I don’t want a British caliphate. I want a country where Christians can live alongside others

An encounter with a nun in a Spanish cathedral has George Pitcher ruminating on a time of unprecedented tension – and what it means for Christians, Jews and Muslims to live together in peace

“I think history is more like a wheel,” a nun told me as we sat in Cordoba cathedral last weekend. “It’s circular but it carries us forward. I like to think it’s forward towards heaven.”

Let’s call her Sister Maria Jose, because I didn’t ask her permission to use her real name here. She was on a pilgrimage to Granada for the festival of the Blessed Virgin. I was bound for Granada too, to see the Alhambra, the massive fort and palace that ran the Muslim caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula until the end of the 15th century.

Sr Maria and I were looking up at the massive arches in Cordoba, a perfect confluence of Christian and Islamic architecture. We’d been talking about how the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam had co-existed peacefully in what was to become Spain, before the reconquest of Al-Andalus by Ferdinand and Isabella and the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews.

I’d said something like: “What goes around comes around”, meaning that history looked like repeating itself with the clash of these cultures promising religious war in Europe again. That’s when Sr Maria made her wheel remark. Based on this model, history is neither circular nor linear, but rotationary and progressive.