Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano Page B

tolerance, later crushed by the Catholic Monarchs,
windmills, parks, and aqueducts that still quench the thirst of several
cities and their surrounding fields,
the postal service,
vinegar, mustard, saffron, cinnamon, cumin, cane sugar, churros,
meatballs, dried fruits,
chess,
zero and the other digits we use,
algebra and trigonometry,
classic works by Anaxagoras, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid,
Archimedes, Hippocrates, Galen, and others, which became known in
Spain and in Europe through their Arabic translations,
the four thousand Arabic words in the language of Castile,
and several cities of incredible beauty, like Granada, of which an
anonymous verse sings:
Please give the man a penny,
Lady, you must be kind,
His sorrow is worse than any,
To be in Granada and be blind.

MAIMONIDES AND AVERROES

    Jewish and Muslim cultures flowered side by side in Spain under the caliphs.
    Two sages, Maimonides, a Jew, and Averroes, a Muslim, were born nearly at the same time in Córdoba in the twelfth century, and they traveled down the same path.
    Both were physicians.
    The sultan of Egypt was a patient of Maimonides, and Averroes took care of the caliph of Córdoba without ever forgetting, as he wrote, that “most deaths are caused by medicine.”
    Both were jurists too.
    Maimonides consolidated Hebrew law, up to that point dispersed among many books, and he brought coherence and unity to the myriad rabbinical writings on the subject. Averroes was the highest judicial authority in all of Muslim Andalusia, and his decisions set precedents under Islamic law for centuries.
    And both were philosophers.
    Maimonides wrote Guide for the Perplexed to help the Jews, who had discovered Greek philosophy thanks to Arabic translations, overcome the contradiction between reason and faith.
    That contradiction condemned Averroes. Fundamentalists accused him of putting human reason before divine revelation. Even worse, he refused to limit the exercise of reason to the male half of humanity, and said that women in several Islamic nations were treated like vegetables. He was banished.
    Neither man died in the city of his birth. Maimonides died in Cairo, Averroes in Marrakesh. A mule took Averroes back to Córdoba. The mule carried his body and his outlawed books.

STONE

    When triumphant Catholics invaded the Córdoba mosque, they smashed half of the one thousand columns and filled the edifice with suffering saints.
    The Córdoba Cathedral is now its official name, but no one calls it that. It remains the Mosque. This forest of stone columns, the survivors, is still a Muslim temple, even though prayers to Allah are prohibited.
    At the ceremonial center, in sacred space, lies a boulder, large and unadorned.
    The priests allowed it to stay.
    They believed it was mute.

WATER AND LIGHT

    Back in the year 1600-something, sculptor Luis de la Peña wanted to sculpt light. In his workshop on an alley in Granada, he spent his entire life trying and failing.
    It never occurred to him to look up. There, on the crest of a hill of red earth, other artists had sculpted light, and water too.
    In the turrets and gardens of the Alhambra, crown of the Muslim kingdom, those artists had made the impossible possible.
    The Alhambra is not a stationary sculpture. It breathes water and light and plays with them as they cavort with each other: liquid light, shining water.

FORBIDDEN TO BE

    The great-grandson of Queen Isabella, Emperor Philip II, sworn enemy of water and light, reiterated certain prohibitions against the Moors, and as the year 1567 began, he decided to implement them with an iron fist.
    It was forbidden to:
speak, read, or write in Arabic,
dress in traditional garb,
celebrate holidays with Moorish instruments or song,
use Moorish names or nicknames,
bathe in public baths.
This last prohibition forbade what no longer existed.
    A century before, there had been six hundred public baths in the city of Córdoba alone.

THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THIS WORLD LIVED IN