On The Road To Seville

After staying for two nights in Madrid, we reached its train station in the morning. The same train station which was reminded to us the day before by the city tour guide as the 2004 Al Qaida Bombing site, the latest imprint of Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula. 

AVE fast moving train takes 2 and a half hours for what one would spend more than five hours on road. It is around 330 miles. Cordoba is along the way, but we would be there later in the week. These train tickets are hot items and one has to book them three months in advance, You cannot book them before that and if one is too late one may not get the seats. That is what we were told, but when we traveled in August, it was rather empty. The ride is very comfortable, and we had a facing seat of two and two with a table in between. 

Travelling down south, I wondered this path had been taken by so many over the thousand years. First in the opposite direction, moving up north and then increasingly in the same direction as I was travelling ie south. In 711 they raced up all the way from Gibraltar to Toledo and modern day Madrid and beyond. Three centuries later, most of it was back in Christian control. After the fall of each city to La Reconquista or al-istirdad,    الاسترداد  families of Muslims traveled south to the remaining Muslim control areas, and ultimately back to North Africa. 

Within forty years of Tariq Bin Zayad's invasion of Spain, the internal conflicts of various warlords provided an opportunity for the fleeing Abdur Rahman I to gain power. He had escaped from the massacre of his family at the hands of Bani Abbas in Damascus. He found a new life and a new empire in Al Aldalus. Banu Ummayah ruled Spain for almost three centuries, first as Independent Emirate for almost two centuries. Later when the threat from the Fatimid in Tunisia grew, his namesake and descendant Abdur Rahman III proclaimed himself a Caliph, breaking all ties with the Abbassi caliphate in Baghdad. 

After the fall of this parallel Caliphate one century later, the whole Iberian peninsula was divided into many independent city states, called Taifa's طائفہ .,  In the long history which followed there were wars and wars. Many a time a coalition of a Muslim and Christian kingdoms were fighting a similar combination on the other side. Some of the Taifa kings, called their North African Muslim brothers for help against the onslaught of La Reconquista.

The new wave of Moroccan Berbers, al Murabitun,  also known as Almoravids, marched northbound. The most charismatic name of this dynasty to most of our generation thanks to Naseem Hijazi, is Yusuf bin Tashfin. This dynasty ruled a vast expanse of land, from deep in Mauritania (root for the word Moor) to the heart of Spain. They retained Cordoba as their Andalusian capital but the seat of the government was in Morocco. Their rule lasted till mid twelfth century.

Last to come were the really puritan, the Al Mowahids. Followers of a self proclaimed Mehdi, they uprooted Almurbitun in Marrakesh and later in Spain. They deemed the Almoravids and the Ummayads before them as heretic and tried to instill a puritan version of Islam. They moved capital from Qurtuba to Seville. Their Monumental legacy is the Giralda of the fallen mosque in Seville.

After their fall in early thirteenth century,  the story of Muslims rule was basically over for most of the Spain. The exception was Granada, where local Andalusian Moorish ruling family of Bani Nasir carved out their independence as a subject state of Ferdinand III of Castille in return for cooperating with him in the conquest of Seville. Granada, thus remained under Muslim control for another 250 years.

Moving down south on the fast moving train, I saw desert turned into green fields of orange trees and various crops. It would be a natural terrain for the desert loving Arabs and Berbers. They lived here for a long time. They turned this desert into an irrigated land. What ever they contributed and make this land their own, they were deemed as the other by the locals right from the beginning. War was the culture of the time, and this passage would have seen many battles over many centuries.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasirgondal/7910393102/in/set-72157631344553438/

Travelling south on the AVE train, I could imagine Tariq Bin Zayad galloping up north with supposedly burnt boats left behind, and centuries later could see Yusuf Bin Tashfin, his face covered below the eyes in the elusive Murtabin style, slowly riding back into the sunset of Marrakesh, a city he founded.

In essence, that is the story of Muslim presence in Spain.

More on Seville, later.