The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History: Eastern and Western Visions in the Long Nineteenth Century

Back in my high school days in Beirut, we read in class the poem by Ahmad Shawqi about the Alhambra, and in the past few years, on 2 January, some Arabic newspapers online have published articles recalling the 1492 fall of Granada—the last piece of Al-Andalus. It was on that day that Abū ‘Abdallah Muḥammad/Boabdil (d. 1533) went into exile in Fez, Morocco. Symbolizing the grandeur of a lost Al-Andalus, the Alhambra has been a fixture in Arabic memory.In The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History: Eastern and Western Visions in the Long Nineteenth Century (first published in French in 2021), the distinguished historian Edhem Eldem shows how the Alhambra had also been the emotional and touristic destination of peoples of different religions, nationalities, and languages from the “North”/Europeans (chapter 1), the “South”/Maghribis (chapter 2), and the “East” /Ottomans (chapter 3), all of whom expressed wonder, nostalgia, admiration, or anguish upon seeing the famed palace. Visitors wandered in its halls, taking photographs, sometimes posing in “Moorish” clothes, and often signing their names in the visitors’ book, a tradition started in 1829. Using this book as his information base, Eldem traces the backgrounds and motives, both political and personal, of the palace’s sundry visitors, many of whom were ambassadors, offering a fascinating history of the place of the Alhambra in Mediterranean memory from the late eighteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century. Eldem consults sources in multiple languages, archives from Istanbul to Granada, and manuscripts and publications. As he demonstrates, the Alhambra was at the crossroad for visitors, unlike any other secular, Islamic site in the long nineteenth century.While the earliest visitors were European and American, the book opens with the Jerusalem scholar/‘ālim from a distinguished Palestinian family, Khalīl Jawād al-Khālidī in 1912. To describe this visit, Eldem relies, as he does in every other possible case, not only on historical records, newspaper reports, and memoirs, but also on photographs: In another publication, Eldem had written a fascinating study of Ottoman vernacular photography. At the same time, Eldem is the literary scholar who scrutinizes the scribbles, signatures, poems, and reflective paragraphs in the visitors’ book. He builds a portrait of the visitor based on memoirs, published and unpublished writings, correspondence, and contemporaneous accounts. Every entry receives an exhaustive discussion. His goal is to engage with a question: what did the Alhambra mean to visitors? How did they fashion themselves during their visits? And how did Spanish journalists and other observers describe and interpret them?The first chapter discusses the “discovery” of the Alhambra by western scholars and orientalists—French, British and German. From the late eighteenth century on, this new appreciation of the Alhambra by westerners gave rise to the Moresque style and decorations that were widely influential. In England, the Moresque appeared in the “Court” at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, in the stoves manufactured in Sheffield “with arabesque pattern of the richest expression,” and in the royal Alhambra Theatre of 1856 (37). While there was admiration and imitation, there was also the question of the Black Legend—Spain’s empire in the Americas and its establishment of the Spanish Inquisition. Eldem examines the debates that the Alhambra generated in Spain about the role of the “Moors” in Iberian history and the question of how the eight centuries of Islamic presence were to be viewed. And there is also a discussion of Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, which every modern English-speaking tourist to the site buys. Perhaps most interesting in this chapter is the discussion of what Eldem calls “Orientalisms”—how a structure built by Arabs in the “West” became a site of European Orientalizing fantasies: thus the 1885 painting of a pasha grieving for his dead tiger in “Alhambresque setting” (53).The discussion of the “South” brings Maghribi visitors to the site who signed the visitors’ book, leaving Eldem with the question whether the few who left their names were the only visitors (79). With limited sources about the Maghribi visitors, mostly from Morocco and Mauritania, Eldem turns to contemporaneous Spanish newspapers, including local ones from Granada. He describes the various diplomatic delegations that visited the Alhambra and examines (and frequently reproduces) their entries in the visitors’ book, studying the transcription style and language. He then builds a picture of the visitors as they reflected on their past: how a member of the 1889 embassy held “the sword of the unfortunate Boabdil” (111). How did visitors actually feel is a question that Eldem frequently asks, trying to uncover “exaggerations and inconsistencies” in the reports (127).The chapter on the “East” is the longest in the book not only because of the high number of visitors from the Ottoman Empire, but also because of the diversity of visitors that included Turks, Armenians, and Muslim and Christian Arabs of varied ranks and professions. Here, Eldem has the advantage of the vast Ottoman archives containing manuscripts, printed books, photographs, and architectural designs that shed light on his visitors. Again, he starts with a notable visitor, an ambassador in 1844, Fuad Pasha, who wrote in French and in Turkish, which allows Eldem to explore the “mind and soul” of this “cultivated polyglot” (156). There were many other Turkish diplomats and emissaries, who after their visits, wrote and published the first “heterogeneous” histories of Al-Andalus, thereby placing Andalusia in “a central position in the historical imagination of the Ottoman elite” (192). And there were Christian Arabs and Armenians, although Eldem did not find much about them. Eldem then turns to the Ottomans, and shows how they, like the British and the French, adopted a Moresque style in some of Istanbul’s architecture; the list “of buildings in that style,” Eldem concludes, “is long” (209). The style reached Egypt, which was under Ottoman rule.This book might appear to be the definitive study of the Alhambra as a crossroads had it not been for the intriguing questions that Eldem frequently raises in his discussions. Notwithstanding the encyclopedic range of information that he offers, Eldem realizes there are themes and strands that can be further explored. It will, however, be a herculean task for any future scholar to add to Eldem’s erudite and enjoyable study.

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