Portugal won Euro 2016, but did you know about its Muslim heritage?

The whole world is talking about Portugal’s brilliant Euro 2016 victory, but few realise that the European nation has a Muslim heritage that spans five centuries. UK-based award-winning freelance travel writer Tharik Hussain writes about Portugal’s vast Islamic history.

REMEMBERING AL-GHARB AL ANDALUS: PORTUGAL’S MUSLIM PAST … AND ITS PRESENT

“I was taught nothing about Portugal's Islamic heritage in school. It was simply never mentioned.”

Irina Lopes is from Lisbon, the city that was once known as Al-Ishbun, but Irina didn’t know this.

“Until I spoke to you I didn’t know Portugal had this amazing Islamic history. I knew nothing about it and none of my friends have ever said anything of our Islamic history.”

Irina was educated in Lisbon during the 1990s, yet her education ignored 500 years of Portuguese history, the period of the Muslim presence in the country.

If it had been covered, it wouldn’t have been positive. During the 1990s, many Portuguese history books were still talking about the “evil invaders” known as the Moors, reinforcing Islamaphobia that stretched back to medieval times.

Remembering al Gharb al Andalus

Things are changing, albeit slowly. In 1985, the Central Lisbon Mosque opened, and Portuguese children are no longer taught about the evils of the Moors. In 2002 the city of Silves, the former Muslim capital of the south, unveiled the country’s first centre of Portuguese–Arabic studies. 

The most positive sign, though, came just two years ago in the city of Tavira near the popular holiday region of the Algarve, which takes its name from Al-Gharb Al-Andalus, the ancient Muslim name for Portugal. When the new Islamic centre was unveiled at the Municipality Museum in Tavira, the local authority’s opening speech expressed the hope that the centre would bring “residents closer to their heritage”.

The Algarve isn’t the only place to inherit a Muslim name; hundreds of place names in Portugal start with “Al”, which is Arabic for “the”. The Alfama district in Irina’s native Lisbon is one such example. In fact, this is the case all across the Mediterranean, from Alghero in Sardinia to Algeciras in Southern Spain.

This linguistic legacy continues into the Portuguese language, which has nearly a thousand words borrowed from Arabic, such as azeitona (olives) and garrafa (bottle). And then there is the music. That mournful traditional folk sound known as Fado, so common in the neighbourhoods of Lisbon, is also said to have Arab ancestry.

All of this might be news to Lisbonians like Irina, but it is hardly a surprise. Muslim came to Portugal in 714 and ruled Al-Gharb Al-Andalus for more than five centuries. During that time, they completely revolutionised the country, introducing innovative agricultural techniques and changing local eating habits and the lie of the land forever.

They built major centres of learning in cities like Al-Ishbun that were frequented by great medieval luminaries such as Ibn Arabi, and produced intellectuals, poets and mystics like Ibn Qasi and Ibn Ammar.

On the Moorish trail

The physical reminders of the Muslim era are few and far between in Irina’s native Lisbon. Like her history lessons, Lisbon offers very little obvious physical Muslim heritage.

Waves of Christian rulers, determined to eradicate the country’s Islamic identity, put paid to that. Of the original Moorish castle that overlooked Lisbon, only a tiny section of the wall now remains. In its place is St George’s castle.

Even the city’s museums lack depth when it comes to Islamic artefacts, barring the odd one-off specialist exhibition.

The best preserved sites are in the countryside surrounding the quaint little town of Sintra. This is where Lisbon’s Muslim aristocracy spent their summers cooling off, in the green tranquillity of what is today the World Heritage Parque de Sintra.

The town’s strategic distance and positioning from the capital also made it an ideal military outpost protecting Al-Ishbun against sea invaders from the west.

Perched high up on one of the craggier hills, like an eagle’s nest, sits the Moorish fort, a reminder of this role. Sintra’s “castelo” was built in the tenth century as a residential castle. Today, only the outer wall survives, some of which was rebuilt during the later Romantic period, yet it remains perhaps the most atmospheric Moorish fort in Europe.

The walk along the narrow ramparts takes one from the royal tower to the castle keep, offering breathtaking panoramic vistas of the surrounding countryside. It’s obvious why the Muslims pitched up here: potential enemies would have been spotted miles away. 

The Spirit of the Moors

The castle is not the only Moorish presence in Sintra. According to a 700-year-old legend, on bright, moonlit nights, the dark woods are frequented by an extremely beautiful Moorish maiden dressed in white. She is said to emerge from an opening next to a rock and carries a water-pot, which she fills at a nearby spring. In her wake, says the legend, the wind can be heard mourning a time that will never again return. 

It seems that this pining for all things Moorish wasn’t just the preserve of the wind. Its howling must have been at its loudest during Portugal’s Romantic period, for it was during this time that the Pena Palace was built.

A former monastery, the palace was purchased by the eccentric King Don (Dom) Fernando II in 1838, and it is said to be the finest example of Moorish-influenced Manueline design in all of Portugal. As well as revealing the 19th-century bourgeois’ love affair with all things oriental, the mishmash style of the Pena Palace shows just how mental old King Fernando actually was!

Entry to the complex is via a stunning Moorish gate that wouldn’t look out of place in the Fez Medina. Inside, elegant arabesque arcades lead into buildings tiled with mesmerising geometric patterns last seen on the palaces of southern Spain. Every room is filled with Moorish sculptures and paintings, and behind the queen’s terrace is an open courtyard, just like riads of Morocco.

Ferdinand didn’t limit himself to Muslim Moorish styles; he sought inspiration from further east as well. Perched on the end of the guardhouse sits a solitary Mughal turret complete with yellow onion dome, completely out of synch with the rest of the Moorish design.

The oriental styles are brought awkwardly alongside Maritime, Manueline and Gothic features. Just as your eyes are adjusting to the hypnotic patterns on an archway that belongs in Baghdad, you could turn around to face a ghastly gargoyle that belongs to a Prague cathedral.

Or, as you admire a floor-to-roof Moorish-tiled façade, capped with exquisite yellow domes, you might recoil in horror at the realisation that a gruesome half-man-half-fish figure is thrusting its pelvis at you from atop an arch. The Pena Palace really is one of those places that has to be seen to be believed.

Portugal’s new Moors

What Lisbon lacks in historical Muslim culture, it more than makes up with the modern Portuguese Muslim community. No building is more important in this respect than the Central Lisbon Mosque, whose imam is Munir.

“The mosque was associated in 1910, but the current building was built in 1985,” he tells me in perfect English over a lamb biryani at the mosque’s cafe-cum-restaurant, which serves perhaps the finest South Asian food in Lisbon.

Imam Munir’s son sat opposite, enjoying a plate of fried chicken like any good Muslim boy. The imam is dressed in a long, white Arab thobe, a nod to his Yemeni roots, though as he tells me, he grew up in Mozambique. His training was completed in Pakistan. The design of his mosque similarly shows the mark of myriad cultures.

“The design has been influenced by North and Central African styles as well as Andalusian styles; this is meant to reflect the community and, of course, our home region [Andalusia]. Many of the worshippers here are originally from Africa, but nowadays more and more are coming from the [Indian] subcontinent, like Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis.”

Inside the mosque, the main prayer hall has a large archetypal dome with beautiful Arabic calligraphy all around it, whilst the mihrab’s greens, browns and different shades of blue take the eyes to Isfahan in Central Asia. The mosque’s architecture also includes an intriguing minaret.

The mosque, like the Pena Palace, is centred around an open courtyard inspired by North African riads. Around this, elderly men sit on little wooden benches, speaking quietly. It is a warm space where you want to stay and spend a little time, and it is also a classically Moorish space, like so much of Portugal itself.

(This article is written by Tharik Hussain. Tharik is a freelance British Muslim travel writer, journalist, broadcaster and photographer specialising in the Muslim stories of Europe. Hussain’s first ever radio documentary, America’s Mosques; A Story of Integration, has been declared one of the world’s best radio documentaries for 2016. All his work can be viewed at www.tharikhussain.co.uk)