89. DISTANT MANDATE
Concealed in its essence,
by its appearance revealed
We don’t even know what it was called, not a single contemporary document refers to it as the Alhambra, in part because there is no such document, or no such document has survived; in part because even if such a document did survive, this name is the most unlikely one, for its builders — if they were the ones we refer to today — would never have designated it by a name altogether not in accord with the building itself; as this name is not: if you derive an attribution from the expression based on the color of the materials used for the masonry, “qal’at al-hamra” or possibly “al-qubba al-hamra,” it could signify “al hamra,” accordingly “The Red,” which might refer to the name of the builder, a version which, although more faintly, does hold together in some fashion or another; the palace, with its breathtakingly harmonious magnificence within, surpassing the architectural beauty of any earlier or later period, is itself, however, inconsistent with this hardly exalted vernacular clarification, so distant from the nature of the Arab spirit; if we were to rely upon those whom we have to thank for this structure for the attribution, then they would certainly have found a loftier designation for it; so already we’re off to a bad start, it doesn’t even have a name, because “Alhambra” is not its name, that is only what we call it, moreover in distorted Spanish, that is to say that “Alhambra” could refer to anything at all, it just stuck somehow, not to mention that in Islam it was just as frequent for a sacred or secular building not to have a name as to be given one, because what was the name of the Mosque of Córdoba? the Aljafería of Zaragoza? the Alcázar in Seville? the al-Kairaouine mosque in Fez? and on and on along the North African shore onward to Egypt, Palestine, and northwest India? there were no names; so there are examples, if we think upon it more deeply, hundreds of examples that there can be good reason not to give a name to an immortal artwork, it’s just that this reason is indecipherable to us, just as indecipherable as the date of the construction of the Alhambra, because the records are fairly contradictory in this matter, as the whole thing depends on what the first one doesn’t know, the second one misunderstands, and where therefore the third puts the emphasis, that is to say how far away this or that one strays from the unverifiable facts; certain individuals report that there are Roman and Visigoth ruins on the mountain that served as the location for the later Alhambra — either the part of it known as Sabīka, or the entire locale — others are of the opinion that until the building of the Alhambra, this mountain, rising above the swift-flowing waters of the narrow Darro, thus including the Alcazaba, a fortress dating from the eighth century on the top of it, never played any kind of significant role, and that maybe there was some sort of battle between the Arabs and an ethnic group known as the Muladi after the Arab conquest of Al-Andalus in the ninth and tenth centuries; but yet again in the view of others — in opposition to those who say that the Jews only lived in the district known as Garnatha, that is to say down below, in the area of today’s Granada — there is only one fact worth mentioning, that in one of the centuries preceding the Alhambra, hence certainly by the eleventh century, starting from some point in time and ending at a later point in time, there existed, on the part of the mountain that was to become truly important later on, a Jewish settlement; after the fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, an early Berber ethnic group, the Zirids, belonging to the Kutama tribe and thus to the Umayyads, who founded the city of Granada, located its center here and tried to “protect” the Jews; in any event there was a Jewish vizier by the name of Yusuf ibn Naghrallah, who built a so-called hisn, a fortified palace; we know, other scholars remark, that on the mountain beside the Darro there was, as far back as early Roman times but also after the Arab invasion of Iberia in 711, a strongly defended fortress, or at the very least from the eleventh century, an extremely well-built wall; and of course in opposition to this view there exist other opinions, according to which regarding this place — starting from Granada and the district known as Albaicín, from the nearly unverifiable fortress of Elvira nearby and the Jewish community of Sabīka, all the way to the Berber dynasties (the Almoravids and the Almohads), and the never-ending sheer butchery known as civil war — there’s nothing, nothing at all, from which we might glean a bit of certainty, and so then we finally arrive at the first Arab sources such as they are, because up until this point — here and now is the time to say this — there is no kind of usable historical material at our disposal whatsoever, because the location we are discussing never had any usable historical records or they have not survived; hypothetically, because this place, during the first centuries of Iberian subjugation, did not play an important enough role for it to have something like its own history, that is to say its own place in historical events, because this place began to acquire an important role only with the emergence of the Nasrid Dynasty, the sudden appearance of which coincides with the genesis of the Alhambra in today’s sense of the term, and it is better if we say at once its genesis, and avoid the question of who built the Alhambra, because this is already the third question after “what is its name” and “when was it built,” that we cannot answer, as even this is not certain, it never was, maybe not even to those who were involved with it, someone began it, of that there is no doubt, but as for the true founder, to take a huge leap forward in time, the true initiator and first patron of the Alhambra is said to be Yusuf I; supposedly it was he who commissioned it, who paid for a new palace complex on the ridge of the mountain — roughly the middle section — following the various and obscure initiatives of the Nasrids; because there are many already who said that the first Nasrid was the one who built the Alhambra, he, the earlier ruler of Jaén, Ibn-al-Ahmed, his full name being Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, but better known under the name al-Ahmar, that is to say the prince known as “The Red,” who moved his residence from Jaén to Granada, and proclaimed himself Muhammad I, he became, after the Umayyads, the Almoravids, and the Almohads, the first grandiose founder of this place, previously not so splendid; in addition to this, in the history of the western Arabs, he simultaneously became, with his own last dynasty, the luminous ruler of Islamic ambitions westward, because he began by reinforcing, to a degree never before seen, the walls of the Alcazaba; and, well, if we can believe a so-called contemporary account, the beginning of the story of the Alhambra began with him, Abdallah ibn al-Ahmar, namely, the ruler himself, at least according to the somewhat adventurous manuscript baptized as the Anómino de Granada y Copenhague: “In 1238, he went up to the place later known as Alhambra, inspected it, designated the foundation of a castle, then instructed someone to build it,” the visit from which, supposedly, six palaces emerged, the royal residence in a northeastern orientation, with two round towers, as well as countless bath-houses, so somehow it got off to a start, it was begun like this and it became like this, and perhaps the romantic history of the Alhambra really did occur like that, but it’s also possible that it didn’t, as the description originates from a chronicle that — and here every self-respecting professional scholar, from Oleg Grabar and Juan Vernet and Leonor Martínez Martín up to Ernst J. Grube, raises his index finger — is completely unreliable; I for example, Ernst J. Grube writes in a letter to a close friend, have never once seen this account; so that they — all of these aforementioned scholars, including, as well, the amicable and as yet unpublished index-card notations of the scholarly team of four that authored the minor masterpiece The Language of Pattern — all agree quite clearly that the Alhambra was planned, commissioned, and built nearly one century later by Yusuf I, the Nasrid Sultan who ruled for eleven years after 1333, whose palace most likely bore within its embryo, or in its foundations — how shall we express it in this obscurity? — the concealed essence of the final Alhambra, although at this point one becomes completely uncertain, because it is necessary to add immediately that it was he, and after one of his own bodyguards ran a dagger through him, of course, his son, because this whole has to be imagined in such a way, that they, so to speak, built this work of uncertain depth together, Yusuf and his son Mohammed V, both of whom, as it were, passed the trowel from hand to hand — an expression wishing to allude to their inseparability — therefore we can conjecture that in all likelihood both knew very well what they were doing, because in the end, after them, there is nothing else, it could have only been them; for if it is certain that this origin is as unclear as the origin of any work of art can be, moreover if one would venture to state that nothing is more unclear than the origin of the Alhambra, the end, however, is as certain as death: after Mohammed V and his long reign, ending in 1391, there can be no doubts about the end; about one hundred years then follow, during which the Sultanate of Granada, among others, consume seven more Mohammeds and four more Yusufs, but this period of one hundred years is one single chaotic tragic drama where, in relation to the Alhambra — apart from the construction of the Torre de las Infantas — nothing essential even occurs, so that when the last Nasrid ruler, Mohammed XII, known just as often as Boabdil, “The Unfortunate,” in 1492, upon the fall of his Granada and his Alhambra — seen from here, the conclusion of the great Reconquista — lamented, according to hearsay, that this was the end, no more, he must depart from all of this beauty, the Catholic Kings are marching into the Alhambra, kings who of course see the magnificent enchantment but do not understand it, but even more importantly, do not even wish to understand anything; yet they do not destroy it — how kind of them — which the non-Hispanophone historical accounts truly recognize as their one irrational, if beneficial act; in short the Alhambra’s fate was sealed, and with the victory of the Reconquista it was occupied by foreigners, and in the centuries to come they built this and that in the surrounding area, for the most part insignificant structures, so that the essential thing, looking at it from the reference point of Alhambra, was that the Arabs definitely vanished from the scene, and thus the Alhambra ended up in the most haunting of conditions imaginable, for if there was anyone at all who understood it, it was the Arabs, yet they had vanished from here for good, which means, in our case, that there remained no one, from this point on, who could approach its meaning, this is absolutely true, because there is no one up to this very day who has been able understand the Alhambra, it stands there aimless and incomprehensible, and no one can comprehend even today why it is standing there, so there is no one who can help in this situation, it is not the interpretations that are lacking, but the interpretive code through which it can be deciphered, and it will remain like this from now on, because it is not even worthwhile to keep going on in this direction, but more worthwhile to turn back, to wander back a little to the probable creators, and in the most well-founded uncertainty to say that yes, after 1391 — not including the interior of the Torre de las Infantas in the mid-fifteenth century — no one added anything anymore to the Alhambra, it came into being with Yusuf I and his son Mohammed V, and with them it also came to an end, in a word, it is more worthwhile to pronounce them indecisively as most likely to have commissioned the Alhambra; winding our way back, we cannot speak any less cautiously than this and perhaps what we have stated about Yusuf I and Mohammed V may be permitted, if one proceeds cautiously, a caution that at any single tiny point of this story is not in the least bit superfluous, particularly if we reach — as we are reaching right here and now — that point when it becomes clear that leaving aside the fact that we don’t know what the name of the Alhambra was, or even if it had a name at all, and that this isn’t even something without precedent, and so it is thus tolerable, that we cannot find a clear answer to when it was built and finally even to who built it; but now