Close-up of the Nasrid dynasty motto “wa la ghalib illa Allah” (there is no victor but God), carved in stucco in the Patio del Cuarto Dorado in the Alhambra.
The phrase inscribed is “wa la ghalib illa Allah” (there is no victor but God), and it was considered a motto during the Nasrid dynasty, which were the last Muslim rulers of Granada and the last Islamic state in the Iberian Peninsula. This phrase is said to have been inscribed thousands of times across the entire Alhambra, which was entirely intentional, as they wanted to make the environment connected to the divine, making the architecture inseparable from what it represented. However, it didn’t only serve a spiritual purpose; it also focused on the visual, expressing them as decorative elements that went along with the geometric patterns present all over the walls. One thing to note is that the Alhambra’s walls are famously known as “talking walls” in Spain, since they are all covered with inscriptions in both Kufic (an early angular form of the Arabic alphabet) and cursive Naskhi, which range from poems to religious verses. Al-Andalus art does tend to avoid using figures or imagery in sacred contexts, so the written word itself becomes the main content; that’s why they prioritize weaving the script into geometric shapes to display it as ornamental pieces.
So how do alphabets and writing systems shape what we mean by design? In this case, there’s no separation between the writing, the decorative, and the architecture. The alphabet is the design. This is a big contrast when we think of Western ideology (modernism, like Gutenberg and onward), where type has often been framed as neutral. Here, the script carries spiritual and aesthetic meaning simultaneously. It’s also a case of design history that’s been excluded from the “canon.” Al-Andalus is usually filed under Islamic art and cut out from the graphic or typographic history of Europe, which is crazy to think about given that it sat in Spain for nearly 800 years. Given all this, many questions get raised, like why does this get labeled simply as Islamic art but rarely connected to Spanish design history? And what does this mean when Al-Andalus is properly addressed as part of Spanish identity, when it's usually marketed as a very Catholic Mediterranean image in most of its later designs (erasing its own history)?
When I think about Spanish identity, it really feels like a layering of many cultures, not just a single pure thing. There’s Celtic influence (Galicia), Roman influence, as it gave Spain its Latin language (Castellano, Catalan, and Galician all descend from Latin), German (Visigothic), Jewish, Islamic, and roma/gitano influence (central to Flamenco). If Spanish identity is really an umbrella of culture, multiple official languages, and very strong regional identities, then maybe there’s no such thing as a ‘Spanish design’ but instead a negotiation between all of them. And that negotiation wasn’t always peaceful, because after 1492, Spain introduced limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) laws, which demanded proof of no Jewish or Muslim ancestry and turned identity from something ‘cultural’ to something hereditary. In other words, they decided whose culture counted as “truly” Spanish, and perhaps that is why this part of history is underrepresented and labeled as else.
