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discover new lands for Christianity. For almost five centuries afterward, Spain had no Muslim population. But the Moors have always retained a clear sight and glorious dream of Spain from the northern Moroccan cities of Tangiers and Tetuán, just across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar.
After surrendering the keys to Granada, Boabdil rode off into exile, crossing the hill of Los Martirios (the Martyrs), and up the desolate heights that form the skirt of the Alpujarra Mountains. From a barren summit, known even today as La Cuesta de las Lágrimas (the Hill of Tears), the fallen monarch took a last look at the splendor that was Granada. It was here, too, at a place called el último suspiro del Moro (the last sigh of the Moor), that his sadness was turned to bile by the reproach of his mother, Ayxa: “You do well,” she supposedly said, “to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man.” King Ferdinand added insult to injury by taking Boabdil’s daughter Aixa as a concubine, then casting her off; she became a nun. Commenting on Boabdil’s fate, Emperor Charles V of Spain reportedly sneered: “I would rather have made this Alhambra my sepulcher than have lived without a kingdom.” 3 Nowhere does this sorrow and bitterness linger deeper than in and around Tetuán, known in Morocco as the Andalucian City 4 and the closest African metropolis to Europe. Here is where the Moors’ defeated but unbowed Grenadine knights, under the command of Abdul-Hassan al-Mandari, 5 retreated, then rallied to fight off the Christian advance into North Africa. The struggle continued well after al-Mandari’s death in 1511, into the mid-twentieth century, led by descendants of the Andalucian émigrés who had remodeled the city to reflect their precious Granada. Their heroic stories of triumphant resistance to Christian conquest remain an integral part of the lore of present-day Tetuán. But redemption for the loss of the Kingdom of Granada is still missing. Like any Southern boy who has dreamed of reliving Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, only this time winning the day, the young men of Tetuán, beckoned by the Andalucian hills they see across the Strait of Gibraltar, long for bygone glory, for the days when the Moors commanded the world’s respect.
The caid, the local police commissar in charge of Jamaa Mezuak, a tumbledown barrio in Tetuán, was firm and formal with his French: “Le Wali a dit non et c’est non, point à la ligne.” (The governor said no, and it’s no, period at the end of the line.) “You can’t talk to anyone else here unless you give me a letter from the minister of the Interior, c’est tout (that’s all).” Of course, the ministry of Interior in Rabat would promise me a yes for some indefinite tomorrow, but I didn’t have time to wait on its whim.
I had come back to explore the few square blocks in Mezuak that had produced five of the seven suicide bombers who plotted the 2004 Madrid train attacks and then blew themselves up. Several other young men from the same Mezuak neighborhood had gone on to fight and die as martyrs in Iraq. 6 I felt I needed to convey a better public sense of who “the enemy” was following a reaction to a briefing I gave in March 2007 for National Security Council staff at the White House. The briefing was based in part on what I had learned in Palestine and in part on information that I had gathered in Madrid and Morocco with Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer who liaised with the mujahedin out of Pakistan during the later stages of the Soviet-Afghan war. The thrust of this information was that small-group dynamics—intimate interacting networks of family, friends, schoolmates, workmates, soccer buddies, and such—were key to the making of terrorists.
At the White House I spent nearly an hour showing data about neighborhood, team, and collegial relationships, arguing that even focusing on pairs of friends—offering them both soccer