Granada

Granada

Middle
East
Literature
in
Translation
Michael Beard
and
Adnan Haydar,
Series
Editors

Other titles in Middle East Literature in Translation

The
Author
and
His
Doubles:
Essays
on
Classical
Arabic
Culture
Abdeltattah Kilito; Michael Cooperson, trans.

The
Committee
Sonallah Ibrahim; Mary St. Germain and Charlene Constable, trans.

A
Cup
of
Sin:
Selected
Poems
Simin Behbahani; Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa, trans.

Fatma:A
Novel
of
Arabia
Raja Alem with Tom McDonough

Fugitive
Light:
A
Novel
Mohammed Berrada; IssaJ. Boullata, trans.

In
Search
ofWalid
Masoud:A
Novel
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra; Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar, trans.

Moroccan
Folktales
Jilali El Koudia, trans.; Roger Allen, ed.

Three
Tales
of
Love
and
Death
Out El Kouloub

Women
Without
Men:
A
Novella
Shahrnush Parsipur; Kamran Talattof and Jocelyn Sharlet, trans.

Yasar
Kemal
on
His
Life
and
Art
Eugene Lyons Hebert and Barry Tharaud, trans.

Zanouba:A
Novel
Out El Kouloub; Nayra Atiya, trans.

Granada

A
Novel

Radwd Ashour

Translated
from
the
Arabic
by
William Granara

With a Foreword by Maria Rosa Menocal

Copyright © 2003 by Syracuse University Press
Syracuse, New York 13244-5160
All
Rights
Reserved

First Edition 2003

04 05 06 07 08 6 5 4 3 2

This translation is based on the Arabic edition,
Graimta,
which is volume 1 of
Thulathiyat
Ghamata
(The Granada Trilogy)
(Beirut: Al-Muassassa al-arabiyya lil-dirasat wa al-nashr, 1998).

Mohamad El-Hindi Books on Arab Culture and Islamic Civilization
are published with the assistance of a grant from Ahmad El-Hindi.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.∞
^TM

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

'Ashūr, Radwa

[Gharnāṭah. English]

Granada :a novel / Radwa Ashour ; translated by William Granara.—

1st ed.
p. cm.—(Middle East literature in translation)

ISBN 0-8156-0765-2
1. Granada (Spain)—History—Fiction. I. Granara, William. II. Tide.

III. Series.

PJ7814.S514 G48132003
892.7'36—dc22 2003018502

Manufactured
in
the
United
States
of
America

Egyptian writer
Radwa Ashour
is a novelist, critic, and professor of English literature at Ain Shams University, in Egypt. After studying English Literature at Cairo University, graduating in 1967, she earned her doctorate in African-American literature in 1975 from Massachusetts University. She then joined the faculty at Ain Shams University, where she has taught ever since, except for brief periods. Ashour has written several novels and short stories; the trilogy of which
Granada
forms the first part was named Best Book of the Year by the General Egyptian Book Organization in 1994, and won first prize in the first Arab Women's Book Fair two years later.

William Granara
is a translator, writer, and professor of Arabic language and literature at Harvard University, where he also directs the Arabic language program. He studied Arabic at Georgetown University and received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He formerly served as the executive director of the Center for Arabic Study at the American University in Cairo and as director of the Arabic Field School of the U.S. Department of State in Tunis, Tunisia. Professor Granara specializes in the history and culture of Muslim Sicily, and has written on cross-cultural encounters between Islam and Christendom throughout the Middle Ages. In addition, he lectures and writes on contemporary Arabic literature and has published translations of Egyptian and North African fiction.

Foreword

Ways of Remembering Granada

I
n Arabic letters, the tradition of remembering the lost shards of Islamic Spain is an old and venerable one. The destruction of Cordoba itself—the Caliphate politically dismembered and the venerable city sacked, along with the nearby palatine city of Madinat al-Zahra,
One
Thousand
and
One
Nights
-like in its architectural wonders—was the subject of what is perhaps the best-known work of Andalusian literature,
Tauq
al-Hamam
(The neck-ring of the dove), by Ibn Hazm of Cordoba. Not unlike the extended family of characters so lovingly created by Radwa Ashour in this novel, Ibn Hazm was himself of a generation that lived through the transition from one universe to another, a personal witness to the unimaginable losses that followed the political debacles of his time. The Cordoban's celebrated work about love, and about its ways of shaping the human condition, and about the sorrows of loss in love, easily elides the love of a woman with that of his homeland. When he says "My love for her blotted out all that went before, and made anathema to me all that came after" he might as easily be describing one as the other. And it is precisely this kind of crucial interdependence of public and personal histories, and the ways in which life and love must indeed go on, and yet are unbearably transfigured by earthshaking historical events, that is on vivid display in
Granada.

A work of historical fiction set in the aftermath of the Castilian takeover of the lone Islamic kingdom of Granada in 1492,
Granada
tells the story of an extended family grappling with the conse
quences of that political catastrophe for the Muslim community. Granada at that moment recreated here by the Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, the turn of the sixteenth century in a Spain where the New World has just barely been discovered, is removed by about five hundred years from Ibn Hazm's devastated Cordoba—almost exactly as long and far as it is removed from us, and from the "interesting times" in which we ourselves live. One is tempted to argue that while the details of history change—and the textures and colors of everyday life are more or less exotic to a reader—the personal remains the same, and that the love stories and the family sagas that come to us superimposed on the narrative of the sack of Madinat al-Zahra by fundamentalist Berbers in 1009 are, at the end of the day, love stories and family sagas like all others, whether five or fifty or five hundred years later.

But in fact all history is not created equal, and the Arabs and many other Muslims have long harbored a complex nostalgia for an al-Andalus remembered, iconically, as both the best of times and the worst of times in their history. From Ibn Hazm through Radwa Ashour—with everyone from Ibn al-Khatib to Salman Rushdie in between—to evoke any given chapter within the longue duree of Andalusian history, no matter how seemingly domestic or how formally poetic, is to call forth the complex specter of how much a culture can achieve, how fragile such achievement is, and most of all, how much it can lose. Ashour has chosen 1492, the most easily lamentable moment in this history, and by far the most often chosen as a setting for historical novels
¹
—it is, after all, one of those moments
of history whose various dramas, like those of the French Revolution, seem to have already been written by a melodramatic novelist. Nevertheless, in
Granada
she tells a story that is fresh in many ways, and whose relevance to contemporary issues does not obtrusively call attention to itself. In telling the story of an extended family on this cusp of history she leaves no doubt about the unmitigated evils that follow the revocation of rights at first granted to Muslims under Christian rule, without, however, leaving us with characters who are little more than mouthpieces for righteous ideology.

1. In relatively recent years one notes two prominent and best-selling 1492 novels: Tariq Ali's
Shadows
of
the
Pomegranate
Tree,
with a setting just outside the city of Granada but at the same moment Ashour has chosen, and Noah Gordon's
The
Last
Jew,
whose eponymous hero is, instead, from Toledo, but who shares with the Muslim characters—as the Jews did indeed share historically, in Spain, with the Muslims—their struggles with the choices of adaptation and conversion versus resistance or exile. Far less common are historical novels set in earlier moments in the very rich landscape that is the seven-hundred-some year history that begins in the
middle of the eighth century, although two recent ones, both involving the more positive story of the legendary religious tolerance and cultural admixtures of caliphal Cordoba, are worth noting:
Journey
to
the
End
of
the
Millennium
by A. B. Yehoshua and, in French,
Le
calendrier
de
Cordue,
by Yves Ouahnon.

On the contrary, part of the genuine pathos of the novel—and I strongly believe the historical as well as personal verisimilitude—lies in the many different paths taken by the different members of the family, and in the equal love the novelist has for these very different children of her imagination. From those who became members of the violent resistance in the Alpujarras (that mountainous region to the southeast of Granada where Muslim refugees waged a ferocious struggle for dozens of years, until they were finally, brutally, repressed) to those who were not only willing to convert to Christianity, but even loath to give shelter, in the family house, to other family members suspected by the Inquisition authorities, all of her characters are first and foremost complex human beings and not easily judged. Driven by different ways of expressing their love for each other, for their culture, and for their children, these men and women (and the women have center stage a great deal of the time, as the enduring centers of a social world that is increasingly hidden and domestic, and this too she shares with Ibn Hazm, whose love-treatise is set inside the harem where he was brought up) struggle to make the best decisions they can, when no decision seems quite good enough, under the circumstances. So the matter of heroes and
villains is largely left open-ended and the only exception to this general human role is that of the handful of Castilian Christians who appear in the story, who are almost invariably the villainous and cartoonish heavies. But since this was in fact almost always officially and publicly the case, and since Ashour's few Christians here are mostly public and not domestic figures, it is hard to quibble with such a representation, although the extent to which ordinary Christians may not have shared the totalitarian program of the Church is as vital to the genuine pathos of the history as the conversions to Christianity by so many Muslims.
²