There is no conqueror but God

Sue and I went to Madinat al-Zahra today. It's the site of a great palace complex from where the muslem rulers of Al Andalus governed the south of Spain. As we wandered the terraces and looked out over the valley of the Guadalquivir I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone seeing the same view more than one thousand years ago. I got no further than feeling the brush of white cotton robes against my skin and half hearing an intoned phrase "there is no conqueror but God ... there is no conqueror but God ..." Something I first heard in my head in 1996 walking around the Alhambra, where my memory tells me it is inscribed over and over again in the decoration, "there is no Conqueror but God." In Arabic I'm sure it has a much more poetic lilt. "Allah" is such a soft and seductive sound by contrast to the gutteral and stoccato "God".

Now I am fifty five and I know what half a century feels like, one thousand years does not seem so far away. Scarily close in fact when I consider the ruins around me where once the centre of a great civilisation. Perhaps the builders of the Alhambra were right to remind the rulers of Al Andalus that however mighty their achievements they would still only be transient in the face of the one great truth that "there is no conqueror but God".


Or is it time that is the real conqueror?