Assalamu’alaikum and greetings to all,

We hope everything is fine over there. As promised, we would like to present you with a writing about one of the legendary Islamic city - Andalucia. However, we are not going to write it like the textbook instead we invited Afnizar Mohd from University of Manchester to share her travel notes with all of us. Since she has a lot to share, thus we have divided her notes by parts. What’s more, we are glad to feature photographs shot by Mohd Haneef Nasir from Cardiff University during his trip there. Without wasting your time, here’s Part 1 of Andalucia: Remnants of Abandones Stories.

How many fellow-travellers have I known? I cannot count.
How many corners of the Earth? I cannot tell.
Now that my wanderings east and west are done,
There is but one last corner left: my grave.

Of course,  I haven’t travelled as much as the travelling poet of the eleventh century who wrote the verses above had, but there are a few places that captured my heart- places which in my dreams they always appear, places which images keep popping inside my head at times when I long for serenity. And one of those places is Granada.

Our Andalucía trip was not very well-planned I have to admit. We did bought our flight tickets months earlier, but blame the massive workloads, we only managed to sort out our accommodation, and even the week before flying off. And yes, daredevils we were, the four of us: Hanee, Hakimah, Hasnidar and I - we even had two nights without any accommodation pre-booked. We will just find some hotels and walk in, Hanee said. Yeah, I added, it is not that all accommodations have this online booking service, right?

So we arrived in Madrid (that’s a silly choice of airport to land at since we were heading for Andalucía, but this was the cheapest destination offered) around 10 o’clock in the morning, and so the adventure began. The earlier steps - what to do next, where to go - were pretty much listed down and thought-of, so everything ran smoothly. We headed for the coach station on Metro (commuter lookalike I’d say) on line 6 then continued on line 8 for Estación de Autobuses, and soon everyone knew their roles - I was the reluctant leader of the troop (since I was chosen democratically, I could not say no), whose job was to read maps mainly, leaving the communication task (read: asking for direction, in Spanish, mind you) to the other three girls. I think they were pretty happy to do that, since Spanish guys are generally good-looking. Hasnidar and Hakimah bought the coach tickets at the counter, I believed rather painfully, since the men attending the counter won’t speak anything but Spanish. And my two friends had nothing to help them communicating but a small Spanish phrase book!

The journey to our very first destination in Andalucía was not any easier either. It was seven hour long, and after 30 minutes I started to Miss Manchester – and I still remember what Hasnidar said to me upon listening to my whining: We haven’t seen the rest of Spain to say that you like England more. I have to admit that she was right, because as soon as we arrived in Granada that dusk I felt a little different. The previous seven hours seeing the view countless olive trees along the highway was an inevitable pain you have to suffer before indulging in the beauty of a place like Granada (and that’s the price to pay for not opting for Granada airport or somewhere closer like Malaga, of course!).

I was excited for the first time, and the atmosphere in the bus was exactly as excited - as the bus driver failed to find the correct route to the coach station- having to circle the roundabout a few times – and had the passengers laughing happily.

Though our overall trip was more or less left to be determined by fate, our two days in Granada were pretty much planned I have to say (and that was basically because of it being the first destination!). As soon as we arrived, I knew what to do next to get to the booked accommodation, Posada Dona Lupe – get on bus number 33 to Plaza Nueva, then change to bus no. 30 or 32 which will bring us straight to Alhambra. Theoretically it was that simple, but then again, it was getting darker, and nobody can be very sure if we had arrived at Plaza Nueva or not!

Plaza Nueva was not the last stop for the bus, so to be on the safe side, it was better to hop off earlier I decided, and there we went, out of nowhere with luggage weighing 12kg! We walked and walked, stopping a few times asking unsuccessfully for help – thanks to our limited vocabulary, and then finally decided to resort for a taxi ride to the hostel. It was getting darker, and looking like we were lost and helpless would definitely make us more vulnerable and prone to theft and all nasty things that could happen to tourists. Add the fact that all of us are small-built Asian girls in the equation if you should.

But telling the cab drivers where to go proved to be problematic. And yes, my readers, this is one good advice I can give you – trust God for what you need. Miracles do happen – and I believed that as soon as this girl, who must have seen how helpless we were, came offering her help, in English (that was a great blessing itself, for none of those we asked previously can speak English!).
That was not all – Sarah, upon hearing us all speaking Malay – then asked:

“Are you from Malaysia?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my God!”
“Why?”
“I’ve been there, working for a few months. Can’t believe I meet Malaysians here!”

It turned out that Sarah, a Canadian, once worked in Terengganu.
She must have lead a very exciting life – to fall in love with Granada after spending her summer vacation there with her family, later decided to stop her studying and came back to work there.
“Don’t worry. We’ll walk there. I know where the bus stop for bus no 30/32”, she assured .
And yes, all the way to the bus stop we could not stop talking even for a second – Sarah herself was busy telling us stories about her stay in Malaysia – recalling a few Malay words she still remember, before asking us to do her a favour.

“I have one thing to ask, but I’m not sure if you will do it for me,” she asked suddenly.
We gave her questioning looks, and guess what, she requested us to sing her favourite song while she was in Malaysia – Kau Ilhamku by Manbai. I was reluctant at first (The idea of singing in public while pulling noisy luggage seems to be a public nuisance) but my mates did not seem to have any problem with that and soon that song echoed as we walked together that evening I had to chipped in a few moments later since they seem to be lost with the lyrics. Yes, that was how far we’ve gone promoting Malay songs – I said to myself!

Granada, when we arrived, was filled with this atmosphere of celebration – Semana Santa or the Holy Week. Well, it was supposed to be a solemn procession – but as the town was flooded with neon lights I could not help but thinking of it as a happy festival. Except for the appearance of some strange and creepy-looking costumes and headgears, called nazareno, capirote and antifaz (which I later learned, out of my curiosity) with each of them is symbolizing something.

We left the urbanized area (obviously this is not the right term) just to find ourselves in a more cosy, exotic looking surrounding – small food shops selling kebabs and all – and I could not help but feeling excited!

Sarah left us right at the bus stop after telling the bus driver where to get us off – a big favour indeed, considering the possible communication breakdown we could be facing without her help. All the way up La Sabika hill towards the hostel I feasted on the incredible beauty of the magnificent building, a story to be discovered soon.

Soon enough, that I can hardly wait for tomorrow to come.

***

I was autocratic, I have to admit (I guess I still am), and I freaked out the next morning to find out that Hanee and Hasnidar in the other room were not yet awake at 7.15 a.m. that morning. With no ticket to enter Alhambra pre-booked earlier (recall that this was a badly-planned trip), we needed to start queuing as early as possible as tickets sold on the day itself were limited .
‘We should go first,’ I told Hakimah while the two were preparing themselves, and we were right, the queue was already hundreds metre long by the time we reached the entrance.
There came the test for patience, I told myself. And as Rumi said in his poem, patience expands your capacity to love and feel peace. How patient you have to be for success to come your way?
Tariq Ibn Zeyad who engraved the path to Visigothic Hispania back in year 711, must have endured even bitter tests for such a success, a success that remains cherished through the years.

I almost cried (I did, despite of me being autocratic and all), when I read the story of Tariq Ibn Ziyad and his army. What kind of patience and courage did they have back then to leave all they had behind and fight, so ‘that the word of God shall be exalted in the country’ and ‘that the true religion shall be established’. It was a one way street they chose to lay out – having burnt their ships as soon as they landed – with the sea behind them and enemies before them, I cannot help but gasping in awe as I read Al Maggari’s accounts on the conquest in the book I brought along A Vanished World: Muslim, Christian and Jews in Medieval Spain written by Chris Lowney.

Such courage, I said to myself, will definitely make us more than just tourists who have to pay 12 Euro to see the remnants of what our brothers had built long ago, if only all Muslims have that.
And Alhambra’, yes, it is the evidence of the advanced civilisation Muslims had years ago – as my friends put it, while the Vikings in York bathed once a year, Muslims in Spain were indulging in posh and exclusive bath houses every day– but this one book, which was intended to be my companion throughout this journey revealed a hidden lesson.
A lesson on brotherhood, and what become of hearts filled with desire for wealth, power and the worldly beauty.

Alhambra’, you must have been crying all this while.

To be continued…

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