Abu'l-Hasan Ali of Granada


Abu'l-Hasan Ali ibn Sa'd, known as Muley Hacén in Spanish, was the twenty-first Nasrid ruler of the Emirate of Granada in Spain, from 1464 to 1482 and again from 1483 to 1485.

Life

The son of Sa'd, Abu'l-Hasan Ali became sultan in 1464, and in 1477 he refused to pay tribute to the Crown of Castile. In 1481 he ordered an invasion to the city of Zahara de la Sierra by surprise, killing and enslaving the unarmed Christian Zaharans. This action was taken by Isabella I of Castile as a reason to start the war against Granada.
He was the father of Muhammad XII, the last sultan of Granada, by his relative Aixa. He took a captive Christian slave named Isabel de Solís and fell in love with her, renamed after her conversion as his second wife Zoraida or Soraya, the daughter of Sancho Jiménez de Solís, Alcalde of La Peña de Martos, he had two sons. There are no other biographical elements on Zoraya: She could have joined him in his exile with her two sons. It seems that after the death of Abu'l-Hasan, Zoraya and her two sons re-converted to Catholicism. The sons took the names of Juan de Granada and Fernando de Granada.

Literature

Abu l-Hasan Ali appears as a character, along with Isabel de Solís, in the novel "People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks, and of Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra briefly mentions Mula Abul Hassan.