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11-M: MOROS Y CRISTIANOS

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do well," said she, "to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man.' " Irving did not invent the story himself. Well before he arrived here on his horse, this had been known as 'The Moor's Sigh.' The road he took from the ciry was known then as 'La Cuesta de far La'gritr~ar,' 'The Slope of

The year Granada was taken, bringing almost eight centuries of Christian Reconquist~ of Iberia to a formal end, was extraordinary. It is hard to overes- timate the importance, not just to Spain but to the world, of the cvents that unfurled under the joint flags of Castile and Arag6n. This year still conjures up a one-line childhood rhyme which 1 used to memorise dates. 'In 1492,' I learnt,'Columbus sailed the ocean blue.' O n the far side of the Atlantic, in- deed, Christopher Columbus 'discovered' the Americas, creating a colony on

H E R O A D SO^^^ from Granada towards the Mediterranean rises : the island of Hispaniola-now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. T ,nr]y uphill it rounds the western fringes of the mow-capped sierra Spain's Jews, meanwhile, were expelled on the orders of lsabella and Fer-

~ ~ ~ ~ d ~ . crest the rise, the sierra swells upwards on the left, a first, dinand. This couple, known as the Catholic Kings, had, by uniting their

dramatic rampart towards the MulhacCn, mainland Spain's highest peak. realms, effectively founded modern Spain (though it would take until 1512 to

hi^ is where the rivers start running south, rushing for rhe nearby sea. It is, fit in the last piece of the puzzle, Navarre). Today's SephardicJews, clustered however, [he name of this pass-rather than the countryside around it- in communities from Los Angeles to Paris to Tel Aviv, are the descendants of [hat impresses. For this, a modest sign indicates, is the 'Puerto delSmpiro del that dias~ora. Legend has it that some families still conserve, five hundred

Moro,' 'The Pass of the Moor's Sigh.' yean later, the old iron key to their house in Toledo. At a synagogue in the lt was here, according to legend, rhat Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo I was once able to converse, in an ad-

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ d ~ , looked back for the final time towards the civ. BoabdiL whose mittedy stuttering fashion, with an elderly man using two similar languages Mediterranean kingdom had stretched west ro Mdlaga and east ro Almeria, h a t we could both understand-his Ladino and my Castilian Spanish. The

was a sentimental man. Standing here on a January day in 1492, the stow old man's Ladino-a quaint, time-warped version of Spanish conserved over goes, he wept. It was not just the end of his personal reign, but of 781 Years centuries by the Sephardic communiry-might have been wen more easily of ~ ~ ~ l i ~ kingdoms in Spain. The Granadinos still celebrate the Fiesta ~2 understood by Miguel de Ce~an te s , the creator of Don Quixote and a con-

& Reconquista, of the Reconquest, every 2 January. They are not always temporary of William Shakespeare. The expulsion of the Jews was just the keen to tecognise it, but a century and a half must still pass before theircir~ stage in a process of ethnic and religious cleansing. The Moors them- can claim to have been Christian for longer than it was a place where. prin- selves were also gradually obliged to convert to Christianiry and, when they

cipally, Mohammed was revered. or only pretended to do so, eventually expelled.

~ ~ ~ b d i l was on his way to La Alpujarra, the steep, south-facing foothi Boabdil's melancholy trip into the Alpujarra led him to one of the most

of [he sierra Nevada. Queen Isabella of Castile and King Fetdinand spots in Spain. The steep slopes of the Alpujarra hills are covered hag&, had lefr him a small fiefdom in return for his capitulation. As h in scrub, deciduous woodland, olives or small orchards of apple, cherry, fig, stood looking back towards Granada and his recently abandoned Alh-b pear, orange, lemon, medlar and almond trees. Deep gullies cut into the hill-

sides which, in places, are stripped nearly bate by erosion. All is bathed in fhat special, dear, whitish light of south and central Spain. Watered by xnw-melt and springs from the Sierra Nevada, this was the 'desert islandx

G H O S T S O F S P A I N 11-M: M O R O S Y C R I S T I A N O S ~ 2 7

discovered by writer Gerald Brenan. His Bloomsbury friends, Virginia Forty years later the moriscor-who still accounted, for example, for a Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, rode mules up through the third of the population of the Valencia region-were forced to leave. Some valleys to stay at his home in Yegen in the 1920s. Brenan was struck here by 275,000 of them were ordered out in 1609. Many died of hunger or exhaus- the stillness and the quality of the thin air. Sounds from a village four miles tion. Others were massacred on their arrival in North Africa, or were killed away-barking dogs, men singing flamenco's cantejondo, even the noise of even before they had managed to leave Spain. running water-would travel crisply across the valley. There was 'a feeling The morisros, and the Moors themselves, had always seemed to me just of air surrounding one, of fields of air washing over one that 1 have never another quaint, if important and romantic, part of Spanish history. Their come across anywhere else.' Woolf recalled 'scrambling on the hillside presence in modern Spain (except in language and place names) was among fig trees and olives . . . as excited as a schoolgirl on holiday.' solely architectural. Here, after all, were the splendid Alhambra palace,

In those days the rightly huddled houses in the pueblor were a drab, un- the vast mezquita in C6rdoba with its 580 columns and the hilltop Alcaz- painted grey. The standard of living for some had not changed for centuries. aba fortresses overlooking Mdaga and Almeria. They had left, too, some Poorer families boasted just one possession-a cooking pot. There were uniquely Spanish architectural forms, where east and west overlapped to no metalled roads and no money for whitewash. Now there are not only ~ roduce the hybrid m u d ~ a r and moza'rabe styles in churches and monas-

roads-though these are still bone-rattlers in places-bur the white-painted villages gleam like Christmas decorations scattered down the steep hillsides. Occasionally, Al Andalus would reappear in the news. Muslims, for ex- Visitors like to think they have always been like that. In fact the Alpujarra ample, tried to gain access for themselves and other religions to pray at the villages, like so many places and people around Spain, only became wealthy C6rdoba mezquita-which now houses the city's cathedral-but were enough to pretry themselves up later in the twentieth century. turned down by the Vatican. Those who prostrate themselves before the

Driving towards Yegen from the Pass of the Moor's Sigh on the high road mezquita's sparkling, golden mihrab can still be thrown out. In Granada, towards TrevClez, which some claim is Spain's highest village, another road- meanwhile, a group of European converts eventually got money out of the side sign gives a clue to the history of Spain's Moors. More it United Arab Emirates to build a smart, gleaming new mosque on top of the tells of the morircos, the Moorish popularion that nominally converted to Albaicin. It symbolically overlooks the Alhambra from a charming barrio of Christianity after Boabdil's defeat and his subsequent move, a few years winding lanes and cypress-filled gardens that once boasted twenty-eight later, to north Africa. Here, cutting under one of the right curves that look mosques. That, I thought, was it. Al Andalus was a great tourism draw. down into the precipitous, bare valleys where the Trevelez, Poqueira and Granada, with its Moroccan gift shops and restaurants offering courcour and Guadalfeo rivers flow, is the Barranco de la Sangre, the Gully of Blood. The tajines, had even become something of a Moorish theme park. Here was one

morixor of La Alpujarra, in a lasr-ditch attempt to hold on to the customs, piece of history that Spaniards were not about to argue over. language, clothes, veils and even bathing practices that had been banned by I could not have been more wrong. Late in 2004, JosC Maria Aznar, the decree, rebelled in 1568. A plaque on a house in the nearby village of V%r, former prime minister whose Conservative People's Party (PP) had been erected recently by a group of Spanish converts to Islam, marks the sire of ejected from power in favour of the Socialists of JosC Luis Rodriguez Zapa- the home of Aben Humeya, the leader of the revolt. 'To Aben Humeya and tero at elections that March, gave a lecture at Washington's Georgetown the moriscos, the height of freedom for Al Andalus,' it says. University. His parry's defeat had come rhree days after 191 Madrid railway

Rather than the height of freedom, however, the rebellion was part of the commuters were killed in the west's worst Islamist terror attack since Sep- death throes of Moorish Spain. One of the worst battles was here, in the tember 11. I t had been the most traumatic moment in recent Spanish his- ~ " 1 1 ~ of B ~ O O ~ . Legend has it the blood of the Christian soldiers flowed tory. To understand the circumstances surrounding that defeat, Aznar told uphill in order not to mix with the Moorish, crypro-Islamic blood of the the Georgetown students, they should wind the clock back to 7rr. This,

morircos. Spanish schoolchildren are meant to know, was the moment when a Berber

G H O S T S O F S P A I N

called Tarik Bin Ziyad crossed the Mediterranean with a small army and be- gan a swift invasion of Iberia (whilst also leaving his name behind ar the large rock known as Jabal-al-Tarik, the Rock of Tarik, now Gibraltar).

'Spain's problem with Al-Qaida starts in the eighth cenrury . . . when a Spain recently invaded by the Moors refused to become just anorher piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its identity,' Amar said. 'This reconquista process was very long, lasting some eight hundred years.

Aznar was widely ridiculed for his words. They were an attempt to relate the train attacks to Al Andalus. Christian Spain, he meant, had long been a target for Islamic crusaders. An old enemy, in other words, had returned.

Few people agreed. One who might have done, however, was a bearded and robed man then believed to be hiding out somewhere in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden had shown a personal interest in Al Andalus, signalling it to his followers as an apostate territory and lamenting its loss to Islam. O n the day in October, zool, that the Unired Srares began its campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Al-Qdida founder issued one of his famous videotapes. He was followed by his number w o , rhe Egyprian Ayman al- Zawahiri. 'Let rhe whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of A1 Andalus should be repeared.' al-Zawahiri said. Two months be- fore theMadrid atracks, Bin Laden himself rerurned to the theme, lamenting the weakness of rhe Arab world. 'It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker rhan the economy of one country that had once been part of our world when we used ro rruly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Al Andalus,' he said on a tape broadcasr by A1 Jazeera.

A newspaper editorial summed up the feelings of those Spaniards who had angrily rejected Aznar's policies and his disastrous handling of the bombings at the polls that March. 'In their reinvention of the past, and their vindication of the crusades between Islam and Christianity, there is a disturbing similarity between Aznar and Bin Laden,' huffed El Pair. Spain's Muslims, be they immigrant Moroccans or local converts, agreed.

Aznar was not the only outraged Spaniard talking of a conspiracy to turn the clock back several centuries. A few weeks earlier, Spain's leading clergy- man, the arch-conservative Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco. had trodden a similar path. 'Some people wish to place us in the year 711.' Cardinal Rouco said. He was complaining about rumours that the Socialist government planned to put other religions or denominations, be they Islam, Judaism or

1 1 - M : M O R O S Y C R l S T I A N O S 210

the Protestant churches, on the same footing as Roman Catholicism- which, amongst other things, has a near strangIehold on religious teaching ar schools. 'It seems as if we are meant to wipe ourselves out of history.'

Once again, I found, Spaniards were bickering over the meaning of their own history. Only this time it was about a period that stretched back, in Brirish retms, to even before the days of the Vikings. It seemed thar rhe country's self-image was somehow at stake. Should Spain be defined as a proudly Roman Catholic nation that emerged, or re-emerged, from a valiant eighr-century battle against Islam! O r should it, as the historian Amirico Castro first proposed decades ago, think of irself as being forged from a his- toric encounter between religions and cultures, including both Islam and Ju- daism! For a country of inevitably intimate relations with a Muslim world that is clearly visible across the Mediterranean from its southernmost shores, these are important questions.

This latest row had been sparked by the tragic, dramatic events of those four bitter, yet historic, days in March 1004. These were the four days bracketed, at one end, by the train bombings and, at the other, by the sur- prise ousting of Aznar's party from power.

Early on the morning of 11 March, Luis Garrudo, the doorman of a small block of flats close to rhe railway starion in Alcali de Henares, a Madrid dormitory town, noticed a white Renault Kangoo van parked across the street. It was a bright. spring morning. Three men busied themselves around the van. They seemed dressed for rhe coldest of winter days. Their heads and faces were all bur hidden behind scarves, hats and hoods.

'When 1 saw them I rhoughr they looked like armed robbers or some- thing like that, though i t didn'r make much sense at rhar time of the morn- ing,' Luis told me when I went to see him twenty-four hours later. 'They were all covered up around their heads and necks, and it wasn't even cold.'

At just before 7 a.m. Luis walked the zoo metres to the railway station to pick up a copy of Metro, a free daily morning newspaper. He found himself walking behind one of the men from rhe van. 'He seemed to be in a hurry.' he cold me. 'He was walking very quickly, carrying something and, again, I could hardly see his face at aI1.'

Luis thought, from rhe white scarf tied high across his neck and chin, char he might be a ReaI Madrid fan. 'All I could see was the scarf and some- Ching covering rhe rop of his head. You could onIy reaIly see his eyes. By rhe rime I got back, the orher two men had gone. The van was sriIl there.'

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Luis was walking behind one of the worst mass murderers in recent Eu- to you,' Clara Escribano, a survivor from the train at Sanra Eugenia, told me months later. ropean history. For this was one of several young Muslim radicals and small- s

time crooks equipped with thirteen bombs. A few minutes later they started The first emergency workers to arrive were also struck by the srillness of

hopping from carriage to carriage, and from rrain to rrain, across platforms this tableau of horror. 'Ir was the silence that made it so differenr from orher

packed full of early morning workers-builders, office cleaners, electricians attacks,' Dr Ervigio Corral, a veteran of ETA artacks, told me. Dr Corral

and schoolteachers. This was the 8 a.m. start crowd, those who had to be at was the man in charge of Madrid's ambulance services. He had rushed to

building sites and warehouses well before most office workers had even left Atocha sra~ion and was the first to enter some coaches. The dead, or their

their homes. Many, more than a quarter, were immigrants, attracred by the remains, wete everywhere. 'The only living people left inside were those

cheap rents this far out of the Spanish capital. The man Luis Garrudo fol- who could not move. They were almost all suffering from burst eardrums, which meant they could nor hear you. When you asked what was wrong lowed would place at least one of thirteen cheap sports bags in at least one

of four different trains. Each bag contained a mobile phone, a copper dero- with them, they did nor answer. They asked you for help only with their

naror, nuts and screws to act as shrapnel, and some welve kilos of Spanish- Europe had only seen one attack on this scale before, in 1988, when 270 made Goma 2 Eco explosives.

The bombers targeted four separate trains which passed through Aka16 de people were killed by a Libyan bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, forcing it to

Henares between 7.00 a.m. and 7.15. In some cases they may have ridden them crash into the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

for the first few stops as they headed in towards Madrid's Atocha station, dis- Dr Corral would see some eighty corpses in that first hour, in Atocha and JOO yards up the track where 3 second bombcd train had ground to a halt tributing the bombs amongst the packed carriages. Within half-an-hour, after bits of carriage had been blown into apartments overlooking the track. Europe's initiation into the new tactics of radical Islamist terror was complete.

The bombs were detonated by the alarms in rhe mobile telephones. They Over the next rhirry-six hours he would personally give the news of death to

started going off at 7.37 and had wrought their full destruction by 7.43. In some 130 bereaved and distraught families.

some trains those who went to help the wounded from the firsr bomb were The death toll could have been higher. Of the thirteen bombs, only ten

caught by a second or third. By the time they finished exploding, thcrc wcrc exploded. Madrileiios found out that day, ro their surprise, that they had

four trains each with immense, jagged holes blown through several cat- one of the best-equipped ambulance and emergency services in Europe.

riages. The smoking hulks were strung along the line between Atocha, Two field hospitals were ser up, hundreds of volunreers called in and, of

where one train had just arrived, and rhe working-class barrio of El Pozo del the 400 injured rushed to hospital, only one died on the way. Fourteen

Tio Raimundo. The latter's name was once synonymous with the poverty more died after they got there. The timing of the artacks helped, too.

of immigrant workers arriving from other parts of Spain. One bomb had Hospitals were just changing shifrs. so had twice the normal number of

exploded in a wagon known as 'little Romania' because it was where irnmi- staff at hand. Operating theatres were empty. 'If it happened again, I would

grants from that country gathered every morning. Fifty-four of the dead : just ask that it happen at the same time,' a doctor who [reared the injured

were immigrants. There were Muslims, too, and schoolchildren, babies, pregnant women,

My apartment lies just a block from the Gregorio Maraiiirn hospital,

young couples and parents with their young children. All of these, and which took most of the injured. That morning my children waited r m min-

more, would die, their bodies peppered with shrapnel or the breath Utes to cross the road on their way to school. The scream of ambulances

squeezed our of them by the blow and suck of the blast. tearing past made their usual zebra crossing impassable.

Those who survivrd recall the ghastly silence that followed immediately af- Spain had not lived a rnomcnr of such enormous drama and tension since

ter. Some will never forget. 'It still flashes through my mind continuously. . . Civil Guard lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero and his men stormed parlia-

The silence, the dust and the things I saw that 1 can't bring myself to describe ment in their failed 1981 coup attempt.

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