The Alhambra offers perspective on ambition, decline, and remorse about what could have been. In Irwin's final pages of text he bemoans, "The Alhambra serves as an icon of exile and loss" (locator 2022). The early presence of Moors in Spain brought religious tolerance, prosperity, and stimulated art and culture distinctive in Europe but in its final years all this would vanish, all but the Alhambra.
The Alhambra palace (actually 6 palaces) is sectioned into three areas; the Mexuar for public business, the Court of the Myrtles for private administrative use, and the Court of the Lions which included private apartments for the king (Emir) and his concubines. The uses of the palaces, barracks, mosque, and small town are sometimes disputed, and the reality is that it's impossible to determine the historic use of some areas in the palace. By contrast to many historic buildings that were erected to assert authority and power, the Alhambra was more scaled to the private use and comforts of Nasrids. But historic events did take place there, including a visit by Christopher Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella years after Christians defeated the Moors. Columbus, with his Jewish Arabic-speaking interpreter by his side, appealed for resources to sail to the east by going west on his 1492 expedition. Why an Arabic-speaking Jew? Because Columbus assumed that those he would encounter in the east would speak Arabic. The preservation, and subsequent renovation, of the Alhambra was as much a victory statement of Reconquista as it was a commitment to great architecture.
The phrase 'La Ghalib ila Allah' ('No victor but God') is found throughout the Alhambra, displayed in fabrics as well as incorporated into the permanent decoration of walls. The pleasures of life, a veritable heaven on earth, are reflected in arresting vistas, proportion of buildings and arches, landscape, and pools and fountains. The hammams (baths) in the Alhambra are both beautiful and functional, allowing for ablution in preparation for prayer as well as for cleanliness. The Hall of the Ambassadors is the most impressive room, clearly intended as a chamber for reception of visitors, and is sheltered by a ceiling of twelve-sided stars in seven levels, reflecting the seven heavens. The Court of the Lions is a sunken garden of low plants (or "Riyad") and is considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. This garden and others served as extensions of the buildings, with the buildings simply framing the beauty of the gardens, which might have served as meditative spaces for Muslims to study and pray (madrassa). All the Alhambra buildings reflect a harmony of space that suggests the infusion of mathematical principles in design, although no evidence confirms such a scientific approach.
Music was also an important element of the Alhambra, with music itself being highly mathematical and proportional. The 'ud, an instrument popular today throughout the middle east with Marcel Khalifa its undisputed contemporary master, is proportioned to match the relationship of the spheres. Ibn Khaldun declared that the meaning of music "is that existence is shared by all existent things" (locator 1219) and that vocal music reflected the apex of cultural development. The predictable mathematical relationship in music are reminiscent of the symmetrical tessellation found in abstract decorations in textiles, carpets, tiles, and other adornments, with arabesques depicting leaf and tendrils and atauriques depicting vegetation such as palmette, pinecone, and palm leaves.
The perspective of the Moors, and the Alhambra their personification, for some Spaniards is that the Moors undermined their unique cultural identity. For Arabs and Muslims, the Alhambra stands for all that has been lost in the centuries after the decline of the Moors in Spain, the Ottomans in the Middle East, and persecution in far eastern places such as India. I've come to understand this through Marcel Khalifa's sculpted portrayal in the music of "Concerto al Andalus" and in the mournful playing and singing that I previously thought was Spanish but now recognize as a blend of Spanish and Muslim/Arab cultures.
