Entangled Gazes: The Polysemy of the New Great Mosque of Granada
In: Muqarnas OnlineSearch for other papers by Olga Bush in
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In 2003 a mosque was inaugurated in Granada, overcoming opposition voiced by neighbors, officials, and cultural institutions during two decades of heated debate. At issue was the meaning of the mosque within the contexts of local, regional, national, and global history. Current, large-scale immigration of North African Muslims stands clearly in the background. There was, however, a prior movement of conversion to Islam by young Spanish Christians in and around Granada at the end of the Franco dictatorship. These neo-Muslims conceived and built the Great Mosque of Granada, whose architectural design and decoration mobilize contested historical and cultural narratives. The mosque poses the fraught ideological issues in terms of what will be visible (or invisible) and to whom. The site of the mosque at the summit of the Albayzín hill, facing the Alhambra, has been the crux of entangled visualities. The mosque is not only an object of the gaze but also a privileged subject position for the gaze, in rivalry with the Christian gaze from the adjacent Church of San Nicolás and its mirador. The new mosque is a key to the transformation of the discourse of Spain’s relation to its Muslim past into debate about its Muslim present.
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3
Omayma Abdel-Latif, “Back in Spain—with a Difference,” Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 650 (August 7–13, 2003), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/650/fe1.htm (accessed April 10, 2012) (emphasis added).
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4
Jorge Trías Sagnier, “Una mezquita inquietante,” ABC, July 14, 2003, http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-14-07-2003/abc/Opinion/una-mezquita-inquietante_194722.html# (accessed July 12, 2012).
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5
Álvaro Calleja, “Granada inaugura la mayor mezquita de Europa cinco siglos después de la expulsión musulmana,” ABC, November 7, 2003, http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-11-07-2003/abc/Sociedad/granada-inaugura-la-mayor-mezquita-de-europa-cinco-siglos-despues-de-la-expulsion-musulmana_194025.html (accessed July 12, 2012).
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6
Nebahat Avcıoğlu, “Identity-as-Form: The Mosque in the West,” Cultural Analysis 6 (2007): 97. Avcıoğlu’s incisive contribution also serves as a critical introduction to the vast body of scholarship on mosques built in Europe and the United States in the twentieth century and into the present. For an overview of several new mosques built in Spain, see Jennifer Roberson, “Visions of al-Andalus in Twentieth-Century Spanish Mosque Architecture,” in Revisiting al-Andalus: Perspectives on the Material Culture of Islamic Iberia and Beyond, ed. Glaire D. Anderson and Miriam Rosser-Owen (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 247–69. Roberson includes a brief discussion of the Great Mosque of Granada (262–69).
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10
Gil Anidjar, “Futures of al-Andalus,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 7, 3 (2006): 225–29.
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12
Hajj Abdulhasib Castiñeira, “La comunidad musulmana de Granada, un ejemplo de integración positiva,” Jornadas sobre Convivencia Vecinal y Espacio Publico, Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza, Concejalía de Acción Social y Mayor, La Casa de las Culturas, Zaragoza, April 15–16, 2008, http://www.mezquitadegranada.com/index.php?id=lacomunidadmusulmanadegran (accessed May 1, 2012).
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16
Joaquín Bosque Maurel, Geografía urbana de Granada (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1988), 78, cited in Francisco Javier Rosón Lorente, “¿El Retorno de Tariq?: Comunidades etnoreligiosas en al Albayzín granadino” (PhD diss., Departamento de Antropología Social, Universidad de Granada, Granada, 2008), 128, http://biblioteca.ugr.es (accessed August 5, 2012).
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20
Rafael Garófano Sánchez, La Andalucía del Siglo XIX en las Fotografías de J. Laurent y Cía (Almeria: Junta de Andalucía, 1999), no. 86.
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28
Julio César Cabrera Medina, “El turismo en el Albaicín,” in El Albaicín en la encrucijada, ed. Juan Carlos de Pablos (Granada: Universidad del a Granada, 2005), 196–222, esp. 199.
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30
Juan Carlos de Pablos, “El uso residencial del Albaicín,” in El Albaicín en la encrucijada, ed. Juan Carlos de Pablos, 72–124, esp. 123. Among recent studies on various aspects of Albayzín’s urbanism, the topics addressed in El Albaicín en la encrucijada are of special interest for my article. It should be noted, however, that the impact of the neo-Muslim and Muslim communities is mentioned only in passing in the analysis of the neighborhood’s economy—the businesses in the Calderería that cater mainly to tourists. Although the edited volume was published in 2005, it is a result of a project by the sociologists of the University of Granada that was undertaken in 2000 while the mosque was still under construction.
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33
Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar, “Al-Andalus in Andalusia; Negotiating Moorish History and Regional Identity in Southern Spain,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, 3 (Summer 2007): 863–86. On the festivals of Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians) in Valencia, Andalusia, and Castilla-La Mancha, see, for instance, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, “Battles of Identity, or Playing ‘Guest’ and ‘Host’: The Festivals of Moors and Christians in the Context of Moroccan Immigration in Spain,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 4, 2 (2003): 151–68; Roland Baumann, The “Moors and Christians” of Valor: Folklore and Conflict in the Alpujarra (Andalusia) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1995); Henk Driessen, “Mock Battles between Moors and Christians: Playing the Confrontation of Crescent with Cross in Spain’s South,” Ethnologia Europaea 15, 2 (1985): 105–15.
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34
Daniela Flesler, “Contemporary Moroccan Immigration and Its Ghosts,” in In the Light of Medieval Spain, ed. Doubleday and Coleman, 116. In addition to this article, the following is also especially insightful: Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2008).
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41
Ibid., 142.
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43
Abend, “Spain’s New Muslims,” 143–45; Rosón Lorente, “¿El Retorno de Tariq?,” 365–66.
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50
Castiñeira, “La comunidad musulmana de Granada.” See also Rosón Lorente, “¿El Retorno de Tariq?,” 351–64, 393–98; Coleman, “Persistence of the Past,” 163–75.
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52
Abdennur Prado, “Sobre la Situacion Jurídica del Islam en España,” May 19, 2005, www.webislam.com/noticias/43786-sobre_la_situacion_juridica_del_islam_en_espana.html (accessed June 27, 2012). For the implications of Spain’s federal law with regard to the Muslim minority (Acuerdo de Cooperación entre el Estado Español y la Comisión islámica de España), promulgated as Law 26/92 on November 10, 1992, and other government initiatives, see Ricardo Zapata-Barrero, “The Muslim Community and Spanish Tradition: Maurophobia as a Fact, and Impartiality as a Desideratum,” in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach, ed. Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ricardo Zapata-Barrero (London: Routledge, 2006), 143–61.
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59
Pierre Nora, “Preface to the English-Language Edition,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1:xvii.
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60
Castilla Brazales and Orihuela Uzal, En busca de la Granada, 47–49.
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66
For a summary, see Rosón Lorente, “¿El Retorno de Tariq?,” 479–80.
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75
August 10, 1993, quoted in Rosón Lorente, “¿El Retorno de Tariq?,” 408. For a more complete history of the litigation mobilized by the Asociación de Vecinos del Albayzín against the construction of the mosque, see ibid., 402–22.
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83
Ibid., 122.
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84
M. Antequera, “El Albayzín se cristianiza,” Ideal, September 20, 1936, 10, quoted in Castelló Nicás, La renovación urbana, 122–23. Stone crosses were placed in front of other churches in the Albayzín (San Gregorio Alto, San Cristóbal, de la Victoria, San Ildefonso) as well as in small public plazas, among them Cruz de Quirós, Cruz de la Rauda, and Cruz de Piedra. Juan Manuel Barrios Rozúa, Guía de la Granada desaparecida (Granada: Editorial Comares, 1999).
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109
Beebe Bahrami, “A Door to Paradise,” City and Society 10, 1 (1998): 127–28. On the politics of the collective memory of the Moriscos, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Memory and Mutilation: The Case of the Moriscos,” in In the Light of Medieval Spain, ed. Doubleday and Coleman, 67–90.
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110
Aidi, “Interference of al-Andalus,” 76. Aidi quotes Muhammad ibn Azuz Hakim, a Moroccan historian, who traced more than seven thousand surnames of Andalusi origin in Tetuan alone. For an analysis of Andalusian identity among the descendants of the Moriscos in Rabat, see Beebe Bahrami, “Al-Andalus and Memory: The Past and Being Present among Hispano-Moroccan Andalusians from Rabat,” in Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain, ed. Stacey N. Beckwith (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 111–43.
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Entangled Gazes: The Polysemy of the New Great Mosque of Granada
In: Muqarnas OnlineSearch for other papers by Olga Bush in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
In 2003 a mosque was inaugurated in Granada, overcoming opposition voiced by neighbors, officials, and cultural institutions during two decades of heated debate. At issue was the meaning of the mosque within the contexts of local, regional, national, and global history. Current, large-scale immigration of North African Muslims stands clearly in the background. There was, however, a prior movement of conversion to Islam by young Spanish Christians in and around Granada at the end of the Franco dictatorship. These neo-Muslims conceived and built the Great Mosque of Granada, whose architectural design and decoration mobilize contested historical and cultural narratives. The mosque poses the fraught ideological issues in terms of what will be visible (or invisible) and to whom. The site of the mosque at the summit of the Albayzín hill, facing the Alhambra, has been the crux of entangled visualities. The mosque is not only an object of the gaze but also a privileged subject position for the gaze, in rivalry with the Christian gaze from the adjacent Church of San Nicolás and its mirador. The new mosque is a key to the transformation of the discourse of Spain’s relation to its Muslim past into debate about its Muslim present.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1087 | 111 | 8 |
| Full Text Views | 73 | 2 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 66 | 7 | 0 |
