Some years ago, I spent part of my sabbatical in Granada. I resided in the Carmen de la Victoria, the residence for visiting professors at the University of Granada. The historic house sits on a rise in the famous Albaicín quarter, a neighborhood whose urban fabric, spatial organization, and very name all hark back to the Islamic period. The word carmen itself, which today sounds thoroughly Spanish, is in fact a hispanized form of the Arabic karma (vineyard), a fitting designation for the Nasrid and Morisco houses of Granada, each of which contained a courtyard planted, at the very least, with a vine. This pattern recalls the courtyard houses of the Arab world at large, where a single tree – fig, pomegranate, orange, or vine – often dominated the central space and became its living emblem. The Albaicín, in other words, is not only a surviving quarter but a palimpsest of Mediterranean-Arabic modes of dwelling, visible in its terraces, winding streets, and houses that keep a vine or tree as their nucleus.

The Carmen de la Victoria is remarkable in its orientation: it directly faces the Alhambra, the most resplendent of Granada’s monuments and one of the most celebrated achievements of Islamic architecture worldwide. The royal city of the Nasrids, the Alhambra was built and inhabited by the Banū Naṣr, or Banū al-Aḥmar, from their rise to power in the thirteenth century until the fall of the city in 1492. From my window each day, I was treated to a view of the fortress-palace, at once majestic and haunting. My daily ascents and descents to the city center carried me beneath its walls, sometimes several times a day, and I cannot exaggerate when I say that the vision of this red citadel, ringed in verdant green, overwhelmed me with its beauty and solemnity. Especially at night, when illuminated dramatically, the Alhambra seems to slip away from its earthly site and float ethereally above the wooded slopes.

Granada and the Memory of Loss

Granada is the perfect place for an Arab to meditate on exile and defeat. Inscribed in our collective memory as the last city in al-Andalus to fall to the Catholic monarchs in 1492, it still bears witness to that golden age of Islamic culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Its monuments testify eloquently: the Alhambra itself, the fourteenth-century Madrasa Yusufiyya (later the city hall), the Corral del Carbón (a caravanserai), several converted mosques, and above all the Albaicín, the hill-hugging neighborhood facing the Sabīka Hill, where the Nasrids raised their red citadel. Together they evoke an entire urban ecology of Islamic Granada, fragile but persistent.

For centuries, poets, essayists, and moralists recalled Granada, and the Alhambra above all, as our “Paradise Lost,” the marvelous city that we could not hold on to. Its loss haunted Arab memory, as testified in countless poems of lamentation, in didactic sermons, and in moral tales warning against disunity and indulgence. This remained the case until the mid-twentieth century, when Palestine became the fresh wound, the new and ongoing catastrophe, the nakba that has weighed on the conscience of generations of Arabs ever since. Palestine displaced Granada as the last loss, remembered in politics, art, and literature. Granada, meanwhile, perhaps because of its ethereal beauty and the growing distance from its tragedy, became the erstwhile lieu de mémoire, often evoked with resigned nostalgia and exaggerated visions of past grandeur.

But for me, the Alhambra impressed with more than its aesthetic brilliance or its status as the register of anguished nostalgia. Instead, it compelled me to reflect on the ongoing erasure of Palestine. Granada’s history, before my eyes each day, offered itself as a prism through which to contemplate the enduring meanings of loss, exile, and memory.

The fall of Granada in 1492 to Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile marked the end of nearly eight centuries of Islamic presence in the peninsula. From that moment, al-Andalus passed from lived reality into memory, attaining an aura of perfection, convivencia, and creativity that grew ever more intense as the contemporary Arab condition deteriorated. The expelled Andalusians dispersed, mainly across the Maghrib, carrying with them their traditions, their refinement, and their sorrow. They founded new quarters, often called al-Andalus, preserved their music and courtly manners, and gave rise to a rich corpus of laments and elegies that has continued to this day.

The Nasrid Dynasty and Its Monument

The Alhambra itself still bears eloquent traces of that past, despite five centuries of transformation. Of its original seven or eight palaces, only two remain: the Court of the Myrtles with its long reflective pool and jewel-like throne room, and the Court of the Lions with its celebrated fountain borne by 12 marble lions and its two intricately adorned halls, the Halls of the Two Sisters and of the Abencerrajes, whose muqarnas domes remain unrivaled in their complexity and splendor. The ensemble is at once delicate and monumental, fragile yet enduring, modest in scale yet infinite in detail.

The Nasrid dynasty’s history was undeniably tragic. Founded in 1238 by Muḥammad b. Yūsuf b. Naṣr (Ibn al-Aḥmar), the emirate endured for two-and-a-half centuries as a fragile Islamic enclave surrounded by the ever-advancing Christian Reconquista. Its survival depended on precarious diplomacy, alternating between Muslim and Christian alliances, while internally it was riven by intrigue, assassinations, and struggles for power. Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Ibn Khaldūn, and Ibn Zamrak – all of whom lived and wrote within the Alhambra – testify in their writings and in their fates to the brilliance and the instability of its culture. Ministers became exiles, poets became martyrs, scholars became political pawns. The very walls of the Alhambra carry their inscriptions: verses of Ibn Zamrak inscribed across the halls, lyrical celebrations of beauty and power, but written in a palace where conspiracies and betrayals ended in exile or execution.

And yet, paradoxically, this weak and isolated polity enjoyed an economic and cultural efflorescence. At the very moment of its greatest political vulnerability, it produced works of exquisite refinement in architecture, literature, and the arts. Successive rulers, especially Yūsuf I and Muḥammad V, lavished resources on embellishing the Alhambra and its surrounding suburban estates such as the Generalife (Jannat al-ʿArīf), perhaps the most accomplished expression of garden design in the western Mediterranean. The paradox is profound: a polity doomed politically, yet producing an architecture so refined that it continues to inspire awe and imitation centuries later.

Indeed, there is little dispute that the Alhambra represent one of the most celebrated achievements of world architecture. Nor is there any disagreement that these palaces have entered the global artistic and cultural imagination alongside the other great marvels of humanity such as the Pyramids of Giza, the Acropolis of Athens, or the Taj Mahal of Agra. These monuments long ago transcended their architectural, artistic, and historical meanings to assume symbolic, exalted, even mythical associations. They stand in the global imagination not only as structures but as ideas: the pyramids as humanity’s challenge to death and its tragic submission to mortality; the Acropolis as the birth of aesthetics, philosophy, and democracy; the Taj Mahal as the universal emblem of love.

The Alhambra is different. It is neither grand nor monumental. Nor has it carried the same weight as a universal symbol of an essential human ideal. Its palaces are delicate, refined, even flimsy: a sequence of modest courtyards ringed by slender halls and arcades, leaning against the fortress walls, gazing toward the hills, and partly hidden behind Charles V’s intrusive palace. They appear incomplete – almost amputated. And yet, when one enters, one steps immediately into a self-contained world of geometry, water, inscription, and light.

It is perhaps this very contrast – the fragile grace of the palaces and the storm of hostile forces encircling them – that endowed the Alhambra with its symbolic aura. For the Romantic imagination of the nineteenth century, it became the last refuge of an exotic “Oriental” enchantment at the western edge of Europe. Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra popularized its legends, Chateaubriand projected onto it his melancholy, and poets from Alfred de Musset to García Lorca, from Gustave Doré to Nizar Qabbani, filled it with verse, fantasy, and lament. Their works blurred fact and fiction, elevating the Alhambra from fragmentary ruin to luminous legend.

How did these modest palaces, the last relics of a vanished Islamic dynasty, survive? Perhaps because their beauty is not of scale or power but of proportion, delicacy, and integration with nature. Their muqarnas domes, epigraphic bands, and endlessly varied arabesques achieve a lyrical harmony with fountains, gardens, and vistas. It is this beauty – at once intimate and transcendent – that has ensured their vitality in the imagination of architects, poets, and visitors. Beauty, more than history or politics, has lifted the Alhambra from the fate of neglect into the realm of myth.

Contemporary Resonances: Beyond Elegy

What, then, should the Alhambra mean for us today? Not merely the mnemonic weight of defeat, nor a picturesque relic of Orientalist fantasy, it should function as a paradigm: of proportion against gigantism, of layered inscription against emptiness, of water and garden against sterility, of lightness against bombast, and of beauty against destruction. To remember loss is necessary; to remember only loss is disabling. The Alhambra teaches that beauty is not consolation but method – an exacting discipline that binds memory to making and transforms nostalgia into creation.

To reconcile with the full legacy of al-Andalus – its triumphs and its tragedies alike – would be to re-engage its monuments as resources for contemporary creativity. Such reconciliation is not amnesia; it is the cultivation of forms that keep memory active. In this sense, the Alhambra remains urgently present in these tragic days. But instead of sublimating loss into myth, it offers a different labor: to translate wounded memory into a generative practice – cultural, architectural, literary, and visual – that refracts the past into promising future.

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