CORDOBA, Spain (dpa) – After centuries of oblivion and denial, Spain is reclaiming its Arab and Moslem past.
Thousands of people are flocking daily to an exhibition in Cordoba on the Umayyad dynasty under which Moslem Spain reached the peak of its splendour a millennium ago.“A few decades ago, it would have been impossible to organize such an exhibition,” says Jeronimo Paez of the foundation Legado Andalusi, which seeks to disseminate knowledge about Spain´s Moslem past.The exhibition is constantly sold out, and its success is seen as yet another sign that Spain´s vision of its past is changing and that the country is seeking to recover its ancient role as a cultural bridge between Europe and the Moslem world.During the 1939-75 dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who ruled in alliance with the Roman Catholic Church, “Spain´s Arab identity was taboo,” says Rafael Lopez Guzman, organizer of the exhibition.Since the return of democracy after Franco´s death in 1975, historians have been setting the record straight about the 800-year Moslem era, which had been downplayed and even vilified.A new vision of the Arab world is emerging at a time when much of the West still equates Islam with fundamentalism and regards it as its chief enemy.The exhibition tells the story of the Umayyad empire, which reached all the way from the Indus to the Iberian Peninsula. The Umayyad state in southern Spain, which lasted from the 8th to the 11th century, became independent from the former capital Damascus.The 300 objects on display, lent by 15 museums around the world, leave no doubt that the Moslem period – known as the Moorish period – was a sophisticated one.Mural reliefs and dishes in the shape of animals tell of stunning artistic achievement, gold jewellery evokes the sumptuous courts of the caliphs and objects such as astrolabes and surgical instruments bear testimony to the contribution of Arabs to European science.Moslems also helped to spread Greco-Latin ideas in Europe and had a far-reaching influence on many aspects of culture, from love poetry to Christian mysticism.The exhibition is staged in the beautiful ruins of the Madinat al- Zahra palace city, built by caliph Abd-al-Rahman III in the late 10th century, when Cordoba rivalled Damascus and Baghdad for power and was the cultural capital of the western world.Spaniards now think of that time as an era of extraordinary tolerance, when Moslems, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together in a country known as al-Andalus.Moorish Spain later collapsed due to internal warfare and the Christian reconquest, and tolerance came to a definitive end when Jews were expelled in 1492 and Moslems in 1609.A millennium after the Madinat al-Zahra was burned and looted by Berber tribes and local people, Arab music is now again echoing from its elaborately carved walls, and Spanish descendants of the Moors wander around the gardens where cypress and orange trees are filled with birdsong.“The Madinat al-Zahra has come back to life,” Lopez says.Half a millennium after their forced departure, Moslems are also literally returning to Spain, with the community of Moroccan immigrants already numbering hundreds of thousands.Most Spaniards see no link between themselves and the newcomers, and relatively few have made the short trip across the Strait of Gibraltar to North Africa, where they would not fail to find reminders of home, from architecture to ceramics and spices.Even that most Spanish of words, “ole”, is thought to derive from “Allah”.In order to culturally reunite the two shores of the Mediterranean, several major exhibitions on the Moslem heritage of the Iberian Peninsula have been staged in the recent years.Spain is excavating Moorish remains in places including Granada, Jaen, Malaga and Cordoba, and meetings of historians and other experts are regularly organized to further the understanding between the three “peoples of the Book”, Jews, Christians and Moslems.In the 19th century, writers such as Francois Rene Chateaubriand and Washington Irving created a romantic image of Moorish Spain, but Paez says that those times should not be idealized either.The message of the cultural activities in Spain is simply that “Moslem culture is a part of the European heritage”, he says – an idea easy to believe in Cordoba´s old centre, where shopkeepers are busy offering Arab trinkets in the shadow of the huge mosque built by the Umayyads.The exhibition “The Splendour of the Cordoban Umayyads”, which was inaugurated by Syrian President Bashar Assad and Spain´s King Juan Carlos, will run through September 30.
