The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History

Throughout the ‘long’ 19th century, a steadily growing flow of visitors turned the Alhambra into a tourist destination and a major trope of Medievalism and especially Orientalism, created by Western authors and artists from François-René de Chateaubriand to Owen Jones and from Washington Irving to Jean-Léon Gérôme. Yet behind this Western infatuation lie scores of ‘Oriental’ observers of the monument, as revealed by its visitors’ book, kept since 1829. The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History uses this untapped source to capture and analyse the perceptions of the Alhambra by a wide range of actors and observers, including Westerners and Spaniards, but more importantly a vast array of ‘Orientals’, such as Moroccans and other Maghrebi subjects, culturally Turkish Ottomans, a few Greeks and Armenians, and growing numbers of Christian and Muslim Arabs from the Mashreq, especially from Egypt. The book thus reveals the existence of significant variations and interconnections between Western and Oriental perceptions of the monument, from Orientalism and Romanticism to Arab nationalism and Ottoman Orientalism. Based on an exhaustive perusing of the visitors’ book, combined with a systematic examination of contemporary memoirs, travelogues, photographs, periodicals and newspapers, it uses the Alhambra as the nexus of a history of the complex and entangled relations between East and West, North and South, Islam and Christianity, centre and periphery during the heyday of Orientalism and Western hegemony.