Pomp and Circumstance Girls dressed as medieval Christians take part in Mojácar's Moros y Cristianos festival
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Across the river from the Alhambra, another Islamic complex has risen on another hill. It is a gleaming white mosque, the first purpose-built one in Granada in 500 years. Its construction took more than 22 years, a delay prompted in part by the resistance of many residents who — especially after 9/11 — worried that it represented an effort, both by local Muslims, and by the United Arab Emirates that helped fund it, to "reclaim al-Andalus." But eight years after its inauguration, the new mosque seems an integral part of the landscape of Albaicín, Granada's old Moorish quarter. Tourists flood its bloom-filled patio to get a better view of the Alhambra across the way, while worshippers enter through their own portals, divided by gender.
The Muslims who built the mosque, and staff it still, are Spaniards who have converted to Islam. They owe their origins to a Scottish convert who arrived in Granada in 1975, just as the dictator Francisco Franco was dying, and began reintroducing Spain to the Islam it had suppressed. Today, there are roughly 20,000 Muslim converts in Spain. Although they have long since fractured into different ideological groups, the importance of al-Andalus — not as a land to be reconquered, but as an example to be emulated — unites them. "We recognize ourselves as members of a community that managed to give to the world one of the most beautiful civilizations that man has known," convert Mehdi Flores has written. "A civilization that, with its light and shadows, was able to reach levels of humanity that still serve today as an example in our quest for models of how to live and live together."
Granada's convert community soon drew native-born Muslims as well. "We started here because Granada was more emblematic, the flavor of Andalusian culture was fresher, more recent," says Zakarias Maza, a schoolteacher who converted 30 years ago. "But then North African immigrants started coming here from the coast because they heard there was a community, because we had a mosque." Today it has three, including the new one on the hill. Maza still prays at the first one, inside an apartment building in the center of town (a sign advises worshippers not to disturb the "Christian family" living above it). "The upper one is mostly Spanish, and maybe more liberal," he says. "Mine, the lower one, is mixed."
Religious variation isn't the only sign that Granada's Muslim community is one of the most developed in Spain. There is a EuroArab management school here; the country's first "Islamically inspired" political party, the Party of Spanish Renaissance and Unity, was founded here in 2009. And then there are the sloping streets behind the Plaza Nueva, given over largely to Muslim-owned businesses.
A Nation Divided
To travel today through Andalusia is to come face to face with a peculiar brand of schizophrenia. Historic Islam is reflected by the monuments from the days of the caliphate that have been restored to splendor, by the old quarters in all the major cities that have been given over to tearooms and "Arab" baths, and by a romanticized image of an al-Andalus in which Muslims lived peacefully with people of other faiths. All this is embraced and even held out as a model for society. But contemporary Islam — of immigrants from North Africa who start their own businesses or huddle in makeshift huts; of women who wear veils but aren't nuns; of varieties that run from Sufi-inflected mysticism to Salafist puritanism — that living Islam remains unassimilated, and unresolved.
In Mojácar, José Antonio González jokes that he chose to join the Moors over the Christians because they had better costumes. But he also admits to a more serious affinity. "I'm a great defender of Arab culture," he says. "What al-Andalus gave us was a lighthouse that illuminated the world." Still, he doesn't agree with the efforts to open Córdoba's Mezquita to Muslim prayer, and he was as bothered as anyone when complaints of insensitivity forced another town to remove its Muhammed statue from its own Moros y Cristianos celebration. "I love what Arabic culture has given us in the good sense. But the culture they're trying to impose now? That I don't like."
One of his neighbors, Kachina Ghaddaf, strikes a similarly complicated balance. Half Egyptian, half Moroccan and a practicing Muslim, she and her husband arrived in Spain less than a year ago, and recently opened a jewelry store in Mojácar. She has never attended Moros y Cristianos, but she has heard about the spectacular pageantry and is eagerly looking forward to the festivities. "Oh yes, my neighbor has said she'll help with my costume," she gushes. "I'll be one of the Christians."