The Alhambra of Nasrid Granada

The Alhambra of Granada is the masterpiece of Nasrid architecture and the last great monument of Muslim Spain. The Nasrid emirate of Granada was the final Muslim state in Iberia, established in 629 AH (1238) as the Christian Reconquista swept over the rest of al-Andalus, and surviving for two and a half centuries as a tributary kingdom in the mountainous far south until its fall in 897 AH (1492). On the red hill above the city the Nasrid sultans built the Alhambra, a fortified palace-city of courts, halls, and gardens, raised chiefly in the fourteenth century under Yusuf I and his son Muhammad V, in whose long reign the palace reached its fullest beauty. The genius of late Andalusi art is gathered here: slender columns and delicate arches, muqarnas vaults of stalactite plaster, walls sheathed in carved stucco and tilework dense with arabesque and Arabic verse, and above all the disciplined play of water, the channels, fountains, and broad still pools that carry coolness and reflection through courts laid out as images of paradise. The scene shows one of these garden courts: a long reflecting pool down the centre of a paved enclosure, a slender-columned portico rising into a tower and doubled exactly in the water, lateral arcades of carved stucco and tile, cypresses and clipped beds climbing toward the snow of the Sierra Nevada behind. In the shaded corners robed men sit reading and writing, the learned court life of secretaries, viziers, and poets that made Granada a centre of letters in its last age. The verses inscribed on these walls are largely the work of the court poet Ibn Zamrak, written so that the building praises itself, its arches, its water, and its sultan, in the first person; and the kingdom and its court are described from the inside by the great Granadan vizier, polymath, and historian Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (rahimahu Allah), in his al-Ihata fi Akhbar Gharnata. The Alhambra was a final, exquisite flowering of a civilisation in its last surviving corner, built more than a century after Cordoba and Seville had fallen and only a century before Granada itself would be lost. This scene depicts the palace at its height: a Nasrid garden court with its reflecting pool, portico, and tower, the muqarnas and carved walls, the running water and the gardens, and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada beyond, the last Muslim court of al-Andalus in the fullness of its beauty.