Meet the Neighbors

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Like their geological counterparts, the fault lines of history seem to converge on the countries of the Mediterranean basin. It was in the Spanish city of Granada that King Boabdil, the last Moorish monarch of Muslim al-Andalus, made his final stand against the Christian forces of the reconquista before fleeing to North Africa. Here, too, are buried Ferdinand of Aragon and his queen, Isabella of Castile, who ousted Boabdil in 1492 and later reneged on a promise to allow religious tolerance in their newly conquered kingdom.

These days Ferdinand and Isabella must be spinning in their shared mausoleum. For the first time in five centuries the cry of the muezzin can be heard calling the faithful to prayer from atop the first minaret to be built in the city since Moorish times. "This is a homecoming for the Islamic faith," says Malik Abder Rahman Ruiz, president of the foundation that has built the mosque. "We were expelled and persecuted but we have returned, not to reconquer the country, but to resume our rightful place."

The strong turnout by local and regional dignitaries at the mosque's dedication ceremony earlier this month suggests that the citizens of Granada have accepted that their city's 15,000 Muslims have as much right to a place of worship as the Christians whose churches now dominate the ancient Moorish quarter of Albaicín, where the new mosque is located. But tolerance is a relatively new arrival. Twenty-two years ago, when a group of Granada's Muslim converts launched their project with the purchase of a vacant plot on the crest of the Albaicín hill, they ran into opposition. Even though the mosque site lay between a church and a convent of cloistered nuns, the local authorities suddenly designated the area as residential and scotched the plans. Legal battles ensued and tensions mounted, not just in Granada but elsewhere in Spain, where antipathy towards mainly Muslim immigrants from North Africa is never far from the surface, even though the country likes to think of itself as a model of convivencia (peaceful coexistence).

We were expelled and persecuted but we have returned, not to reconquer the country but to resume our rightful place — MALIK ABDER RAHMAN RUIZ

After several twists, turns and compromises, the mosque is up and running, built with €4 million in donations from Muslim countries. Were it topped by a Christian cross, the minaret would scarcely be distinguishable from the towers of the surrounding churches. As it is, the biggest distinction is the very different sound emanating from the minaret's upper reaches, where a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer five times a day with the age-old words "Allahu Akbar" (God is great). The first call is at 5:30 a.m., "but the muezzin tries to keep the volume down so as not to annoy the neighbors," Ruiz says.

The neighbors have mixed feelings about the mosque. "We need to put the past behind us and think how we can work together in these difficult times," says Sister María, a nun visiting Granada from her home near Madrid. But her more cloistered sisters in the adjacent Convento de las Tomasas don't seem to be on the same wavelength. Ruiz points out that they have raised the height of the wall that divides the convent from the mosque and topped it in part with a metal grill. "We shall ignore it," says Ruiz, who sees the new mosque and its associated Islamic cultural center as a place where understanding between the two religions can be improved.

There's much work still to do. Many of Spain's 500,000 Muslims are unhappy about the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq; and shortly after the mosque was inaugurated, Granada hosted a conference on "Islam in Europe," where 2,000 participants heard Spanish Muslim radical Umar Ibrahim Vadillo call for the destruction of the U.S.-dominated capitalist system. A less divisive event was last week's visit to the mosque by some 320 children from 48 countries, who attended the earlymorning prayer session. "Now," says Ruiz, "we have to work on the good sisters next door."