When I was a child I dreamt of exotic places: palaces filled with beautiful women, mysteriously veiled, flowers and birds and the tinkling of flutes. I would clutch the Aladdin's lamp my parents had given me for Christmas and fly away into a world populated by rich colors and jewels: magenta, indigo blue, bold rubies and pearls, and swirling patterns on silk. I would see white cranes perched on the lip of a sparkling fountain in a courtyard and everyone around me was dressed in mysterious, rich clothing, like a fable from Scheherazade.
Had I lived in Cordoba, Spain in 755, this would not have been a dream. When the Arabs invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711 and occupied Spain for over 700 years, there emerged a golden culture of greatness that was not seen in Europe at that time. This glittering world encompassed many cultures: the largest Jewish population in Europe, remnants of the Greco-Roman world and that of the Visigoths, and a large Christian population as well....and they all contributed to this emerging culture.
Had you walked through the streets of Cordoba at apogee of this golden age in the 10th century you would have seen paved roads, streetlights, great libraries of learning, hospitals and schools. You would have wandered into the bazaars and souks, not unlike those seen in North Africa now, and encountered nobles and scholars from Europe exchanging ideas and learning with the great poets, astronomers, mathematicians and philosophers who lived there: Maimonides, Ibn-Rushd, Averroes, and others. There was a massive transfer of knowledge from this world to the west in science, technology and culture, and one could argue that this transfer, this collaboration, went a long way towards the eventual renaissance of thought in Europe.
It must have been a fabulous world, dreamlike and exotic, a unique culture that stood in sharp contrast to the relative barbarity of Europe, one never before seen in that part of the world, and after its ultimate decimation by the Christians in 1492, never to be seen again.
This world, the world of Al-Andalus, still lives in the hearts of many, from both East and West. It was this multi-layered world that Lorca inherited and which deeply informed his thinking and his poems.
He had a profound respect for this culture, and as he asks Angelina in my book: "Tell me, little one, which was the greater sin: imposing upon the Moors and the Jews a prophet they respected but did not call God, thus destroying a culture of tolerance that embraced all, or allowing the beauty of Allah, Jehovah and God to co-exist?"
Indeed.
Had I lived in Cordoba, Spain in 755, this would not have been a dream. When the Arabs invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711 and occupied Spain for over 700 years, there emerged a golden culture of greatness that was not seen in Europe at that time. This glittering world encompassed many cultures: the largest Jewish population in Europe, remnants of the Greco-Roman world and that of the Visigoths, and a large Christian population as well....and they all contributed to this emerging culture.
Had you walked through the streets of Cordoba at apogee of this golden age in the 10th century you would have seen paved roads, streetlights, great libraries of learning, hospitals and schools. You would have wandered into the bazaars and souks, not unlike those seen in North Africa now, and encountered nobles and scholars from Europe exchanging ideas and learning with the great poets, astronomers, mathematicians and philosophers who lived there: Maimonides, Ibn-Rushd, Averroes, and others. There was a massive transfer of knowledge from this world to the west in science, technology and culture, and one could argue that this transfer, this collaboration, went a long way towards the eventual renaissance of thought in Europe.
It must have been a fabulous world, dreamlike and exotic, a unique culture that stood in sharp contrast to the relative barbarity of Europe, one never before seen in that part of the world, and after its ultimate decimation by the Christians in 1492, never to be seen again.
This world, the world of Al-Andalus, still lives in the hearts of many, from both East and West. It was this multi-layered world that Lorca inherited and which deeply informed his thinking and his poems.
He had a profound respect for this culture, and as he asks Angelina in my book: "Tell me, little one, which was the greater sin: imposing upon the Moors and the Jews a prophet they respected but did not call God, thus destroying a culture of tolerance that embraced all, or allowing the beauty of Allah, Jehovah and God to co-exist?"
Indeed.