A Drive to Cordoba

Today we drove to Cordoba, a 2-hours drive from Granada. The drive passed through a scenic route through endless plantations of olive trees.

Cordoba used to be one of the greatest Muslim cities. I read from the guide book it used to have up to 3000 mosques at its height in the 10th Century with a population of half to a million people. Now it is famous for a single remaining mosque, the Mezquita or the grand mosque, now 1200 years old, said to be the 3rd largest mosque in the world at that time. It was built by Abd-ar-Rahman 1 in 785 when he formed the exiled Umayyad dynasty in Spain and made Cordoba the capital. Cordoba was then the heart of the Western Islamic empire and the city was said to rival Cairo and Baghdad as a centre of Muslim art and learning. At that time the city also was the largest and most prosperous city of Europe. And the mosque ranked third in sanctity after Mecca and Mesjid Al-Aqsa.

We initially booked a hotel outside the city centre but was given the option to stay at the same hotel chain for the same price but located right at the heart of the city. So we took the offer. And what an offer it was, the Conquistador Hotel is located right in front of the Grand Mosque.

We took a private guided tour of the Grand Mosque and the surrounding areas. The tour took over two hours and was good for the kids as they were quite attentive following the guide.The centre of the mosque has long been converted into a large cathedral when the Muslim rule fell. The original minaret has been covered and redesigned so it does not look like an Islamic minaret anymore. The mosque looks plain outside but very beautiful inside. From outside there is some similarity to the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. But inside, this mosque looks incredible and more beautiful and functional.There are over a thousand pillars inside which form an incredible sight and structure. It is like an endless forest of columns, remarked in some books as one of the world's architectural wonders. It was said that the mosque once could hold as many as 25,000 people. The mihrab is still intact and was not destroyed by the conqueror. Nowadays much of the central part of the building has been converted into a large cathedral.

One of the oddity of this former mosque is that the direction of the kiblat is wrong. This is quite clear when we prayed in our rooms which is parallel to the mesjid. The kiblat is off by 38 Degrees. That's quite a lot - i.e. instead of heading to Mecca to the Southeast, it is heading South. One of the possible reason is that the original builders of the mesjid were from Syria and in Syria the direction of Mecca is towards the South. However this mosque existed for over 300 years and nobody at that time made any effort to correct the kiblat. May be this could be one of the reasons why the mesjid is no longer a mesjid anymore nowadays - only Allah knows.