BOOK OF THE DAY: Mary Russellpreviews Homage to Al-Andalus: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain. By Michael Barry Andalus Press Pp 265, €35
THERE IS probably no more evocative image of the Arab world - or rather one that Europeans can most easily relate to - than the Alhambra. Yet its construction began when Arab influence in Spain had already begun to wane.
In his marvellously illustrated book Homage to Al-Andalus, Michael Barry traces the story of the Arabs who first crossed the 14 miles of water that divide Spain from north Africa and who brought with them such a rich store of creativity.
The Arabs were not the first group of people to settle in Spain for, as Barry points out, peninsulas are vulnerable places, so ahead of the Arabs were the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Byzantines and the Vandals, though it was the stunningly designed and decorated architecture that has left Al-Andalus still a major showcase of artistic achievement.
In 760, there was a switch in power from the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty to the Abbasids who moved the Caliphate to Baghdad. This resulted in Abd Rahman, young scion of the defeated Umayyad dynasty, forced to flee Damascus and to spend five years travelling southwards through the Egyptian desert to north Africa until finally he reached Spain.
For the next couple of hundred years, the Arabs were on a roll. Barry's book charts every battle, every skirmish, every assassination, all of which were to characterise the ensuing centuries so that you have to wonder where on earth they found the time to build their glorious mosques, palaces and castles. Roads they didn't need to build - the Romans had already seen to that.
The answer lies partly in the fact that when a treaty between Christians and Muslims was agreed, it gave the parties 10 or 20 years of stability in which they could plan their extravaganzas. As Barry remarks, the fruit of peace was prosperity.
It was the period after just such a treaty, signed in 1246 between the king of Castile and Leon, Fernando III and Ibn al-Ahmar, founder of Granada, that gave the latter a period of peace during which he started the construction of the Alhambra. And despite the richness of the architecture, this was not a hugely expensive undertaking: "The materials used," writes Barry, "were not expensive. The necessary inputs were imagination, inspiration and many skilled hands which were obviously available in abundance…"
Michael Barry is an engineer currently working for Irish Rail. He is also a very talented photographer whose painstaking patience in waiting to catch the right moment for a pencil-slim ray of light to fall on a marbled floor or for a late evening sun to throw a glow on a castle wall is evident in the huge number of fine photographs in his book - at least one on every page.
If I have a complaint, it is that while buildings can be beautiful and inspiring, it is the people who live in them that bring them to life. I wanted to hear the music and the poetry of this intriguing place, with its mix and clash of cultures, but sadly there wasn't any. There was a picture of the great water wheels brought by Syrians to Spain from Hama which is near Aleppo and - this I know because I have heard them - these make an ethereal music of their own, creaking and groaning as they turn through the water, but in this book they were silent. And, as always, I would have liked at least one overarching map to show all the places mentioned in the book.
Barry has clearly walked much of Al-Andalus and anyone planning a walking holiday through this part of Spain will find his book invaluable as a guide to some of the secret, forgotten places of Arab Spain.
Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in the Middle East