Notes from Toledo

[imomus]

Sitting in the station reading the English-language version of El Pais, the Spanish newspaper that comes with the International Herald Tribune, I found an article about mosques in Spain. Headlined "Mosques? Not in my neighbourhood!", the article describes how "when a group of Muslims decides to open a mosque, the neighbours mobilize to stop the project". People think their house prices will plummet, that bearded terrorists will walk their streets, that there'll be noisy calls-to-prayer, and so on. Since the mid-90s there have been 60 blocked mosque projects in Spain, often on technicalities ("fire hazard"). As a result, Muslims gather in much more discreet, architecturally low-key prayer centres.



None of this information prepared me for the beautiful shock of arrival in Toledo, an ancient walled town about half-an-hour by train from central Madrid. In fact, if anything proves that Islamic architecture increases your house prices, it's Toledo. The station is a tiled Moorish fantasia, pure Morocco. Climb through the labyrinth of streets to the top of the hill and you sense the layout of a middle-eastern town. The abbeys are organised around central courtyards featuring fountains in the arabic style. The post office is an exotic north African space. Everywhere you find patterned tiles, bulging rounded gridded windows, buildings called "alcazar" and "alhambra". There are synagogues and Christian buildings too, of course -- and even a Chinese-looking house built by a Spanish Inquisitor -- but the Muslim presence is one of the things that makes Toledo a treasure.



Back in Madrid yesterday evening, I went to the World Music section of 24-hour culture store FNAC. I was hoping to find a CD similar to one I already have, a recreation of Arabo-Andalusian medieval music (you can hear samples of it in my song Going For A Walk With A Line).

I asked the assistant where I might find such a fusion. "Oh," she told me in Spanish, "there's Arabic music and there's Andalusian music, but they're different things." Eventually -- and, it seemed, reluctantly -- the assistant dug out two CDs that contained the required fusion. It had happened somewhere, apparently, just not in her back yard.

Comments

[magick-temple.livejournal.com]

I think it's kinda unfortunate that that particular news story was in the paper at the time you visited Spain, because, while I don't debate the accuracy of the story, I think seen in isolation it probably gives a skewed idea of Spanish opinions to Islam and North African communities.

I think first it's important to remember that Spain is effectively a federation of regions with very different history, culture, opinion and even in some cases language. Certainly here in Valencia I see far less racism and/or Islamophobia than I do anywhere in Northern Europe - and there are still very visible and large Islamic/North African communities here. Maybe that's why.

It's probably also worth mentioning that Spain is still an ostensibly Catholic country, which may also play a part when considering attitudes to major centres of worship for other Abrahamic faiths that are not seen in modern secularly governed countries.

Maybe the truth can be seen in the results for the recent European elections... while pretty much the whole of northern Europe swung heavily to the right seeing unprecedented growth for anti-immigration, nationalistic and racist parties, Spain simply consolidated in the liberal progressive centre. That is the voice of the nation, far more so than a bunch of selfish householders, more concerned with not losing property value than higher principles like freedom of worship for a faith they do not believe in.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it was in a way bad timing. Or rather, I put a story I read in Atocha station together with the trip to Toledo I made right after it, producing an interesting semantic juxtaposition, but certainly not a considered summing-up of the whole Spanish Zeitgeist.