The Alpujarra region, stretching along the southern slopes of Sierra Nevada, is one of the most beautiful ones in Spain.
Famous since the late 19th century for attracting travellers, the region boasts a string of small towns and villages. It might seem an odd place to embark on an engagement with the Middle East.
I have come to visit an Iraqi Kurdish friend and his family, whose passion for the region owes greatly to the fact that the mountain vistas remind them of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The region's connection with the Middle East is long-standing. As my host suggested, the very name Alpujarra is most likely derived from the Arabic word for mist, bukhar, a connection evident from the clouds that envelop the villages and neighbouring hills on an early autumn day.
The names of many places in the region have Arabic origins: The highest mountain in the Sierra Nevada, Mulhacín, would appear to commemorate the last but one Muslim ruler of Granada, Moulay Hassan, and ruined mosques dot the mountainsides.
This region was made famous in Spanish and Islamic history as the site of the last resistance by the Muslim population to Spanish rule in the late 1560s. Everyone knows the story of the surrender and fall of the last Muslim capital, Granada, to the Catholic rulers Ferdinand and Isabela on January 2, 1492. They were handed the keys of the city by the last king of the Nazari dynasty, Abu Abdullah or Mohammad XI (Boabdil in Spanish). He had tried to stem the Christian advance by forming temporary alliances with his foes. In the end, however, all resistance proved useless and, rather than waiting to see the destruction of his city, he surrendered the keys and left for the south with his family. As he crossed the last pass from which he could see Granada, and as his mother scolded him for his cowardice, he looked back. That spot, now marked by a motorway sign, is known as El Sospiro del Moro, "the moor's last sigh", immortalised in a novel by Salman Rushdie.
The Muslim inhabitants Boabdil left behind in the Sierra Nevada had been promised protection by the Christian monarchs. But within a few years things began to change and persecution and forced conversion to Christianity followed. As late as 1560 there were an estimated 150,000 Muslims in Granada province, as against 125,000 Catholics. But pressure to convert and to speak Spanish increased.
For the inhabitants of the Alpujarra, however, the most provocative issue was economic: Descendants of the Berbers who came in the 8th century with the conqueror Tariq Ibn Zayid ( the word Gibraltar is a corruption of Jebel Tariq, "the mountain of Tariq") they had been cultivators of silk and relied on its production and export to Italy for their livelihood. Gradually, as pressure mounted from the new Catholic population of the region and from elements in the royal court, Philip II began to expropriate lands of local producers.
In 1568 a revolt broke out in the Alpujarra. An already established banditry run by militant Muslims, munfis, said to torture and kill Catholic priests, turned into an organised insurrection. At its height, the rebellion mobilised 30,000 men, of whom 4,000 had come from North Africa to join the fight. Under the leadership of Aben Humeya (Mohammad Ibn Humaya in Arabic), a nobleman who had converted to Christianity and now reconverted to Islam and who titled himself "King of Cordoba and Granada", the rebels seized control of the area. It took months for government troops to crush the rebellion.
The revolt was finally crushed in 1569, with the capture of the last insurrectionary holdout, the minaret of the mosque at Bubión, and the inhabitants were then forced to convert or leave for North Africa. The rebels took shelter in the mountain caves and Aben Humeya died at the hand of his own followers, in a cave at Berchules. A decree of October 1570 ordered the detention and expulsion, in chains, of the Muslims of the region to other parts of Spain, although even in 1587 up to 10,000 still lived in Granada city.
The Alpujarra war was part of a broader historic and strategic process. It was the bloodiest Spain was to know between the end of the Reconquista in 1492 and the Napoleonic invasion of 1808. The defeat of the revolt was, moreover, followed by another event that sealed Spanish domination of the western Mediterranean — the Battle of Lepanto, in a bay off western Greece, in which in October 1571 Don Juan of Austria, the prince who had crushed the Sierra Nevada rebels, inflicted defeat on the Turkish navy, partitioning the Mediterranean into two. This gave Spain the freedom to dominate the western part of the sea, a control it was to maintain till the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and to pursue its new conquests in the Americas.
Even now, it is not hard to trace the course and geography of the Alpujarra revolt. This is ideal guerrilla country. Only in recent decades has a road been built along the mountain slopes linking villages to each other. Until then all transport was by mule. Today the former minaret of Bubión has been replaced by a church tower, looking out over a tranquil valley, in a village much favoured by northern European residents. The villages themselves still bear the marks of their North African ancestors — flat roofs and chalk-painted walls reminiscent of the Atlas mountains. And the agricultural layout of the slopes follows Arab patterns. Indeed there is a legend that when the 17th century rebellion was crushed, two Arab families had to stay behind in each village to show the new Christian settlers how to operate the irrigation systems.
One of the famous people to settle in this area in modern times was the English writer Gerald Brenan. He first came here in 1919, bringing 3,000 books on mules and lived on and off in this part of Andalusia until his death in 1987. In South of Grenada, Brenan's classic travel book, there are many references to the region's Arab past — the names of places, the features of the people and the cultivation of the landscapes.
The shadow of this history is even more evident elsewhere in Andalusia. The Cathedral at Granada, built to mark the Christian victory of 1492, sports a plaque over one of its main doors, La Puerta del Perdón, celebrating the end of "seven centuries of Muslims rule", and the Royal Chapel where Ferdinand and Isabela are entombed. In the Cathedral there is a vast altarpiece from 1707 of St James in military mode, astride a horse. The man he is trampling underfoot appears to be an Arab. In the hill of Albaicín that looks out at the Alhambra, thousands of Arab immigrants, mainly North Africans but with some recent arrivals from Iraq, run a series of Middle Eastern restaurants and souvenir shops.
All of this would in one sense be irrelevant, or a generously available part of history, were it not for the fact that there is a minority of writers and politicians who seek to return to the wars of the 15th and 16th centuries to make political capital. Just as there are demagogues among the Islamist movement who talk of reconquering the Iberian Peninsula (Al Andalus in the sense of all the areas once ruled by Islamic states), so there are Right-wing Spanish journalists who play up the history of the Alpujarra as part of a continuous Muslim threat to Spain. In their rhetoric the "fifth column" of the rebels of 1568-69, in league with Turkey and the pirates of Algiers and Tetuan, are the ancestors of the terrorists and fundamentalists who are active today among the Muslim communities (mainly Moroccans and Pakistanis) of Spain.
For those with an interest in such historical echoes, however, this autumn has brought another, in its way gratifying, addition to the story.
In a country without any major evident hostility to Muslims to date, and where public reaction to the 2004 Madrid bombings carried out by radical Moroccans was dignified, Juan Enciso, the populist mayor of the town of El Ejido, a town that relies on migrant labour to harvest its crops, had stood out as an embodiment of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant prejudice. It was in February 2000 when, following the killing of three local people by Arab migrants, Enciso put himself at the head of a wave of racist demonstrations, under the slogan "Arabs Go Home".
When urged to provide facilities for destitute migrant workers, without support or shelter after the demonstrations, he at first refused to do anything and then located them, far from the town, in a set of metal containers. In the Andalusian heat, these turned into ovens.
Enciso's arrest, on charges of embezzling up to 150 million euros (about Dh820 million) over six years as mayor of the town, is another chapter, in this case a fitting one, in the long history of relations linking this part of Spain to the North Africa that is so near and on a clear day when the mists have lifted, visible from the balconies of the Alpujarra villages.
Fred Halliday is ICREA Research Professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Affairs.
