MADRID, 11 May 2003 — It has taken more than 900 years, but civilization has finally returned to Madrid. In a tardy act of reparation for the damage caused by the unwashed Christian hordes who chucked out the sophisticated Moors in the 11th century, the ancient hammam — the Arab baths — have been reopened.
Located on a central square that functions as a bus station and pick-up zone, the underground Medina Mayrit hammam is an adaptation of an ancient Aljibe, or cistern — part of an Arab system of water channels, wells and storage tanks which is virtually all that remains of Moorish Madrid.
Investigating the city’s Arab past is an arduous task. It requires you to spend an hour and a half floating silently in vaulted, scented pools with only the soothing tones of Andalusian music and the sound of running water to distract you. Feeling the heat sear your skin as you step into the stuccoed steam room, or letting the masseuse pound your limbs, is about as demanding as it gets.
It allows time to reflect on why this city has turned its back on its Arab past and why, with its well-settled Moroccan population, it shows little interest in its Muslim present.
For, apart from a small section of the Arab walls on display by the cathedral, the hammam is the city’s only nod to several centuries as a military outpost of the Muslim Kingdom of Toledo.
Madrid, as far as most residents are concerned, came into being when Philip II made it his capital in 1561. It has remained firmly, sometimes ferociously, Christian ever since. “You have to remember that this was the city of the Inquisition,” says Victor Garcia, the entrepreneur who has decided to give the city its baths back. “Every trace of Islam was eradicated.”
A few minutes away, in the neighborhood of Lavapies, Arab restaurants serving couscous and tajines dot the streets and women with hijabs covering their hair are out shopping. For the 80,000 Moroccans who live here and across the region, Madrid’s Arab past is everywhere.
“Wherever we look we see Arabic names,” says Mustapha El Mrabet, the head of an immigrants’ association.
“’Madrid’ itself derives from the Arab Majerit. Even the cathedral, the Almudena, has an Arabic name. It is a shame nobody realizes that Islam forms such an important part of this culture.”
In fact, official policy — even as the prosperous city welcomes fresh waves of immigrants — is to keep Moroccans, and Islam, out. The city’s two mosques are, after Sept. 11, under close police scrutiny. Moroccans, El Mrabet complains, are now treated as potential terrorists, bag-snatchers or dope-peddlers.
“Now they want to replace us with Latin Americans, because they are Catholic, speak Spanish and, they say, have Spanish blood in their veins,” says El Mrabet.
Ten centuries ago, he reminds me, Spain was the place where, unusually in the history of the three great Abrahamic religions, Muslim, Jew and Christian lived in peaceful coexistence.
Can a hammam, however humble, help Madrilenos get back in touch with the Arab blood that runs through the veins of most of them? Called on to remain silent for a full hour and a half, the dozen normally garrulous fellow Madrilenos who stepped into the hammam with me managed it — almost. And that, in one of the loudest, gabbiest cities on the planet, felt like true civilization.