I don t know whether I spent the night in his home, or probably on his bed. Have I sat in his favourite place and leant on his preferred place on the old arch as he watched clouds gathering, looking a fields, trees and streams? Tens of questions mixed with despair with an answer to a single one: Ronda is the land of Aboul-Baqaa Alrandi, the writer of the most well-known elegy in Arabic poetry. Ronda is the place where he was born, lived and was buried. We stayed for a while there which ran like lightning, as did past centuries. But for historical records and monuments we would never have known anything about the past.

The elegy has revived the memory of its writer for a thousand years and kept it alive in the annals of impartial history. Aware of the high status of their and our poet, they named a Ronda square after him.

Ronda, Rondah and Takarna

Like the names of other cities and towns in Andalusia, each area has two or more names, or an old and a new name. This difference is attributed to the fact that earlier Muslims there tried to adapt Spanish names to Arabic pronunciation. Example include Seville (Sevilla), Toledo, and Mallarca. As the Arab military presence mixed Arabs with Berbers, each group adapted names their own way, as did native Spaniards. An example of this is Ronda. The Arabs pronounced it Rondah ; the Berbers, who first settled in Ronda named it Takarna , after one of their tribes. In his book The Dawn of Andalusia, Dr Hussein Moenis writes, The Arabs always preferred plains, lowlands and warm, slightly rainy areas in the south, east and west as well as in Saragossa. The Berbers, used to living in high lands, preferred similar areas in Andalusia. In the south, e.g., the Arabs settled in Chezuna and Astiga, while the Berbers preferred Ronda.

After the fall of Ronda, its people immigrated to and around Tetouan. Ronda was in the province of Malaga in the kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim entity in Andalusia which also included Antequera, Marabella, Gibraltar and other cities and towns.

The map of the sky

In the dark of night we groped our way among the hills around Ronda. We saw nothing except the flash of a star. Strangely enough, there are no road signs for such a beautiful town, as if King Ferdinand and his wife Queen Isabella wanted to conceal it among the hills to drive us to despair and go back. But it was the sky map, which guided caravans in the desert and ships at sea, that guided us to Ronda at night.

The side of the town where we entered is in its insipid new part, with small houses and shops which my colleague drove fast through. We spent the night in a hotel opposite the historical 5,000 audience bull ring built by King Philip II, one of the oldest places where this bloody game is played in an annual successful season.

Out of curiosity we wanted to explore the town, open its closed shops and switch on its lights, but to no avail. The town was quiet after a busy day. As everybody knows, the sun sets late in Europe. Before I gave up, I went near the arch by the bull ring and it was so quiet that I heard the purl of water down the deep valley, then I went back to the hotel waving to our star.

A description of Rona

Ronda is strategically located on top of a massive mountain, 750m above sea level, particularly following diminishing Islamic presence in Andalusia, and the town turning into a border one. I d like to cite an opposite case here: The Syrian city of Aleppo had always been the staring point for resistance against the Ottoman empire, and after its and other Syrian towns annexation it lost its military position and assumed a new role as a commercial city enjoying security and stability in a powerful country.

Historian Muhammad Anan said the fall of Ronda and the surrounding area to the Castilian army opened up Granada s western front, and the first town left exposed and vulnerable was Malaga, which fell after the fall of Ronda. Malaga is 122 km north west of Ronda, and was described by traveller Ibn Battuta as one of the most heavily-fortified, beautifully-located Muslim strongholds.

Ronda acquired its military legacy only during the reign of Granda sultans, except for the revolt of Omar Ibn Hafsoon against Umayyad emirs. Many fortifications and walls were built round the town to foster its ability to withstand the long siege. During the military alliance between the kingdom of Granada and the Merin state against Christian kingdoms, three military bases, including Ronda, were handed over to the Merins to secure their permanent presence in Granada.

Breathtaking beauty

I got up early in the morning on our first and only day in old Ronda with birds twittering by my open window. I actually didn t expect less than that reception in a small dreamy town living near clouds.

We first passed by the bull ring which, unfortunately, was closed, then went to the arch we stopped at the previous night. The sunlit scene was both wonderful and awful: in front of me there was an endless stretch of gardens and green trees and water flowing through crocks. It was probably that scene that motivated Abbas ibn Firnas, who was born in Ronda, to try unsuccessfully to fly. As I remembered what the American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who lived far some time in Ronda, wrote about the victims of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s who were thrown down the deep valley, it was with deep regret that I imagined their last-minute supplications to be killed in a less horrible way.

At the top of Armenian Street we reached Aboul-Baqaa Alrandi Square exactly opposite San Sebastian Church, which was previously Ronda s mosque, with orange trees everywhere. Looking at the church clearly shows that its front, despite all subsequent alterations, is more similar in design to a mosque than a church. Another noticeable feature, which is rare in Islamic architecture, is that the minaret is separate from the mosque itself, as a tower called Sebastian Tower sands some distance away. It has a small wooden door and stairs inside. According to unconfirmed reports, the tower is the only remaining part of an old mosque.

Ronda s beauty is untainted as long as we are away from its steep edges. A sudden strong wind makes adventurers fall off its towering height, which isn t easy to tame.

The fall of Granada

Ronda fell on 23 May 1484 in the context of a plan approved by the Spanish Cortes designed to capture the whole of Granada. Ronda was a prime target as a key gateway to the western region of the Muslim kingdom. Despite its height and fortifications, it didn t withstand the 40,000 strong army led by Ferdinard himself. In the beginning, Hamid Alzueri, the ruler of Ronda, left a small garrison and went on a sudden mission to Chezuna, while the Castilian army was heading for Malaga. It must be mentioned here that the Cortes had decided to engage the Muslims in two military campaigns a year, exactly as did Almansour Abu Amer with the northern Christian kingdoms in the twilight days of Cordova, which controlled all of Andalusia and North Africa.

Alzueri and his soldiers took many spoils in the form of animals and food supplies. As he was going back to his high tower he received the tragic news that King Ferdinand s soldiers were occupying the surrounding valleys and plains. The news spread rapidly by watchful soldiers on mountain tops who lit a fire as a warning of imminent danger. Ronda was heavily bombarded with catapults, fire bombs and boiled oil, and its towers were destroyed completely.

At night Ronda was like a candle lighting the surrounding hill, and by day an open boiling urn. Its people suffered heavily and experienced unprecedented fear and bitterness during the siege. Add to this Castilian soldiers discovery of Ronda people s water supply. After Alzueri troops desperate attempts to break the siege of Ronda, the town surrendered under favourable conditions, including allowing its inhabitants to leave it with their property or staying under the Spanish crown enjoying full freedom of worship.

Aboul-Baqaa, the poet of the times

Aboul-Baqaa Salih ibn Yazid ibn Salih ibn Moussa ibn Aboul-Qassim ibn Ali ibn Sharif Alrandi (1204-1281) of the Berber tribe of Nafza was a religious scholar, writer and poet. He wrote poems which did not excel the works of famous Andalussian poets like Ibn Zaidun, Ibn Hanei, Almoatamad ibn Abbad and Lisanuddin ibn Alkhatib. However, he wrote an elegy for Andalusia which relieved him of the task of writing of hundreds of poems and tens of anthologies.

The period Alrandi lived witnessed many strategic changes in the future of Islamic presence in Andalusia. Following the battle of Aliqab (1212) in which Alumwahiddin army was defeated, many bases in Andalusian towns became vulnerable and exposed: Seville, Valencia, Cartagena, Murcia and others fell within a short time. Under those circumstances the elegy words aroused people s emotions and poured out their hearts. Although the poem was unearthed posthumously, it had been very impressive and survived many ages in view of the profound wisdom it imparts.

Strange things coincided with the times it was written and discovered. First, Dr Muhammad Anan said in an article in issue 277 of Al-Arabi (October 1977) that Alrandi did not include the elegy in a book he wrote about prosody, as if he had not valued it rightly. Second, Lissanuddin ibn Alkhatib included a number of Alrandi s poems, excluding the elegy, in a book about the history of Granada! Third, the elegy was discovered by historian Almaqri in a book about Andalusia he wrote in Cairo in1630 during the Ottoman rule. Almaqri, as Anan affirms, did not specify the date the poem was written.

The spirit of the Arab east and west

The town s outstanding beauty appears during the hours of daylight, but night conceals it. Ronda houses fronts are mostly white. Dark oriels (mashrabiyas) and the amount of porcelain in the lower parts of houses and shops as well as decorations, mats, old houses doors, and hundreds of palm trees make the spirit of the place closer to the towns of northern Maghrib, Cairo and Syria. This spirit is also widespread in all southern Spain s regions.

On our way out of Ronda we were in no more need of the sky map or our distant star, as road signs read prominently Malaga so-and-so km.

(Translated by Dr Shaaban Afifi)