Author
Belén Esturla
Belén Esturla is an artist and illustrator in Granada, Spain.
Articles by this author
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part VI: The Double Lives of Ibn al-Khatib
History
Minister in the Nasrid court of Granada both before and after exile in Morocco, Ibn al-Khatib was a poet, a polymath and an insomniac whose writings earned him renown and a prominent inscription on a wall at the Alhambra.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part V: Ibn Hazm’s Journeys of Exile and Love
History
Socially acerbic, survivor of 11th-century politics that drove him from three homes, Ibn Hazm wrote prolifically on many subjects, but he is remembered most of all for his bittersweet classic, Tawq al-Hamama, or The Ring of the Dove.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part IV: al-Ghazal: From Constantinople to the Land of the Vikings
History
Good looks and a fleet wit gave Al-Ghazal his name, which means “gazelle,” and in later years the poet and courtier of Córdoba proved a reluctant though dutiful envoy both east and, more notably, north.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part III: Ibn al-Shaykh and the Lighthouse of Alexandria
History
Architect and builder by profession, Ibn al-Shaykh of Málaga wrote the most accurate description known of Egypt’s famous mariner’s sentinel— in what was essentially a primer for children, where it went unnoticed for nearly 800 years.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part II: Abu Hamid Al-Garnati’s World of Wonders
History
Over his 90-year lifetime, this chronicler of fact and unabashed fancy trekked, sailed, caravanned, studied and traded from the far Arab West to the northern- and easternmost reaches of the 12th-century Islamic world.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part 1: The Travel Writer Ibn Jubayr
History
Arts & Culture
Our six-part series begins with a two-year pilgrimage by one of the great founders of the literary genre of rihla, or travelogue. Over later centuries, his style was widely emulated (and plagiarized), and today the rihla of Ibn Jubayr uniquely illuminates a 12th-century Mediterranean world of paradoxical complexity.