#45: The Grand Mosque, Córdoba

 

At the Grand Mosque October 2020

Revisiting the mosque 

The first time I visited the Grand Mosque in Córdoba, 10 years ago, I was captivated by the generous space inside, divided by corridors of pillars with their famous orange and white double arches. Since then I have returned to it often in my mind and it has become a visual metaphor which has helped me at various times.

Mosque or cathedral?

This time, however, I saw it in a different way, noticing the history and different influences over the centuries which have formed this building. If there’s anywhere that fits the bill of that now rather bland word ‘contested’, it’s this space. My ticket tells me I’m in a cathedral, and so does King Juan Carlos on a marble plaque inside, but it’s widely known as the Grand Mosque.

The history of the mosque

It was originally a mosque, seized in 1236 by Christian forces. A Catholic nave was inserted in the centre in the 16th century and side chapels put around the walls. But a plaque in the courtyard says the Grand Mosque had itself been built on a previous Visigothic Christian site, a sixth century basilica dedicated to Saint Vincent was whose devotees were ‘dispossessed of it in the Muslim invasion’. There is not much archaeological evidence for this, although there is a fragment of a Visigothic building from the site displayed inside the mosque.

There’s lots of writing inside. On the wall of the nave is a plaque (above) with a list of priests who were killed for their faith ‘in the religious persecution of 1936-39’ — eh? Spanish Civil War, surely? Elsewhere are plaster casts of both Arabic and Spanish names which had been cut into the columns as graffiti, perhaps by generations of bored worshippers.

Living together

I hope that this coming together of symbols of two different religions over time can now be a sign of how people of different religions, or none, can live together without trying to take vengeance for the injustices of the past or obliterate evidence of them. So the painting (below) of King Ferdinand receiving the keys to the city from kneeling vanquished Muslims, crescent moons prominent on their turbans, I would not remove as an affront to Muslim or postcolonial sensibilities. I would leave it as important evidence of past events and attitudes, trusting the present-day public, of whom I am one, to interpret and understand it according to our now more enlightened views.

Reinterpretation not destruction

So I am against tearing down monuments, even to events we now regard as oppressive and unpleasant or worse. They are evidence of various degrees of conflict, achievement and plain everyday living together. I would reinterpret statues, not reanimate the conflicts they may represent. In other words look forward, not back.

‘An embrace of the communities of the world’, in the words of King Juan Carlos (now abdicated and being investigated for corruption).

#44: Slow fashion

 The price of fast fashion

I came back with a good haul from a local charity shop recently – a pair of jeans, a dress and two books (above) for less than the price of a one-way bus ticket to the nearest shopping mall. But I confess I had also visited that shopping mall a week earlier and came back with three Primark T-shirts, made in Bangladesh.

Fashion is apparently one of the most environmentally damaging industries; according to Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas, every year 80 billion new garments are made and 2.1 billion tonnes of clothes are thrown away.

Lauren Bravo’s ‘How to Break Up With Fast Fashion’ recommends repairing, recycling and holding your head up high as you go into the local high street Mind or Oxfam. She highlights exploitation in the worldwide fashion chain exposed by disasters such as the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, in which 1,134 people died. Cracks in the building had appeared the day before but workers were told they would lose a month’s salary if they did not go back to work next day. According to Wikipedia, wages were about £25 a month.

This started as a light-hearted blog post about how to do charity shop clothes shopping. But I’ve been so horrified by learning about the exploitation involved in the fast fashion industry, that I’ll try ‘slow fashion’ for a year. No Zara or Primark, or clothes made in Bangladesh, China, Vietnam or India.

I include charity shops in slow fashion because clothes are being kept out of landfill, and there is a bit of added ethical value in the form of charity income.

Meanwhile, here are my tips for charity shopping:

1. Don’t go for something specific. If you’re looking for just the right pair of jeans, or loose shirt, or hat, forget it. Grab what you like when you see it. It might be an overcoat in summer, or a formal shirt when you might never give another presentation. But if that shirt skims your waist or makes you walk tall, snap it up.

2. Check weak spots. Armpits and collars. I’ve even been known to give clothes a quick sniff.

3. Feel noble. Remember, you’re not a cheapskate. You are environmentally and politically conscious.

4. Haggling. Mmmm. I’ve been on the verge of it sometimes (especially after finding a sailor T-shirt in Farnham Mind for £4 (‘new’, said the label) which turned out to cost only £5 in the local Sainsbury’s. Still, it feels a bit dishonourable.

5. I’m not sure that neighbourhoods matter. South Kensington Oxfam did give me a shirt I’m still wearing for interviews five years later, but it’s only M&S. And in Palmers Green, probably only average on the yummy mummy scale, I found a 60-style denim suede miniskirt in Leonard Cheshire I don’t think I’d have found anywhere else.

6. Don’t be a snob. There’s no reason why charity shops can’t give you as much as the most arid shopping mall, for 1/10 of the price.

#43: Cake

The height of indulgence

The peculiar appeal of cake

I wonder if cakes were originally a way of preserving and packing high-calorie food like fat, sugar and dried fruit together to see us through the winter, and have since become an afternoon treat and sign of hospitality. In Jane Austen’s Emma the heroine’s father denies their guests Mrs Goddard and Miss Bates rich food because of his concern for the digestion, so she makes ‘the two ladies all the amends in her power, by helping them to large slices of cake and full glasses of wine, for whatever unwilling self-denial his care of their constitution might have obliged them to practise during the meal.’

Cake also goes naturally with museum and gallery trips, at once a delightful symbol of afternoon leisure and a calorific compensation for the peculiar tiredness induced by the stop-start museum wander.

Cakes without flour, sugar and butter?

I shouldn’t really eat traditional cake, since I’m trying to follow a paleo or caveman diet, which excludes flour, sugar and butter. The cakes I most miss are scones – the rough dense texture of the scone, the smooth blandness of the cream and a shot of sugary jam on top. Also Eccles cakes – clumped currants in an irregular crumbly puff pastry case. ‘O my buttons!’ As Tom Tulliver says in The Mill on the Floss on learning that there is apricot roll-up for tea.

My current/currant favourite cake recipes

So I was pleased to come across some paleo cake recipes on Elana’s Pantry. These use coconut or almond flour, and honey instead of sugar. My two favourites at the moment are carrot cake and chocolate cake. They have a slightly different consistency – not as crumbly – but are just as light and delicious.

quote from Emma by Jane Austen (Penguin, 1985), p.223

#42: Silas Marner

© Simon Schuster

The weaver of Raveloe

I've been listening to Silas Marner, George Eliot's novel about a man, a weaver by trade, who after being unfairly cast out of a religious community comes to live in the town of Raveloe. There he finds stability but his life shrinks to two things – his work, and the money he makes from it.

His unceasing close work at the loom disfigures him so that he becomes short-sighted, with bulging eyes, and 'can see no more than insect', as one of the villagers says. His body shrinks and, says Eliot in Chapter 2, he is like an appendage or handle, an adjunct to his work, incomplete.

From time to time he takes his gold out from its hiding place under the floor to admire it, count it and touch it. And yet 'Master Marner' is not really a miser, as he is judged by some of his fellow villagers. He doesn't seem to think of the money in financial terms at all. Rather, in the absence of other objects, his human desires have become focused narrowly on these things. And this is a two-way process:

He had clung with all the force of his nature to his work and his money. And like all objects to which a man devotes himself, they had fashioned him into correspondence with themselves. (Chapter 5).

The 'objects' people devote themselves to can be aims, as well as a solid objects like Silas's gold. And the 'correspondences' they forge with us are corresponding shapes, like Silas's body, but also the process of corresponding with them.

Photo by Vibhuti Gupta on Unsplash

Looms and computers 

This passage also made me think of our looms – computers. It reminded me yet again of my long-term reservations about the demands that a sitting, sedentary life, makes on health. At a computer most parts of the body do not move, while some (the eyes, arms and hands) move unnaturally quickly – just like the weaver's.

Do all of us have such reservations about work, and the way it may 'fashion' us – affect our bodies, thoughts and feelings? Reading LinkedIn or other social media platforms, with their unceasing hyperbole about job fulfilment and success, you would not think so.

The cure for narrowed vision

Silas's cure comes in the shape of Eppie, a child who finds her way to his hearth and heart, also an 'object' but one 'compacted of changes and hopes' that:

forced his thoughts outward and carried them far away from the old eager pacing toward the same blank limit, carried them away to the new things that would come with the coming years, when Eppie would have learnt to understand how her father Silas cared for her, and made him look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound together the families of his neighbours. (Chapter 14)

Silas's perspective changes here – he becomes 'her father Silas', viewing himself in a different role – a wider perspective in which he naturally sees himself from the outside in relation to someone else, his adopted daughter. And this also makes him look to the Raveloe community.

We may not have the luxury of stepping away from our looms but, Victorian-style, I would take some lessons from this writing. One is simply to look after my body. As a freelancer, I am responsible for my own health and safety – so I think it's time to gather together all my notes-to-self about taking breaks and sitting properly, and make a proper health and safety checklist. The other would be to try to keep a wider perspective, to try to find 'objects' to focus on which make claims on my affections and help me to connect with others.

Photo by Procreator UX Design Studio on Unsplash