Within the hour, the flight attendant announced, first in Spanish then in English that they were about to descend: “Please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened. We will be landing shortly at Salamanca Regional Airport serving greater Castilla y Leon. Thank you for flying with us this afternoon. Local time is one-thirty-five.”
High above the arid plain, the Iberia Air Nostrum ATR 72-600 from Madrid cleared the mountains to the south and circled east as it prepared to descend into Salamanca. Corbett felt the momentary interruption in the monotonous thrum of the Pratt and Whitney twin turbo-props as the pilot throttled back in preparation for landing. Beside him, the old woman still dozed. Corbett turned to stare out the window at the golden landscape below.
“¿Señor….? ¿Señor…? Perdoname…” Reaching across the sleeping Gypsy in the seat beside him, the flight attendant released his seat back returning it to upright. Self-consciously, Corbett nodded his thanks then turned back to watch the earth rise up to meet them. A moment later, he felt the wheels deploy and lock for landing. Welcome to Salamanca.
*****
Located roughly 15 kilometers from the center of the city itself, the air terminal at Salamanca had been constructed back in 2005 and currently serviced only two major carriers, Iberia and Air Europa. As a result, the crowds were sparse except for those times when the University of Salamanca returned to session and the students began to arrive for the new term. With the fall semester about to begin, groups of students could now be seen moving along the concourse.
Standing beneath the terminal’s row of clerestory windows, two men of Middle Eastern descent waited for the flight information display board to announce the arrival of Iberia Flight 3417 from Madrid. Casually dressed, they appeared to be workmen and attracted little attention. The taller of the two, a man named Noor, was dark skinned and preoccupied himself with a gaggle of coeds. Dressed in tight jeans, several wore halter tops provocatively cut to expose their bare midriffs. He wondered how they could flaunt themselves like that? Had they no shame? One in a short skirt and an open-necked blouse played havoc with his imagination. As he watched, another young woman, an American by the look of her clothes and the decisive way she crossed the terminal, moved toward him. Her hair was auburn and cut short and she seemed totally self-aware. He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and attempted to catch her eye as she walked past, but she remained completely unresponsive to his leer. Whore, he thought dismissively then turned his attention to another group of students as they approached.
The other man, however, the one called Jarral, remained impatiently focused on the flight information board. His deep-set eyes were the color of coal and burned with an inner purpose. So completely absorbed in his own thoughts, he paid little notice to the schoolgirls as they made their way to baggage claim. He had first come to Spain on a student visa himself, from his home in Lahore, Pakistan, a half dozen years before. Intrigued by the tales he had read of al-Andalus, the Islamic caliphate that had once ruled the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth century, he had decided to see it for himself. At Granada, the Alhambra had dazzled him with its reflecting pools, lush gardens and fragrant breezes. But he deeply resented the hordes of tourists who thoughtlessly trammeled the palace grounds. And so he had fled west to the city of Cordoba where he discovered the wonders and desecration of the Mezquita.
Begun in 784 and expanded during the ninth and tenth centuries, it had been the largest and most revered mosque beyond Istanbul before the Reconquista. Jarral had arrived on a Sunday and entered through the Puerta del Perdon past the tourists and the ubiquitous Gypsies. To his right was what he presumed to be the minaret only to discover to his disgust that it had long been subsumed within the Torre del Alminar, the 300-foot tall Christian bell tower. Meandering through the Patio de los Naranjos, he was all but overwhelmed when he reached the interior, a thick forest of arches and pillars, more than 800 in all that seemed to stretch to infinity. Constructed of marble, granite and jasper in a pattern of alternating white stone and red brick, they took his breath away. In the sixteenth century, after the Christian armies had driven the Moors back across the straits of Gibraltar, the Catholic Church had demanded that this holy sanctuary be razed so that a cathedral might be built in its place. But, as the story goes, Carlos Quinta, the Holy Roman Emperor, was so taken with the Mezquita’s beauty that he refused the Vatican’s demands. As a compromise, it was agreed that only a portion of the mosque would be demolished to make room for La Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asuncion. It was said that when Charles the Fifth saw the cathedral embedded within the mosque, he had wept for what had been lost. But on this day, Jarral did not weep. Instead, he raged against such profound desecration.
But the thing that most moved him happened quite unexpectedly. Making his way past the cathedral, he approached the south wall where he found the Mihrab, the sacred prayer niche that had once held a gilded copy of Qur’an. And there, kneeling over the flagstones, he traced his fingers along the deep depression in the stone worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims who had circled the Mihrab seven times on their knees. An act of faith so extraordinary it would be etched into his memory forever.
Even today, the very thought of this blasphemy still made Jarral physically ill. Turning it over in his mind once more, he remembered the lament of the Moorish poet Al-Rundi whose resounding indictment filled him with contempt for all non-believers: “Mosques have become churches in
