Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla y Centro Cultural Islámico de Sevilla®
Authorities of Almonaster, ladies and gentlemen!
I would like to thank the Mayor of Almonaster, Mr. Jacinto Vázquez, the Councillor for Culture, Ms. Elisabet Moya González, and all the people of Almonaster, as well as the Seville Mosque Foundation and its president, Ibrahim Hernández, for offering me this table in this emblematic place, at the Islamic Culture Conference of Almonaster la Real. This people and this country have survived times and epochs of more serious vicissitudes than the present one, the one that touches us. I pray to God, to Allah, that, by His Mercy, He makes us pass the test in our days with success and health! Amin.
I had never been to Almonaster before. Part of my preparation for this conference has been reading and watching some videos on the internet about this town. I am impressed by the videos about the customs of the Cruces de Mayo, with the beautiful costumes and the fandangos. Particularly accomplished I find the program “El paisano” by Pablo Chiapella from 2018. What power humor and grace has to lift us out of any situation in life, if it is inspired by affection! After watching it I felt sorry that my talk today does not contain some humor, to counterbalance the serious topics it touches on. I desperately asked my friends here, to give me a joke, something funny, at least some anecdote of the funny Nasreddin of Anatolia. But dressing up with other people’s feathers? Will I have to confirm once again that Muslims are not known for their humor? I am a Muslim and a German on top of that! While Germans undoubtedly laugh from time to time – in fact, they had become unbearably ironic over the past twenty years, but the pandemic put an end to that – the truth is that every people has its own way of being. It’s all in the language. As we learn a new language, we take on the personality and character of its people. Anyway, the funny father of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is not German. And, really, who wants a funny car?
I am a translator of English and Spanish, of German parents, both Protestant Christians, and descend from eight generations of peasants and farmers, documented in the parish register of our village. Despite this family tradition, I have discovered the most unexpected thing: Islam. It was 30 years ago, after years of searching for the meaning of this life. When I was 25 years old, God opened my heart to His Quran and His Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. This event was only possible by the good fortune of having met Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi (1930-2021), may Allah be pleased with him. Being a Scotsman, he showed me by his nobility that the tranquility of Islam is for all who desire it. From his hand I pronounced three times the Shahada: “There is no god but Allah. And Muhammad is His messenger. A year later I married a Spanish woman who had also discovered Islam independently of me. We have a daughter and have been living since 2011 in another place with a great history: Granada.
This mosque and church of Almonaster is a valuable architectural ensemble and it is surrounded by beautiful nature! Just from looking at the pictures on the internet from the surrounding hills, Almonaster seems to be a nest, built inside a huge branch. As soon as I saw the photos and videos about the village, I wanted to see it with my own eyes as soon as possible. It was love at first sight. This village with its mosque is a monument, a human footprint in the vastness of nature, a footprint that we call “history”.
Looking at these columns and capitals, the oldest of which are Roman from the first and second centuries, that is, contemporary to Plutarch, Tacitus, Trajan and Hadrian, the breeze of time blows in our faces: two thousand years of human labor and art are staring at us. Let us pause for a moment: What events must have occurred in this village, in its Visigothic church, in this mosque and then church during the 1200 years of its existence, which is soon to be said? If the walls could speak … According to my readings, in Almonaster have been found the first remains of a human settlement dating back to the Bronze Age (the period from 3300 to 1200 BC). It is overwhelming to think that for some four or five thousand years there have been people living in this valley, one generation after another. Who has written, who has sung its history?
How many weddings, how many births, how many houses were built and crumbled here! How many harangues and tears! How many springs and loves, how many “I love you, my love” and how many “I hope there won’t be many stones when we dig that grave”! And meanwhile, the leaves of the trees are still green…Who makes them grow after the wildest destruction?
“The springs pass swiftly, and the years, dragging with them whirlpools, battles;
and on our foreheads Time is tumultuous,
“but all this the blessed are ignorant of.
And this is not how lovers live.” [1]
Thus sings the most lyrical poet of the German language, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843).
It is a free translation. What it means is that for those who love, time does not pass.
Alas, time and its unstoppable passage! Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658) says:
“The only thing that really belongs to us is time. Even he who has nothing, possesses it”.
Muslims say: Do not curse the weather, for it is God!
Like few countries in Europe, Spain is full of historical sites, starting with the caves of Prehistory, the beginning of the cultures of Western Europe, what they call the Upper Paleolithic, the period from 18,000 to 8,000 years BC. C.
When I first arrived in Spain in 1989 (I was 25 years old) and realized the enormous historical and cultural richness of this country, I felt like a child who until then only knew “the laundry room” of his house, [2] and suddenly encounters the sea… Reading about the rich history of Andalusia and Spain, seeing its monuments, its “prophetic landscape” (as the poet Rilke called it), I felt ashamed, when I saw the Germans, the brothers of the always restless, always disturbing Faust, so busy navel-gazing. “Human, all too human”…..
Since I was born in 1964, I was taught in school that the really important history for Germans is: to avoid another fascist madness with its aftermath of world war and genocide. For generations of Germans, history essentially boils down to avoiding repeating this trauma, the civilizational rupture of Nazism and the Holocaust. Confirming what the writer Schiller (1759-1805) said two hundred years earlier, in his drama Wallenstein (1799):
“That is the curse of evil action, that it must always beget evil.” [3]
Nowadays, there are not many (sober) Germans abroad who greet each other with naivety, with joy, as, for example, Spaniards do outside their own country: even in lost and uninhabited places like in Scotland, Spaniards miraculously meet each other and immediately set up a get-together (I’ve seen it!). Germans abroad, on the other hand, usually prefer to tiptoe around, weighed down by their recent history.
They are not the only country with bitter lessons in their history. Given the fallible human condition, oscillating between feat and crime, the history of many countries is often one of light and shadow.
After Velázquez (1599-1660) there were not many war paintings like “The Surrender of Breda” (1634/35). “Les Grandes Misères de la guerre” (1633) by Callot (1592-1635), “The Disasters of War” (1810-1815) by Goya (1746-1828), “The Bombing of Guernica” (1937) by Picasso (1881-1973) are testimonies to the dark side of the human being. But even a warrior as hardened as Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) realized that there is a force capable of overcoming human bestiality – art – when he wrote: Isn’t it curious that in opera even the prisoners sing?
Actually, if we go back to the beginning of human history, it all goes back to what happened to Adam and Eve’s two sons, Cain and Abel. The Bible and the Koran narrate it each in their own way. Out of envy for having a nicer garden than his brother’s, Cain killed Abel. When he realized what he had done, he was so horrified that he did not know how to bury him. God had to send him a raven to show him how to bury a corpse. Some would say “legends of the past” – but how many times did modern man murder and then fail to bury his victims because there were so many of them! [4]
For empathetic people , studying history can give them a pessimistic view of human beings. Wouldn’t it be better to stop studying history? To be human is to remember, to reflect. It is what distinguishes us from animals. To remember what happened in history, our personal history and that of our peoples. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) distinguishes three ways of looking at history. [5]:
History told as an action movie. The history of museums. And critical history , which serves life .
1. Monumental history prefers to recall exploits to encourage us to repeat them. It is close to fiction and mythology. The followers of this history run the risk of blindly desiring the animating effects, looking to the heroic past to conquer their space in the present. Even a spirit as humane and great as that of Goethe (1749-1832), asserted, “The best thing we have in history is the enthusiasm it arouses.” [6]
But how many times in history have we heard the poisoned phrase: “for better or worse, it is my country”, “no water for the enemy”? It would not have occurred to Don Quixote to speak like that. “Every glass drips from what it contains inside” said the jurist Al-Maydani . [7]. The Spanish proverb says: “Bad upbringing or good, in whoever uses it stays”. Normally, the blind slogan “for better or worse, it is my country” backfires on us. This happened, for example, to Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), one of the greatest organizers of the Nazi holocaust. This slogan is then often replaced by the excuse: “I have only carried out orders”. This is the response of a person caught with blood on his hands. But no matter how many excuses he makes: what happens to him during the night, in his sleep, when his victims return? The good news in all this is that there is justice. In this life, because we have to look in the mirror. And in the next life, the afterlife, too.
2. The history of antiquities, which comes from an excessive fixation on the past. When it is written, the history of a country has come to an end, it is petrified. To want to preserve and venerate is human. But is it not true that when a history is written about someone or something, that someone or something is already dead? Aren’t many of the stories nothing more than flowers and a tombstone on a grave? For a country to remain alive, it must look back, but at the same time, want its future. Here enters, according to Nietzsche, the third way of looking at history:
3. The critical history that corrects the excesses of the first two. It eliminates, forgets the harmful memories (as a natural digestion) and protects itself from the belief of the conquerors who believe that “the end justifies the means”. Critical history seeks a balance: on the one hand, the perpetrators of crimes should remember them in order not to repeat them. On the other hand, the victim of a crime should try to forget it, at least find meaning in it, in order to begin to “digest” it, and thus perhaps be able to turn the page and free himself from that terrible shadow. What is true for a person is also true for a people.
I remember in the first decade of the 21st century meeting a young Bosnian Muslim woman in Berlin, where she lived after suffering abuse in Serb camps in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In vain she tried to live with her memories. When she mentioned this fact of her life in words as terse as they were desperate, I asked myself: What do I tell her? What shall I tell him?
As every medal has two sides, I am also sure that in the same Berlin of the 2000s there lived Serbian witnesses who could have told me about the merciless bombing that NATO unleashed for 78 days on their country, which left deaths and wounds that are felt to this day. And with this I do not pretend to have an equidistant position, as if I lived above both sides.
I just want to remind you that dividing the world into black and white, into “good guys and bad guys” – the bad guys are always “the others”, “the others” – has the dangerous advantage of putting you in the comfortable chair of “the good guys”. But, in sincere moments we realize that Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is right when he says (in accordance with the sense): The most good thing also has some bad in it. And the bad thing has some good in it. Conclusion: Perfection belongs to God alone.
In the Germany of my beloved grandfather’s time, may he rest in peace, neither Catholics nor Protestants could stop the arrest and disappearance of their neighbors: Jews, Communists and all non-submissives to the “superman” regime. The Nazi “supermen” called their compatriots – even the Jews who offered their lives in World War I for their beloved Germany – “sub-men” or “sub-humans” and watched them disappear from the neighborhood. They left behind apartments, houses, things … Once again the story of “Cain and Abel”. This time taken to the level of an entire village. The ancient merciless rivalry between Christians and Jews reached the twentieth century with all the genius and care of the empire that wanted to last a thousand years and lasted twelve.
When a Muslim speaks of the rivalry between Christians and Jews, it is normal to be asked about his rivalry with others. Here we enter the zone of pain and shame. Not every Muslim leader was a Saladin. And not every Christian, the Cid. Why enter into competitions between religions? Is it not true that each one reaps what he sows? As the town of Almonaster was part of Al-Andalus for 500 years, until 1230 A.D., it is worth remembering here that each one reaps what he sows. C., it is worth remembering here, that each person has his opinion and each “scientific objectivity”, in the end, only offers his own vision of the world. There are as many stories as there are historians. The truth of every matter exists, but only God knows it.
In life, as in our convictions, the “how”, how we defend what is ours, often reveals more about us than the “what”, the belief we profess. How often are public convictions private shortcomings? Tell me what you presume… How many times the opposite of the official story has turned out to be the truth!
Although the first pogrom (persecution and massacre) suffered by the Jews in Spain occurred in 1066 A.D. in Muslim Granada, throughout the history of Al-Andalus it is true what the Italian historian Franco Cardini (1940) says [8] in his book “We and Islam: history of a misunderstanding” about the initial expansion of Islam in the world:
“Since the campaigns of the caliphs, the immediate successors of the Prophet, that is, since the 30s of the seventh century A.D., the spread of Islam has never had the character of an unleashed and unstoppable military conquest (nor of a migration of peoples). Rather, it was a process of conquest, not always coherent and continuous, and, in essence a conversion, never forced and imposed from outside, of members of exhausted or crisis-ridden societies.” [9]
I did not witness what happened in Al-Andalus. But what Cardini describes of the initial expansion of Islam in the world, explains what happened to me: Mine was also “a conversion, never forced and imposed from the outside, from [un] member of [una] exhausted or crisis-ridden society.” Part of my “crisis” was what almost everyone told me in my childhood and youth: that the highest value to which one can aspire is “money”. I have had to search for years to find an alternative way of life that does not revolve around the vile golden calf, in a world where everything has a price and nothing has value.
Through the civilization of Al-Andalus and then through the Crusades, the civilization and the philosophical and scientific knowledge of ancient Greece and Islam reached the West. For centuries this fact of history was hidden, ignored and forgotten. In the last hundred years, with the failure of its colonization, the West became aware of this truth. The secret was glimpsed as an “open secret”, the “open secret”.
Why “secret”? Doesn’t the world know plenty about Islam? And why “open secret”? To speak like this is a contradiction: either something is secret, hidden, or it is open, visible to everyone, isn’t it? I have taken this expression from Goethe’s “open secret”, the “open secret”. In his “Maxims and Reflections” he says:
“When nature begins to reveal its open secret, one feels an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter: art.” [10].
And when he says “open secret” he refers to the wonders of nature that seem hidden, but sometimes they show themselves to us: when we see the structure of a snowflake in the window, when we see the birth of a child or the night of stars in Almonaster, as I saw it last night.
I dare to substitute a single word in this sentence, the last one:
“When nature begins to reveal its open secret, one feels an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter: prayer.”
When we see the beauty, the sublimity, the miracle that is a leaf on a tree, an animal or a person’s gaze – the mirror of his or her soul – we stand in awe. Changing “art” in this sentence to “prayer” is permissible, since many artists see their art as a spiritual vocation, as praise, even as their way of praying.
For Muslims Islam means “making peace, with oneself and with the world” and “submission of the creature before his Divine Creator”. This peace and submission and their opposites, ignorance and rebellion against God and His nature, have existed since Adam (peace be upon him). God sent many prophets to the peoples to remind them of the safe way. They are mentioned in the Torah, in the Bible and in the Koran. All this is no secret. It is something “open”, accessible to all.
What for non-Muslims does seem to be a “secret”, something unknown, covered up, is the fact that Islam is not any culture, but rather purifies and ennobles any culture. No nation or culture can claim Islam for itself, not Arab, not Turkish, not Indonesian, not African, none. Religion has no nationality.
Of course it is not the same whether we listen to the Qur’an as God revealed it, in Arabic or in its many translations. But, Prophet Muhammad was sent to all peoples and all languages.
When God sent His last Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, he purified and elevated the Arab culture. Later, the Qur’an and the practices of Muhammad purified the culture of the Iberians and Visigoths of their ruthless feudalism. According to some historians, this is the explanation for the rapid growth of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula and the world. [11] The liberating message of the Muslims reached from the culture of the Berbers to the millions of Chinese who discovered Islam. All this in just 80 years, in an era without cars, trains or airplanes. He reached so many different cultures because he was true to the example of Muhammad, who said, “I have been sent to perfect good character.” Good character” exists in every culture of mankind. What Islam achieves is to ennoble cultures, to filter out the few things harmful to the human being, to elevate what already exists. From the moment I became a Muslim, when I discovered God and His messenger, I began to understand my German authors in depth. They were no longer books on the shelves, but lived wisdoms. It is since then that I enjoy the best of the culture that my ancestors received.
At a time when the kingdom of money wants to subject any culture to numbers, which must always grow, it is the religion of nature – Islam – that protects us from the mad fear, the fruit of the maneuvers of money. No money in the world can buy dignity and peace of mind.
When we enjoy this place, the mosque and church of Almonaster, the panoramic view, the venerable columns, the marriages that have taken place here, or when we simply observe the passing of time and the flight of the swallows, then we understand the meaning of these columns and bricks. God has protected this building from the storms and vicissitudes for 1200 years, to remind us of time, or Him. This has been so for the generations that have lived since the construction of this building, it is so for the present generations and will be so for the generations to come, God willing.
Thank you very much!
Ahmad Gross
Islam, the open secret of Europe
Mosque of Almonaster la Real, Huelva
October 10, 2021
[1] “Tage kommen und gehn, ein Jahr verdränget das andre,
Wechselnd und streitend; so tost furchtbar vorüber die Zeit
Over sterblichem Haupt, doch nicht vor seligen Augen,
Und den Liebenden ist anderes Leben gewährt.”
(Elegy, between 1800-1804)
Translation: Federico Gorbea, Barcelona, 1977, 1995
[2] Then West Germany was about to unite with its forgotten East German brethren, when the wall fell and with it “the iron curtain” that had separated the West from the Soviet bloc between 1945-1990.
[3] Schiller: Wallenstein, 1799, The Piccolomini, V,1 / Octavius Piccolomini
[4] “For this reason We decreed to the children of Israel that whoever kills anyone, without being in exchange for another or for having corrupted in the land, it shall be as having killed the whole of mankind. And whoever saved him, it would be as if he had saved the whole of mankind. And so it was that Our messengers came to them with clear proofs and yet afterwards, and in spite of this, many of them overreached themselves on earth.” (Qur’an 5:32) Translations of the meaning of the Noble Qur’an, by Abdel Ghani Melara
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche: Second untimely consideration: On the usefulness and detriment of history for life (1874).
[6] Goethe: Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Pilgrimage (1821, revised 1829), Reflections in the Spirit of the Wanderers.
[7] en.wikipedia: “Abd al-Ghanī Al-Maydani (1807 Damascus-1881) jurist (faqīh) and legal theorist (uṣūlī) adhering to the Hanafi school, as well as traditionalist (muḥaddith) and grammarian (naḥwī).”
[8] it.wikipedia: <Franco Cardini (1940) (…) Cardini’s main field of study is the history of the Crusades, which he approaches with studies on Christian and Arab-Islamic writings. Cardini believes that the Crusades were neither a clash of civilizations nor a religious war, but an “armed pilgrimage” aimed at bringing the Holy Land under the political control of the various Christian potentates. All this without there being perceived, on either side, the existence of two clearly differentiated sides based on religious divisions: Christians and Muslims fought each other but also allied themselves according to contingent expediencies. (…) >
[9] Franco Cardini: Europa e Islam. Storia di un malinteso (Italian edition: 1999, English edition: 2002). Quoted here from the German edition (2000), page 14.
[10] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): Maximen und Reflexionen. Aphorismen und Aufzeichnungen. Nach den Handschriften des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs hg. von Max Hecker, 1907. Aus: Kunst und Altertum. Vierter Band, Zweites Heft, 1823.
[11] On YouTube: Bettany Hughes: When the Moors Ruled in Europe” (2005)
