minaret/steeple.

One of the many doorways–mosques often have many entrances to facilitate the at-times huge flow of people who rush in at the prescribed prayer times.

Inside, the colonnaded hall that is so famous and the landmark feature of the building. The bicolored arches are said to have been inspired by Roman/Byzantine architecture.


Byzantine mosaic also ornaments the spectacular mihrab, arguably the most spectacular ever made.


A look down one row of columns reveals the disruption in the building; while the columns continue in other directions, a huge rectangle in the building was cut open to build a soaring cathedral into the mosque, filled with light.

The work done to build the church of course required some disruptions in the original structure.

The church is a beautiful one, but the most surprising thing is how once inside it, it feels like a church that could be almost anywhere else–and not at all in the middle of a mosque. Sixteenth century King Carlos V reportedly said, “You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere else, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world.”

As the pamphlet repeatedly points out, before the mosque, there was actually a church on the site. The old mosaics of St. Vincent’s.

Categories
Morocco religion Spain

Reuse of Religious Sites II

In my post of 2008.11.10, I discussed a common phenomenon: the reuse of religious sites. In that post, I covered the Umayyad Mosque, a Pagan to Christian to Muslim conversion in Damascus; the Ayasofya, one of the greater Christian churches ever built, and now mosque/museum; and the Selimiye Mosque, an almost comical cathedral-turned-mosque in Cyprus. (That post is probably worth reading for some background and general thoughts on the practice.) Now a few months further into our trip, I thought I would revisit that topic, with some more examples.

Andalucia, Spain, where we are now, is one of the relatively few regions in the world where Islam (a relatively recent religion, compared to others) was at once dominant, but then overwhelmed by another faith. (The part of Palestine that is now Israel and parts of India come to mind as the only other major examples–other places that went Muslim stayed Muslim.)

Arab/Muslim influence on Spanish culture is not to be underestimated. In architecture, the decorative arts, language, music, dance and countless other aspects of civilization, the footprint of the Muslim period–after all, more than seven hundred years of history–is almost everywhere in Spain (and the New World, through Spain). Such iconic elements of Spanish culture such as ceramic tiling, flamenco and the cheer “Olé” are from the Muslim era in Iberia, as are words such as alcazar (al qasr) and ojalá (Allah). The mix of Christian Spanish and Muslim Arab brought us the great scientific and philosophical flowering called la Convivencia, which some believe helped usher in the European Renaissance through its introduction of classical and Eastern teachings into Western Europe. The Inquisition was successful in destroying this peaceful coexistence and its benefits, but even if essentially no Muslims (or Jews) were to remain in Spain, the brick and mortar of countless mosques survived the transition–as churches.

I am saving the greatest example of mosque-turned-church, the Mezquita or Great Mosque of Cordoba, for the next post, but below are pictures of other mosques and religious structures from the Muslim era, reused through to the present.

The church of Santa Maria la Mayor in Ronda may originally have been a Roman pagan temple and then a Christian church, but its most recent past life as a mosque is immortalized in the remains of a mihrab, visible inside.

Many church steeples in southern Spain clearly had past lives as minarets. The most celebrated is the tower of the Seville Cathedral, called La Giralda (first image), which is almost identical, save reornamentation on the uppermost levels, to the other minarets built by the Morocco-based Almoravids, such as the Koutoubia in Marrakesh (second image).

Below, a lesser minaret/steeple at San Sebastian church in Ronda

The minaret/steeple of San Juan church in Cordoba clearly reveals its much older age, compared to the rest of the church.

The minaret/steeple of San Marcos church in Seville. There are countless more examples.

Minarets are often the most recognizable survivors–presumably because the Christians found it convenient to keep such significant and majestic features, while they were willing to build a new church alongside–but other features also remain. Near the Giralda in Seville, a domed “koubba” of clearly Moorish origin (first image). A similar Almoravid “koubba” in Marrakesh that was part of the Ben Youssef Mosque complex was used for ablutions (second image).

The courtyard of the Seville Cathedral, known as the Plaza de las Naranjas (note that the Spanish–and English–words for the orange, like the fruit itself, came to the West through Persian/Arabic) clearly occupies the remaining open part of the main courtyard of the old mosque (compare to the courtyard of Cairo’s Mosque of ibn Tulun in the second picture below).

The use of the Moorish style in the interior of this chapel in San Pedro church of Seville argues that such styles can be said to be very much Spanish and in some sense native to Spain–as suitable for use in decorating a church as a mosque. Mozarabs (Christians living in Arab Iberia) and Mudejares (Muslims living in Christian Iberia) bridged a synthesis of culture that resulted in some of the greatest notes of la Convivencia, such as the Alhambra (post to come).

Categories
religion

Islamic and Muslim

Today’s post is a somewhat unusual one, a bit of a soapbox piece, a riff on a bit of linguistic usage to which I have grown more and more sensitive on this trip: the distinction between the words “Islamic” and “Muslim.” Now, to anyone who thinks about it for more than five seconds, the basic difference in meaning between the two words is pretty obvious: Islamic is an adjective that refers to something related to the religion of Islam, while Muslim is both an adjective and a noun, and means, in addition to something related to Islam, a practitioner and things related to such practitioners. That said, there are somewhat more subtle differences between the two words as currently used that merit analysis and present food for thought.

Let us consider the difference between the words “Islamic” and “Muslim” through the phrases the “Islamic world” and the “Muslim world.” To a large extent, these two phrases are used interchangeably–googling “Islamic world” takes you to the Wikipedia entry for “Muslim world” and I myself have been guilty of using both to refer to our current trip. And, in some strict semantic sense, the two phrases may be equivalent–they both refer to the parts of the world where Islam is the dominant religion or a dominant cultural force, where most people are Muslim. But I believe there is a meaningful difference in connotation that people need to be aware of.

To try to pry apart the potential difference between the two phrases, let us consider a correlative phrase: What comes to mind when you hear the “Christian world”? Initially, you might just think that the phrase refers to the countries where Christianity has been a dominant cultural force, i.e., Europe and places where Europeans settled, such as the Americas. If you think a little longer, though, your mind might make reference not only to place, but to a time: a time when the Christian religion was perhaps the most dominant cultural force–the Middle Ages. The most abiding image of the “Christian world,” I would argue, is Europe in the medieval era, perhaps even more specifically the Crusades. After all, why use religion (“Christian”) as a designator, unless you want to refer to the significance of religion in the place/time that you are designating? If no particular reference to Christianity is desired, you have the choice of alternate descriptions–including the “Western world,” which in the present refers to substantially the same geography as the “Christian world.” If you use the phrase the “Christian world,” you are probably using it because you want to make reference specifically to religion as *the* dominant cultural force.

Now, back to “Islamic” and “Muslim.” Because the Islamic/Muslim world stretches from Senegal and Mauritania in Africa, up to Bosnia and Turkey in Europe, through the Levant and the Gulf, into Central and South Asia and then out to Western China and Southeast Asia all the way to the southern Philippines, there is no easy non-religious way to describe the Islamic/Muslim world–no easy geographical alternative such as “Western.” We are forced to use the religion as the descriptor. However, just as with “Christian” in the phrase the “Christian world,” using the word “Islamic” or “Muslim” tends to emphasize religion–instead of just noting it as the common feature that distinguishes the region, a way of delineating geography, it makes religion appear to be *the* dominant force in the region, to make the places seem more religious than they actually are. Simply by referring to the region as a unit, we accidentally suggest the dominance of religion in the region–there is no “secular” way to refer to these places as a group.

Which is where the developed distinction between “Islamic” and “Muslim” comes in handy. I believe that the words “Islamic” and “Muslim” have developed in practice a similar relationship to each other as the words “Christian” and “Western.” “Islamic” focuses attention on the religion itself, the precepts of the faith; “Muslim” has become more general and almost geographical. For example, consider “Islamic art” and “Muslim art.” Islamic art is art somehow related to the faith of Islam, such as perhaps Quranic calligraphy or mosque architecture; Muslim art is art made by a Muslim or someone in the Muslim world (and may be rooted in traditions from the Muslim world, but not strictly religious ones). Does this distinction have any historical philological basis? Perhaps not, but it is a useful one nonetheless. “Islamic history?” The history of Islam. “Muslim history?” The history of Muslims.

In keeping with this, I believe that we should avoid “Islamic” whenever possible, unless referring specifically to the religion and its precepts, as it tends to highlight in a misleading and unhelpful manner the role of religion in Muslim societies. Yes, there is such a thing as Islamic law or Islamic finance, but just as often people use “Islamic” when trying to make reference to the region as a region, and not to the religion–in those cases, “Muslim” comes in as a better and more descriptive alternative, such as in the phrases “Muslim cinema” or “Muslim cultures.” Or, better yet, we should look beyond religion and recognize the usually more dominant cultural or national forces, and use more specific adjectives, such as “Arab” or “Persian” or “Turkic,” or “Saudi” or “Malaysian,” or even “Middle Eastern.” After all, how often do people hold “Christian art” exhibits, “Christian voices” festivals or workshops of literature by “Christian women” (other than those dealing specifically with religion)? The more we look upon the Muslim world as some sort of monolith driven by religion, the more confused and skewed our perspective becomes and the more likely that the Muslim world will feel it necessary to band together, in an unhelpful way, as victims of Western misrepresentation and persecution.

Categories
Egypt Jordan Mauritania Morocco Oman Syria United Arab Emirates

The Arab World

Morocco was the last Arab country on our itinerary, and so I thought it fitting to do a brief recap of the Arab world, as visited by us. (Note: The Arab world should not be confused with the Muslim world, which includes non-Arab Muslim places.) As “Arab” is, at its most basic level, an ethnic designator, my survey will focus on demographics and cultural identity within these states.

Our entry into the Arab world on this trip began with a stopover in the Gulf, in the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Not only by its membership in the Arab League and the (Arab) Gulf Cooperation Council, but also through its name, the UAE reminds us that it is Arab. And, given its location in the Arabian Peninsula, one could hardly disagree, on many levels. However, as most who have visited the UAE know, the UAE is a country that may be owned and operated for the benefit of the local Arabs–called Emiratis–but is primarily inhabited by outsiders (80% of the population), some of whom are Arabs from other parts of the Arab world, but most of whom (perhaps a majority of the population) are from the Indian Subcontinent. One proud Indian resident told us that Dubai is the most modern Indian city–and in some ways it is hard to dispute the description of Dubai as an Indian city. Could South Asians at some point overwhelm the locals and take over the country? Have they already? Oman, though also solidly “Arab,” and populated far more by “natives” than overseas workers, has a distinct cultural identity owing to its former colonial empire, and dark skinned Omanis of clearly African descent but Arab identity seem to fit in quite seamlessly into Omani society–a multicultural vision of what it means to be Arab.

From there we traveled to Syria and Jordan. There is a dost-protest-too-much quality to Syria’s official name, the Syrian Arab Republic. As I described in my posts of 2008.04.16 and 2008.04.25, Syria may be squarely in the center of Arab history, as the base of the Umayyad Caliphate responsible for most of the expansion of Arab identity and Islam, but the actual ethnic makeup of Syria, in some genetic sense, is incredibly diverse and clearly not the same as the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula. Basic awareness of history points out that the population must be not only of Arabian descent but of Phoenician, Greek, Persian, Turk and Roman (and perhaps even some Crusader and Mongol). Jordan is somewhat more Arabian, its royalty claiming descent from Mohammed, but the many Palestinians living in Jordan no doubt share the same genetic background as the Syrians.

After some more stops in the Gulf and a hiatus from the Arab world in the Turkic world (see post of 2008.11.05) and Iran-e Bozorg, or Greater Iran, by which I mean all of the areas in the Near East where Iranian languages are spoken, such as Afghanistan and Tajikistan (see posts of 2008.05.12 and 2008.06.12), as well as Muslim East Asia, we returned to the Arab world in Cairo.

Is the official name of Egypt–the Arab Republic of Egypt–as misleading as Syria’s? I would argue yes. Egypt, as the most populous country in the Arab League (more than twice as much as the next most populous country), may have a good claim to represent modern Arab identity today, but a comparison of the reliefs and paintings of Ancient Egypt–created hundreds and thousands of years before “Arab” existed as a significant cultural designator–with the faces of modern Egyptians shows that the population of the Nile seems to have remained largely constant. Egyptians may consider themselves Arabs, but they really are Egyptians first.

Again after leaving the Arab world, we returned in Mauritania, one of the newest members of the Arab League (see post of 2008.12.12), and one that somewhat straddles Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. This was followed by Morocco, a country that is increasingly recognizing its Berber identity as well as its Arab (see post of 2009.01.21).

***

Is there such a thing as the Arab world? A common sense of identity that the countries of the Arab League truly share? Yes, of course, but it is one of significant diversity–diversity of ancestry (with people of many different ancestries now claiming Arab ethnic and cultural identity), as well as diversity of religion (in particular the Christian populations of Egypt and the Levant, see posts of 2008.10.01 and 2008.04.16) and many minority groups (from the South Asians of the Gulf, see posts of 2008.04.03 and 2008.04.04, and the Kurds and Armenians of Syria, see post of 2008.04.16, to the black Africans of Mauritania, see post of 2008.12.12).

Categories
Morocco photo Spain United Kingdom

Gibraltar and Ceuta

The Rock of Gibraltar

Islands are often conquered by external powers. Two of the first British colonies in the New World were Roanoke and Jamestown, both islands. Europeans first established themselves in West Africa on the island of Goree just off of now Dakar. The African island of Zanzibar was held by the Portuguese and then the Omanis, as were the islands of Pemba and Lamu up the coast. Singapore and Hong Kong are both islands. The appeal of taking an island is obvious–an island is much more easily defended (some even had the advantage of being relatively unpopulated when “found”) but can still serve as a base for restocking ships or for forays into the mainland. On a relatively small piece of land can be built a formidable economic and administrative center. The extent to which one can develop an enduring and distinct social or political culture on an island is quite astonishing–consider that Arab Zanzibar lasted until 1964 and Hong Kong held by the British until 1997. Singapore remains an unchallenged, independent city-state and Taiwan is still controlled by the “Nationalist” Chinese, who have built a thriving, prosperous democracy just miles away from a rival many many many times its size.

And, it doesn’t take an island to accomplish these ends–a peninsula or “near-island” has also been used countless times. Examples include the city of St. Louis in now Senegal, Macau and the city of Bombay.

Our route from Morocco to Spain took us into two of the three odd territories in the region that are still examples of a “foreign” power in control of territory acquired in the colonial era: Spanish Ceuta on the African continent and British Gibraltar on the Iberian peninsula (the third is Spanish Melilla, also attached to Morocco). The colonial histories of Ceuta and Gibraltar go way back–Portugal or Spain has held Ceuta since the early 15th century, and Spain kept Ceuta even after it gave up its colonial control over (other) parts of Morocco, and the British have been in control of Gibraltar since the early 18th century, with its residents overwhelmingly rejecting Spanish sovereignty as recently as 2002–and in each the culture of the controlling power has taken deep root, battling against the geographical and demographic forces that will no doubt, over time, put stress on their statuses. How long will they last?

Some photos to consider the unique socio-political circumstances existing in Gibraltar and Ceuta.

Gibraltar’s Muslim history is recalled in the prominent white mosque built by the Saudis in 1997.

The name Gibraltar comes from Gibr Tariq, meaning Rock of Tariq, the Muslim Berber conqueror of Gibraltar and much of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century.

Other street names serve to remind you that you’re on British soil, like this avenue just in from the Spanish frontier.

British-style booths and bobbies, despite the fact that locals actually speak not English, but a language indistinguishable from Spanish.

Moorish-inspired architecture is a reminder that you are not only close to Spain, but the Arab world. Below, the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.

The Union Jack, flying on the Rock

The geography of Ceuta explains in part how long it has remained in control of a different power than the mainland. The border does not currently lie at the narrowest point, but the isthmus is still marked by medieval walls and moat.

Churches and mosques vie for space.

Ceuta is not only a bit of Spain in Africa but a bit of the European Union in Africa, an entry point for refugees and migrants from all over the continent. In the second picture, Moroccan workers commuting into Ceuta. Just as Moroccans commute to work in relatively wealthier Ceuta, many Spaniards and Gibraltarians living in Spain commute into Gibraltar.

Muslim woman, walking in downtown Ceuta

[Gibraltar and Ceuta are, geographically speaking, examples of near enclaves. For a list of similar places, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_enclaves_and_exclaves.

We passed near a couple other notable enclaves on our trip: Nahwa, now pay attention, a piece of the UAE inside a piece of Oman inside the UAE–we just *had* to make a detour here when we were in the UAE/Oman in April 2009–and the many enclaves of Central Asia. “Islands” of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan lie in Kyrgyzstan, islands of Kyrgyzstan in Uzbekistan and islands of Tajikistan in Uzbekistan–all this despite the fact that the ethnicities in these countries are totally mixed up anyway (see post of 2009.07.08). The enclaves appeared after the disintegration of the Soviet Union–had the practice of reuniting all ethnic groups with their ethnic name country continued, Central Asian boundaries would have been almost completely redrawn!

Categories
Morocco photo Spain

From Africa to Europe

As I’ve said before, one of the great things about overland travel is being able to experience the transitions between places. Places may appear as solid blocks of color, delineated by neat lines, on a map, but the reality is that places blend and bleed into each other. Derek used to remark how, when taking the New York subway, your location shifts as if by magic–as if by pneumatic tube, which of course some early subway systems were based on, you are whisked from one place to another, instantaneously and jarringly, without seeing any of the places in between. Each neighborhood exists in one’s mind as a certain radius around each subway entrance, unconnected to other neighborhoods. And so it is with air travel. I remember as a child reading the introduction to the book The Twenty-One Balloons, and its elegy on balloon travel. We may not have the teleportation it disdains, but travel by modern jet is similar–traveling by air disconnects us from what used to be a fundamental part of the travel experience, the “getting there.” In a world where you can fly direct from Paris to Mopti in Mali or from Verona to Samarkand, places until recently reached only by exerting extreme effort, there’s a lot to be said for avoiding air travel when possible.

We’ve completed two great overland stretches on our trip–from Shiraz, Iran to Xian, China, through the old Silk Road, and from Cairo, Egypt to Venice, Italy, through Palestine and Turkey, using one short flight to cross from Israel to Cyprus–and are nearing the end of our third, from Dakar, Senegal to Spain, crossing the Sahel and the Sahara. And today we took one of the most monumental and defining steps of that journey, the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar from Africa to Europe, a continental shift in geography and politics.

Morocco may lie in Africa and Spain in Europe, but of course even the most minor delving into the two countries identifies their close ties throughout history–history which ties almost all connected regions together, despite their apparent differences. In the case of Morocco and Spain, the two Mediterranean regions have often been part of the same cultural and political spheres, from the Carthaginians to the Romans to the Arabs. Even the break caused by the Reconquista and more recent times is being eroded by proximity and deeper historical cultural ties, as Moroccans emigrate northward and Europeans vacation and retire southward, and perhaps even more by technology, in the form of a futuristic tunnel connecting Andalucia to the North African coast.

So, by ferry, a farewell to Africa, and a welcome to Europe.

The line to get on the ferry, headcover helping to identify the ethnic Moroccans, perhaps travelers perhaps new immigrants perhaps citizens of Spain

The pillars of Hercules, in sculptural form

From mid-Strait, it’s possible to see Africa on one side and Europe on the other

Categories
Cyprus Egypt Morocco photo Uzbekistan

Walled Cities of the Muslim World

Walls of Taroudannt, Morocco

Encircling walls have been, historically, a common feature of cities around the world. Beijing’s and Paris’s old walls may have been replaced by ring roads quaintly maintaining references to the old gates, and few big cities have maintained their walls (Istanbul comes to mind), but most of the cities of the world were at all point surrounded by walls protecting the urbane and civilized from the relative lawlessness of the hinterlands as well as foreign invaders. Walls distinguished what was inside, the developed density of organized city life, and what was out.

I don’t want to get into causes–an interesting discussion, no doubt–but many of the greatest walled cities that survive into the present day seem to be in the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East. Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem are some of the most fabled, while smaller but still notable examples include Khiva in Uzbekistan, Lefkosa/Nicosia in Cyprus and Meknes in Morocco. Even among the Muslim cities that have lost their walls, many such as Old Delhi and Kashgar have retained much of that old walled atmosphere.

Walls of Cairo

Walls of Lefkosa/Nicosia

Walls of Khiva

That old walled city atmosphere–what is it? It has a lot to do with density–when walls constrain the growth of a city, urban life is forced to develop inward and upward, and life of every sort fills the alleys. Commerce and markets–the souqs so characteristic of Muslim cities–consume much of the urban core. Families are seen strolling from home to workshop to restaurant to hammam. And just as safety was one of the main reasons for building walls, to be able to maintain the order of civilized life inside, safety still reigns in these cities. Children run in the side streets, and scale and proximity somehow prevents the anonymity of city life from developing, every neighbor a constant presence.

We thought that we had a pretty thorough experience of Muslim walled cities by the time we got to Morocco, but we were pleasantly surprised. Of all the walled cities that we have visited, none equals the atmosphere of Fez–probably the most genuine, authentic and atmospheric walled city in our travels. More than any place else, one feels a continuity in Fez–a sense that the same people have occupied the same homes and narrow alleys for hundreds of years, living their lives in very much the same ways. Below, some images of Fez.

Fez is actually two different walled cities in one, with a substantial royal enclosure to boot. Here, the walls of Fez al-Jadid, or “New” Fez.

Markets fill many of the main arteries of traditional walled cities. Sometimes, covered.


Commerce is not limited to the “traditional”–here, a Credit Agricole branch.

Complementing the markets are warehouses or inns, called funduqs or khans, for merchants and merchandise.

Greeting neighbors, perhaps on the way to the mosque beyond

Fresh water and proper sewage facilities are of course essential to the functioning of a city–perhaps the single civil engineering technology most important to life in density. The street of Fez are still filled with fountains, public restrooms and hammams.



And room for industry as well. The famous tanneries of Fez are still in full production, not only for the local market but for import abroad.


Categories
faces Morocco photo

Faces of Morocco

Since I’ve already written so much about ethnicity and race in Morocco (see posts of 09.01.11 and 09.01.24), this post will be mostly pictures and not words. In my post of 08.11.09, I thanked the Turks (Turkic men in particular) for being so accommodating in posing for pictures, perhaps to the point of vanity. Moroccans deserve to be known for the opposite; we encountered in Morocco outright hostility, even from people who just happened to fall within the frame of, say, a picture of a market. Given the volume of tourism in Morocco, one wonders whether the locals might take a more relaxed approach to tourists’ snapshots.

On to more photos…

One of the things that makes Morocco so colorful a destination, especially in winter, is the dress of the local men–most Moroccan men wear peak-hooded djellabas (or galabiyas), almost druid-like in appearance.

Even better, worn with a fez underneath.

Some “traditional dress” is of course in part for show, in this country of much tourism, but is nonetheless colorful.

The water salesman–sometimes actually selling water!

Women and girls are more out and about and visible in Morocco, in both rural areas and in cities, than in any of the other Arab countries that we visited.




A relatively rare degree of cover.

Categories
Morocco photo queer

The Beats in Tangier

Every Columbia undergrad, reading Kerouac’s On the Road in his or her Literature Humanities (“Lit Hum”) class, fantasizes that he and his circle of friends will form the core of the next Beat Generation. Indeed, even before college, I read Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which I found bewildering but also enticing, with all of its deranged fantasies. Hopefully it’s not what I based my senses of literature or sexuality on, but Kerouac and Burroughs definitely played a role in my adolescent imagination.

And so, finding myself in Morocco, I could not help but make a pilgrimage to those Tangier (“Interzone”) locations so infamously tangled with the short-lived American social/literary movement referred to as the Beat Generation, as much a part of its history as New York’s Morningside Heights or San Francisco’s North Beach.

It is certainly a treat for the fan of history that it is possible to stay at the very house in which William S. Burroughs lived during his Tangier days, the Villa Muniria. Of course, Tangier was then a very very different place from what it is now–the culture of drugs and prostitution of the Interzone has been largely replaced by what is a pleasant and decidedly unseedy medium-sized city, especially for a border town. According to my guidebook, the Villa Muniria was then owned by a procurer of male prostitutes, certainly a welcome convenience for Burroughs. The Muniria Inn is now a quiet, reputable, family-owned pension. We were not given one of the rooms reputed to have been stayed in by Burroughs and Kerouac.

Room 9, in which Burroughs is said to have written Naked Lunch.

Attached to the Muniria is the Tanger Inn, a local drinking establishment. I thought that the young international crowd at the popular bar resembled something like the present-day counterparts of Kerouac and his friends, but that comparison only served to remind me how dull, how devoid of imagination and possibility, the world of the 90s and the present seems compared to that of the late 50s or 60s.

At the heart of Tangier’s Medina lies the Petit Socco, the pleasant appellation of French and Spanish or Italian derivation for what was once the “little souq.” We were a bit surprised and amused to see that it is still a center of drug culture–we read that people openly smoke the kif and in our few minutes there saw a dealer and transactions taking place.

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Ibn Battuta in Tangier

At my more ambitious moments, I tell myself that we are retracing the footsteps of Ibn Battuta, the great traveler of the 14th century who made it his life’s work to travel the full extent of the Dar al-Islam and write about it. Like Marco Polo before him, Ibn Battuta made use of the Pax Mongolica to travel from his home to points as far flung as now Mali and now Indonesia, with extended stays in India and repeat visits to the Middle East. In some ways, of course, our itinerary is deficient–we cannot visit Mecca, in some ways a base of Ibn Battuta’s many journeys–but in others our travels are even more extensive, as we have visited places that were not part of the Muslim world in the 14th century but are very much a part of it now, such as the Indonesian islands of Nusa Tenggara (Ibn Battuta only had to go as far east as Sumatra) and Bosnia (where Islam arrived in the fifteenth century).

“Ibn Battuta Stayed Here” plaque, Timbuktu, Mali

And so, it is with a sense of pilgrimage (one of two pilgrimages here, see other post of the same date) that I arrive in Tangier, Ibn Battuta’s birthplace and home.

Somewhat sadly, or perhaps not surprisingly given the passage of several centuries, there are few Ibn Battuta landmarks in Tangier. But I thought I would identify those that I did find.

Deep in the heart of the Medina of Tangier, on a small rise, is located the small tomb of Ibn Battuta. Whether it is truly the place of Ibn Battuta’s interment is not known for sure, but the street it is on has also been named for him.

A pension named after Ibn Battuta.