The invention of al-Andalus: discovering the past and creating the present in Granada's Islamic tourism sites

Abstract

In a 2008 survey by the Pew Research Centre, 52% of Spaniards confessed to having negative views of Muslims. Yet, one of the most profitable segments of Spain's tourism industry is built on marketing the concept of convivencia, the supposedly harmonious coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the medieval Iberian Peninsula. This article examines Granada's tourism industry as a site for mapping Spain's contradictory relationship with the Islamic world and with its own Islamic past. Granada is a privileged site for this examination: the former Naṣrid capital not only boasts the most famous of Andalusi travel destinations, the Alhambra, but also hosts a large population of Moroccan immigrants and of Spanish converts to Islam. Building on the polysemy of the word ‘invention’ – which can mean both ‘discovery’ and ‘creation’ – this article investigates three different inventions of al-Andalus in Granada's tourism industry. First, I explore the nineteenth-century Romantic ‘re-discovery’ of Andalucía's ‘Oriental’ past. Second, I analyse one of the most visible tourist initiatives in contemporary Granada related to the promotion of the Andalusi past: the Legado Andalusí Foundation. My analysis demonstrates how the work of the Legado Andalusí Foundation has been shaped by the Romantic ‘discovery’ of al-Andalus, as well as by Andalusian nationalist thought and by the discourse of Spanish colonialism in Morocco. In the concluding section, I consider the debates surrounding Islam and Moroccan immigration in Granada's Albayzín neighbourhood, a ‘traditional’ Arab area where the Islamic Community in Spain (Comunidad Islámica en España) recently inaugurated the first mosque to be built in Granada since 1492.

Keywords:

• al-Andalus
• tourism
• convivencia
• Granada
• Morocco
• invention of tradition
• Legado Andalusí

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was supported by funding from three units at the University of Michigan: the Michigan Society of Fellows, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. I would also like to thank José Antonio González Alcantud, Sandra Rojo Flores, Mustafa Akalay, Ana Carreño, Francisco Javier Rosón Lorente, Tomás Navarro, Francisco Jiménez Bautista, and Jamie Jones for the help they gave me during my research in Granada and while I was writing this article. Finally, I would like to thank the guest editors and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1 I quote from the official Spanish-language audio guide to the Alhambra, published by the Patronato de la Alhambra. All English translations are mine.

2 In this article, I will be discussing both Andalucía, the modern autonomous region of Spain, and al-Andalus, the areas of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim control from 711 to 1492. I will use the adjective ‘Andalusian’ to refer to the modern Spanish region and the adjective ‘Andalusi’ to refer to al-Andalus.

3 The best account of the Romantic representation of the Alhambra is Pedro Galera Andreu (1992). Susan Martin-Márquez (2008, 18–27) analyses the Romantic rediscovery of the Alhambra and its relationship with the Orientalisation of Spain.

4 Barbara Fuchs (2009) has argued that maurophilia was an important component of early modern Spanish identity.

5 For an introduction to scholarly debates about the concept of convivencia, see Glick (1979, 6–13), Nirenberg (1998, 8–10), and Martin-Márquez (2008, 300–307).

6 While Astor's study (2011) focuses on opposition to the construction of mosques in Cataluña, it also provides a helpful comparison with similar debates in Madrid (123–143). Rosón Lorente (2008, 398–422) analyses the public opposition to the construction of the Grand Mosque of Granada. (I will return to these debates later in the article.) Rogozen-Soltar (2007, 874–877) has documented the National Islamic Commission of Spain's repeated and frustrated efforts to obtain permission for Muslims to use Córdoba's Mosque-Cathedral as a prayer space. The public debates about the construction of new mosques – or about the use of former Islamic sites for prayer – are not the only indicator of Spanish Islamophobia. Rosa María Rodríguez Magda's La España convertida al Islam is part of a growing corpus of anti-Islamic polemics, including two widely read works by the Spanish Arabist Serafín Fanjul: Al-Andalus contra España (2000) and La quimera de al-Andalus (2004).

Several scholars have debated the suitability of the term ‘Islamophobia’ to describe the increase in anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe and the USA. For an introduction to these debates, see Halliday (1999) and Rosón Lorente (2010). Halliday (1999, 898) has advocated, instead, for the use of the term ‘anti-Muslimism’, warning that the term Islamophobia ‘reproduces the distortion [...] that there is one Islam’. At the risk of falling into the essentialist or homogenising trap against which Halliday cautions, I will insist, in this article, on the term ‘Islamophobia’ to refer to the rise of anti-Muslim or anti-Islamic sentiments in Spain – that is, negative attitudes towards Muslims or towards Islam as a religion. My main justification for insisting upon this contested term is that it is in wide use among the various Muslim communities of Spain. The UCIDE, for example, defines its research branch, the Observatorio Andalusí, as an ‘Institution for the observation and monitoring of the situation of the Muslim citizen and of Islamophobia in Spain’ (2012b, 1).

7 It is difficult to collect reliable data on the size of the illegal immigrant population in Spain. While there are no official statistics, many specialists rely on the reports published by the human rights organisation SOS Racismo. The organisation's most recent report, published in 2010, estimates Spain's undocumented immigrant population at 443,698 (240). Spanish sociologists and anthropologists have devoted significant attention to the phenomenon of Moroccan immigration to Spain. Helpful introductions may be found in López García and Berriane (2004) and Zapata-Barrero (2008).

8 See, for example, Gustavo de Arístegui's La yihad en España: La obsesión por reconquistar Al-Ándalus (Jihad in Spain: The Obsession with the Reconquest of al-Andalus, 2005), or Diego Caballero's cover story for the popular Spanish current events magazine Cambio 16 (Caballero 2007).

9 Extensive accounts of the violent incidents in El Ejido can be found in Checa et al. (2001) and SOS Racismo (2001).

10 For the problematic nomenclature associated with Spanish-born converts to Islam – and, in particular, the use of the word ‘Neo-Muslim’, see Rosón Lorente (2008, 40–42), Stallaert (1998, 98–108), and Roberson (2007, 249).

11 For the debates surrounding the mosques in Granada and Córdoba, see Rosón Lorente (2008, 398–422) and Rogozen-Soltar (2007, 874–877). For recent Spanish mosque architecture and its use of previous Andalusi architectural models, see Roberson (2007). On March 10, 2005, the city government of Seville granted a parcel of land in the Bermejales neighbourhood to the Comunidad Islámica en España (Islamic Community in Spain) for the construction of a large mosque. A neighbourhood association from Bermejales mobilised against the construction of the mosque, and as a result, the city government of Seville withdrew its offer of land and cancelled the mosque project. The Islamic Community in Spain presented a new project for a mosque to be built in Seville's San Jerónimo neighbourhood. This mosque project has also faced harsh opposition from the residents of San Jerónimo, and construction for the mosque still has not started. The Seville mosque debate has not received academic attention, but it has received significant journalistic coverage – both by the local newspaper Diario de Sevilla and by the online news aggregator WebIslam.

12 While the foundation has been mentioned in passing by several important critics (González Alcantud 2002, 193–194; Martin-Márquez 2008, 305; Rojo Flores 2010, 144), its publications have yet to be the object of sustained analysis.

13 In this article, I only discuss the Legado Andalusí's cultural and tourist exchanges with Morocco. Prominent examples of the foundation's work in other parts of the Maghrib are the exhibition catalogues for Mauritania y España: Una historia común (2003) and Ibn Jaldún: Entre al-Andalus y Argelia (2007b).

14 For the racial construction of Catalan and Basque nationalism, see Epps (2005) and Martin-Márquez (2008, 12–63). Stallaert (1998, 70–126) provides a compelling comparison of the racial politics of Basque nationalism and andalucismo.

15 The Parliament of Andalucía declared Blas Infante ‘Father of the Andalusian Homeland’ by decree on 14 April 1983, and the text of the decree was later incorporated into the prologue of the Statute of Autonomy for Andalucía. For the role of Blas Infante's writings in the formation of Andalusian nationalist thought (andalucismo), see Stallaert (1998, 88–99).

16 For the history of the Legado Andalusí, I have relied on the foundation's website (www.legadoandalusi.es), as well as two interviews (conducted on 3 May 2012 and 10 May 2012) with Ana Carreño, the foundation's director of institutional and international relations.

17 The Legado Andalusí (1995, 7) identifies al-Zubaydī as the tutor of the Umayyad caliph al-Ḥakam II (r. 350–366/961–976), but Rafael Valencia (1992, 138) identifies him as the tutor to Hishām II (r. 366–99/976–1009). The quotation that the Legado Andalusí has adopted as its motto comes from a poem by al-Zubaydī, which Valencia cites in translation (138).

18 Stallaert (1998, 90–108) has traced the genealogy of Olagüe's thesis back to Infante and forward to present-day andalucista separatist movements, such as the Islamic group Liberación Andaluza.

19 The infamous quip is popularly attributed to Alexandre Dumas's Orientalist travel account of Spain Impressions de voyage. De Paris à Cadix (1847–1848). Despite the popular attribution to Dumas, I have not been able to locate the exact phrase ‘Africa begins in the Pyrenees’ in his text. Regardless, assertions of Spain's supposed ‘African-ness’ circulated long before Dumas's journey. See, for example, this telling passage from Dominique Georges Frédéric Pradt's Mémoires historiques sur la révolution d'Espagne (1816):It is an error of geography to have assigned Spain to Europe. It belongs to Africa: blood, customs, language, the way of living and fighting. In Spain, everything is African. The two nations have been mixed together for too long – the Carthaginians who came from Africa to Spain, the Vandals who left Spain for Africa, the Moors who stayed in Spain for 700 years – for such a long cohabitation [...] not to have confused the race and customs of the two countries. (168)

20 In addition to the Cultural Itinerary of the Almoravids and Almohads, the Legado Andalusí has also published a guide for the trans-Atlantic Cultural Itinerary of the Spanish-American Mudéjar (Artigas 2002) and has started work on the trans-Mediterranean Cultural Itinerary of the Umayyads. For more information about the Legado Andalusí's cultural itineraries, see the ‘Itinerarios Culturales’ section on their website (Legado Andalusí 2012b).

21 González Alcantud (2002) has studied the role of the Andalusi myth as ‘a tool of Spanish foreign policy’ (183–197).

22 This quotation and the following quotations from Mohammed Achaari and Federico Mayor Zaragoza come from the guide's introductory pages, which are not numerated.

23 The most detailed account of the mosque's history is Rosón Lorente (2008), who summarises the local forces working for and against the construction of the mosque. See also Navarro (1998), Valenzuela (2002), and Roberson (2007).

24 Rogozen-Soltar (2007) refers to this process as the ‘performance and consumption of Arabness’ in the Albayzín (870).

25 For an entertaining introduction to the history of tea, with a focus on its transformation from foreign oddity to British custom, see Standage (2005, 175–195). In the only academic monograph on the culture and consumption of tea in Morocco, al-Sibtī (1999, 28) documents that the paternal uncle of the ʿAlawite sultan Muhammad b. ʿAbd Allah (r. 1757–1790) was the first person in Morocco to try tea.

26 For the gentrification of the Albayzín, see Rosón Lorente (2008, 287–322).

27 This dynamic is similar to the dual roles of ‘guest’ and ‘host’ played by Moroccan immigrants in the popular Festivals of Moors and Christians, studied by Flesler and Pérez Melgosa (2003).