The Legacy of the Moors

This article by David Baird was first published in the Olive Press - Eastern Edition - Issue 34. David Baird has been twice awarded Spain’s national prize for foreign travel writers. He is the author of "East of Malaga - Essential Guide to the Axarquía and Costa Tropical", "Sunny Side Up - The 21st century hits a Spanish village", and "Back Roads of Southern Spain", all published by Santana Books.

JOSÉ was fighting an imaginary bull. He spun on his heels, slowly, gracefully, wielding an invisible cape. "We do not see virtue in doing things fast. Everything should be enjoyed slowly. Like a pass in a bullfight", he said.

Standing on the terrace of his Granada house, this gypsy poet was trying to explain the character of his people. The champagne light of an Andalusian autumn bathed the adjacent rooftops of the Albaicín.

Across the Darro River valley, where the leaves of the poplar trees shimmered like gold coins, rose the walls of the Alhambra palace, sharply etched against the bulk of the Sierra Nevada. It was a scene that has changed little since the Moors ruled here, a long-gone era that left an indelible mark on Spain. José himself reflected aspects of that legacy, in his love of language, his flamboyance, his machismo and his cavalier attitude towards time.

Often without our being aware of it, the long arm of Al-Andalus reaches down the centuries to touch us. The Moors - a term that includes both Arabs and Berbers - have affected our lives in ways we may not suspect. They imported the aubergine and the Arabian steed, but also a new view of Aristotle, of astronomy and of medicine, which from Spain percolated north into the rest of Europe.

Moorish influence is particularly strong in the provinces of Málaga and Granada, for they dominated this area for nearly 800 years until 1492. All through the region you will come across traces of their culture: village names like Albuñuelas, Benamocarra and Benaudalla, typical archways, the ingenious network of acequias (water channels).

Locals are only half joking when they say: "We are all Moors here". When one opens his mouth, his debt is obvious. Such words as alcachofa, alcázar, alforja, alguacil, arroz, aduana, alcalde, naranja, azúcar and limón all came from the invaders. And so too did those "English" words like cotton (from algodón), alcohol, elixir, nadir, zenith, almanac, zero, jasmine, saffron, coffee.

Along with the silk industry, the Moors introduced fruit and vegetables previously unknown in the peninsula, such as bananas, almonds, apricots, peaches, aubergines and cucumbers, along with sorghum and hemp.

Their most obvious legacy is in architectural styles, exemplified by the magnificent structures to be found in Seville, Córdoba and Granada. Crumbling Moorish fortresses police the Spanish landscape and in most communities the church stands on the site of a mosque, quite a few towers originally being built as minarets (little Archez has a particularly fine example).

When I trekked up to an old church on a hillside overlooking the village of Almonaster la Real in Huelva, I found the walls sheltered a perfectly preserved mosque. As a fountain played, I laid a hand on a column and reflected that a thousand years ago this place had resonated to "Allah is great". In Seville, you can gaze down on the city from the top of the Giralda, the 94-metre high cathedral tower originally built as a minaret.

Córdoba’s serpentine, whitewashed streets in the old quarter are dominated by the colossal mosque of 1,000 columns, founded in 785. And then there is the Alhambra of Granada, the Moors' most impressive architectural legacy with its alabaster pilasters, ethereal arches and icing- sugar cupolas. On a humbler scale, a little to the south you find the flat-roofed dwellings of la Alpujarra, constructed in the style of the Berber houses of North Africa.

The ousting of the Jews and Moors 500 years ago inflicted wounds from which Spain took centuries to recover, but it could not root out a lasting influence. Indeed, one of the ironies is that the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews helped spread Arab culture; in their new countries they set about translating important Arab works on many themes, first into Hebrew and then into Latin.

Medical advances- while much of Europe was in the dark ages, the Arab world was in the forefront of medicine, astronomy, botany and geography. Many drugs in use today are of Arabian origin, for the Arabs made important advances in chemistry and preparing medicines. Abdulcasis, of Cordoba, wrote the first illustrated book on surgery and Ibn Zuhr, a Seville physician, produced a practical manual that had profound impact on medical practice in Europe. This penetration into Europe was aided by the prestige and power of the Caliphate of Córdoba.

Brief though the Caliphate's years of glory were, it fertilised cultural growth in many spheres as sages and scholars of various religions flocked to the city. Maimonides, physician and philosopher, Averroës, Aristotelian philosopher, and Ibn Hazm, jurist and historian, all from Córdoba, and Ibn al-Arabi, a mystic-philosopher from Murcia, are among those who influenced later generations. Columbus evolved his theories about a new route to the East after consulting early Arab charts, and he certainly took note of Al-Idrisi, a medieval geographer, who produced a world map in 1154. Arabs were using such navigational aids as the compass long before Europeans and they made important breakthroughs in charting the position of the planets.

Even our eating habits owe something to the Moors. The next time you sit down to lunch consider your reaction if you were served the dessert before the soup. Meals used to be haphazard affairs, with everybody helping themselves from a mixture of dishes. Then along came Ziryab, an extraordinary ninth-century Arab musician and trend-setter at the Caliph's court in Córdoba. He initiated a new fashion which must have created quite a flurry among the etiquette-conscious elite of the Caliphate, ordaining that courses were served in strict order, sweets, fruit and nuts coming last. The ultra-sweet desserts which are the speciality of so many Spanish regions, and such dishes as gazpacho and ajo blanco, are a legacy of Moorish times, while some of their popular dishes such as lamb cooked with honey are now being revived.

Ziryab, who was reputed to know 10,000 songs, introduced the fifth string to the Arab lute, contributing to its development into the six-string guitar. Music is another link. James Woodall in his book In Search of the Firedance theorises that the word flamenco may actually come from felagmengu, meaning "fugitive peasant", or fela men eikum, an Andalusian worker of Moorish times. The passion and pain of cante jondo (literally "deep song") recall Arab ululations and the saeta, that "arrow" of adulation launched at the Virgin in Easter Week, is almost an echo of the cries of praise that the faithful make to Allah. The wild, driving rhythms of the Verdiales practised by groups from the Málaga mountains are said to originate in the songs of Moorish olive-pickers. And the cries of "Olé!" that punctuate a bullfight or a flamenco concert are directly related to the "wa-Allah!" the Moors yelled during poetry recitals.

You do not have to be a scholar of Islam nor an Oxford don to appreciate the utility of Arabic numerals, which replaced the clumsy Roman system. Schoolboys may regret the gift of algebra, but Arab command of mathematics is impressive - the first European treatise on trigonometry was written by Ibn Muadh of Jaén. There are other legacies. Paper, invented in China, travelled first, via Baghad, to Córdoba (where one caliph is said to have had 400,000 books) and only then to northern Europe.

The Barb, a breed of horse native to North Africa was introduced into Spain by the Moors. From it and the Arab breed evolved the English Thoroughbred racing horse.

It is not too far-fetched to argue that the Spanish emphasis on face-to-face contact and the importance of enchufes are also inherited from the Moors. Personal government was, and still is, the custom of the Arab world, where subjects wait to whisper words into the ear of a ruler or his sidekick, a direct contact with power. So today, rather than write to or phone a remote politician or bureaucrat, Andalusians at heart believe there is only one way to get action, through personal connections.

While parts of the Moorish inheritance can provoke ambivalent feelings in modern Spain, the positive aspects cannot be denied.

Think about it. The next time you hear a guitar, take a moment to wonder how it would sound with only four strings. And the next time you add up your shopping list, imagine doing so in Roman numerals scratched on dried sheepskin.