A Muslim couple in Andalusia, southern Spain, are turning an old farmhouse and its land into a place that introduces visitors to the region's Islamic heritage and landscape. British-Hungarian Muslim Henrietta Szovati and her husband Ajmal Masroor, an imam and therapist, have been working on it for two years. They call it the House of Andalus. Barta24 reported the story from Al Jazeera.
The train from Malaga passes a station called Aljaima, from the Arabic al-khaima, a tent. After seven years of searching, the couple bought the white farmhouse on a hillside in 2024. Its roughly 35 acres now hold about 400 olive trees, and Henrietta wants to grow the grove to a thousand.
They plan a Quranic garden of plants named in the Quran. Besides the olives they have planted pomegranate, fig and mango trees, and hope to add ginger, cucumber and grapes. Educational programmes on the region's Islamic heritage are being prepared, and work on a library has begun.
In the Middle Ages the Muslim-ruled lands of today's Spain and Portugal were known as al-Andalus, centred in the south on cities such as Cordoba, Seville and Granada. Henrietta says the idea came from her five-year-old son, who asked why they kept seeing things connected with Islam wherever they went, from ruined forts to Arabic place names.
Many people raised in Europe are taught that Islam belongs to somewhere else, she says; she wants a place where the landscape, food, architecture and traditions let people see for themselves that Islam is part of Europe's own history. Practising Islam in Spain is comparatively easy, she says, and friendly neighbours make Andalusia feel like home, though Spain is not immune to the political currents spreading across Europe.
Reporting: Barta24 Islam desk, from Al Jazeera.
Photo: Looi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Barta24
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