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Chapter 18 m o .c te a g h s The Contemporary Afterlife of .a w w w

m o Moorish .c te a g h s .a Charles Hirschkind w w w

m o .c te a g h s .a w w w

m I o .c te a g h s In 2003, the Spanish government of then-President José .aMaria Aznar agreed, in the w w w face of immense popular opposition, to send a contingent of Spanish troops to join m o in the US-led invasion of . In preparation for the.c mission, the Spanish military te a g produced a new badge for the soldiers emblazonedh with the emblem of Santiago s .a Matamoros, St. James the Moor-Killer. With wits sword-point tip and brilliant w w red color, the has long served as a symbolm within Spain for the defeat and o .c elimination of the by the Christian armieste in the fifteenth century. Spanish a g h troops, now armed with this symbol, weres sent off to Iraq to patrol the city of .a w al-Najaf – one of the holiest cities in Shi’aw . w

m The choice of the Moor-Killer emblemo was not incongruous with Aznar’s .c te a strident anti-Muslim rhetoric or with ghis historical sensibilities. In a talk on “global h s threats” that he gave in Washington in.a 2006, Aznar drew the connection between the w w w fight against Muslim radicals and what is known as the : “It’s them or m o us. The West did not attack Islam,.c it was they who attacked us … We are constantly te a g under attack and we must defendh ourselves. I support Ferdinand and Isabella” s .a w (cited in Gulfnews 2006). wAt the same event, while defending Pope Benedict’s w controversial claim that Islamm was an inherently violent religion, Aznar suggested o .c te that should apologizea for having invaded Spain in the eighth century. g h s Aznar’s tenure in power.a ended with the general election of 2004 (he later w w joined the right-wingw think-tank the American Enterprise Institute and then moved

m on to join Rupert Murdoch’so News Corporation). Despite a significant lead in the .c te a polls just weeks gbefore the elections, his government’s response to the March 11 h s .a train bombingsw in , particularly the widespread perception that government w w officials had continued to place the blame on the Basque separatist movement ETA m o .c despite evidencete that Muslim radicals were involved, provoked immense popular a g h condemnations and produced a decisive defeat three days later. Upon assuming .a w the presidency,w the victor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Socialist Party, w

m immediatelyo instituted a recall of Spain’s troops from Iraq. In addition, he quickly .c te produceda and presented an initiative to the for what he called an g h s “Alliance.a of Civilizations,” its purpose being to “deepen political, cultural, and w w weducation relations between those who represent the so-called world and, © Copyrighted Material 228 Islam and Public Controversy in © Copyrighted Material in this historic moment, the area of Arab and Muslim Countries” (BBC News m o Online 2004). As with his predecessor, Zapatero also invoked Spain’s Islamic past.c te a g h in presenting his initiative, not, however, as one more campaign in a long-standings .a w war between the West and Islam, but rather in terms of a legacy of Convivenciaw , w the practice of mutual tolerance and respect that, according to some mscholars, o .c 1 te characterized relations between the Muslims, Christians and of al-Andalus.a g h s Across much of the nation’s history, Spanish political elites have.a engaged w w some of the most pressing questions of the day through a detourw into the

m o Moorish era, those aligned with liberal currents often invoking.c the romantic te a image of interconfessional harmony, while those linked to conservativeg Catholic h s .a Monarchism depicting the period as a brutal interruption of Spain’sw pious Christian w 2 w soul. Contemporary debates on immigration, on Spain’s role within the EU or m o .c on the War on Terror frequently come to pivot upon discordantte interpretations a g h of the Andalusian legacy. Since the development of Spanishs nationalism in the .a w nineteenth century, much of the Spanish historiographyw of the Moorish period has w

m itself been highly conflictual, never too distant fromo ideological struggles over the .c te definition of Spanish identity, struggles fed by long-standinga anxieties over the g h s nation’s peripheral status in relation to Europe (at.a least until recently, and perhaps w w w now again with unemployment well over 20 percent). m o These tensions within the .c of al-Andalus are not exceptional te a g within Europe but are characteristic of a moreh general phenomenon: the ideological s .a appropriation and deployment of the distantw past by nationalists of all types. This w w phenomenon is particularly evident todaym in the context of contemporary micro- o .c nationalist movements throughout Europe,te with Spain being no exception (Payne a g h 1991; Stolcke 1995; Borneman ands Fowler 1997). While Catalonian and Basque .a w w nationalisms represent the strongestw regionalist movements in the country, the

m southern province of Andalusiao has also been the site of long-standing efforts .c te a to secure greater independenceg vis-à-vis the Spanish state. In order to do so, the h s .a Andalusian state and other regionalw entities have sought to cultivate and promote w w a distinct historical identity through an emphasis on its “Moorish legacy” and m o its multicultural and multireligious.c past – a project that testifies to the economic te a g h importance of local heritages industry (Aidi 2006; Rogozen-Soltar 2007). I will .a w return to the Andalusianw context a little later on. w

m My concern ino this chapter, however, is not about the distortions introduced .c te into historical accountsa by political pressures, such as the subordination of the g h s Spanish historiographical.a tradition to nationalist imperatives. Rather, I want to w w explore a traditionw of inquiry that focuses on Spain’s medieval history as means

m o to pose questions.c in the present about the conceptual and moral boundaries of te a g Europe. Sinceh the late nineteenth century, the question of Spain’s relationship to s .a w w w

m 1 o American President Barack Obama also invoked Spain’s legacy of Convivencia in .c te his speecha at Cairo University in 2009. For an analysis of this speech, see Hirschkind 2009. g h s 2 Hishaam Aidi (2006) provides an excellent overview of contemporary ideological .a w w wstruggles in Spain to define the meaning of the country’s Moorish past. © Copyrighted Material The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain 229 © Copyrighted Material

centuries of Islamic presence in has repeatedly come to the fore of publicm o .c te discourse in moments of national crisis, including the devastating defeat of 1898a g h s and the of the 1930s, as if such critical moments produced a fracturea in . w w the nationalist narrative of Spain’s Catholic career through which other historiesw

m momentarily exacted a claim. In other words, for a variety of thinkers, the oproblems .c te a posed by such national crises demanded a reflection on the nation’s g Muslim and h s .a Jewish past, as if the path forward and beyond the current predicamentw could only w w be found via an acknowledgment of that legacy. For a number of these thinkers, m o .c as I explore below, this act of acknowledgment was not to be tesimply a belated a g h recognition of a distant debt, but the animation of a political sensibilitys they saw .a w as grounded in layers of historical experience, woven into thew social, aesthetic and w

m moral fabric of Spanish life. This sensibility was present oyet trapped within the .c te ideological erasure of the nation’s non-Catholic self, an erasurea most dramatically g h s affected by the institution of the , but also in.a an all-pervasive fiction of w w w Spain as an eternal Catholic crusade (for which Aznar may stand as an example). m o To disinter these underground resources of historical.c inheritance, to right Spain’s te a g distorted relation to its existential career, would openh up possibilities of action and s .a reflection necessary for overcoming the crises wof the moment. What was at stake, w w in other words, in the tradition of Spanish historiographym I explore here was not o .c Islam and ’s contribution to medievalte Europe, but rather how the ongoing a g h reverberations of these Spanish traditions mights act as a dynamic force within the .a w political present. w w

m The question I am raising here, of course,o concerns not simply Spain but Europe .c te a on a whole. As Edward Said (1994)g has famously argued, the idea of Europe as h s a civilizational unity was constructed.a in way that was dependent on a principle w w w of differentiation opposing a Muslim Orient to a Christian Europe. Today, the m o project of securing this boundary.c has received new impetus due to increasing te a g anxieties around European identityh occasioned by the growing presence of Muslim s .a w immigrants within the continent.w The demand to include a reference to Europe’s w

Christian character withinm the 2003 Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution o .c te for Europe, a position astrongly championed by Aznar, is one symptom of this g h s project, though it is also.a evident in claims that Europe’s secular traditions are an w w extension of its ownw forms of . Thus, for Marcel Gauchet (1999), it is

m Christianity alone oamong religious traditions that has the theological resources to .c te a achieve its own self-overcomingg and thus set in motion the processes that lead to h s .a secular modernityw and the autonomous subject of modern democratic political life. w w Accounts of this sort introduce religion into the conceptual vocabulary of modern m o .c political lifete in a way that simultaneously naturalizes one particular religious a g h tradition (Christianity)s and secures the civilizational boundaries of modern Europe. .a w Most importantly,w for my analysis here, such accounts identify the conceptual w

m edificeo of European modernity in a way that forecloses a consideration of Europe’s .c te long-standinga entwinement with the . g h s .a I want to begin this discussion by examining how Spain’s Moorish past has been w w wtaken up as a problem and affirmed as an inheritance by a few different thinkers © Copyrighted Material 230 Islam and Public Controversy in Europe © Copyrighted Material responding to conditions of social and political crisis. Within the dominant currents m o of Spanish historiography, the final defeat of Spain’s Muslim rulers in the fifteenth.c te a g h century and the subsequent expulsion of the Muslim and Jewish populationss from .a w its territories stand as the founding events of the Spanish nation. Yet, despitew a w vigorous and sustained attempt within Spanish historiography to erase Islamm and o .c te Judaism from Spain (coupled with systematic attempts to purify the languagea of g h s influences, the land of Arabic architectural forms and so on),.a a counter- w w history of the lasting imprint left on Spanish life by 800 years of Muslimw presence

m o has repeatedly emerged onto the stage of national public dialogue..c Until the late te a nineteenth century, this counter-history of Muslim influence wasg most developed h s .a in aesthetic arenas, particularly in the fields of literature, languagew and music. It is w w with the approach of the twentieth century, however, that we see the emergence of a m o .c historiographical literature, tied to liberal political currents,te aimed at affirming and a g h documenting the heterogeneity of Spain’s historical originss and the contribution of .a w Islam to Spanish national culture and identity. In addressingw this literature, I aim to w

m highlight the historical sensibilities, attitudes and practiceso that ambivalently link .c te the Spanish nation to its Muslim past and that havea found expression in a range of g h s contemporary social and political movements. .a w w w In the second part of this chapter, I turn to some of these contemporary m o movements that incorporate a lived relation.c to the Islamic past as a condition te a g of ethical agency. In doing so, I want to questionh the tendency to dismiss these s .a movements as founded upon a fictionalw or distorted image of the past. Rather, w w

I focus on how the forms of historicalm memory discussed in relation to Spanish o .c historiographical literature continue tote inform social and political practices of both a g h Muslims and non-Muslims in southerns Spain, conditioning and enabling a variety .a w w of contemporary political projectsw in the region. By exploring some of the fissures

m within contemporary narrativeso of Europe’s Judeo-Christian identity, I hope .c te a to contribute to current scholarlyg conversations on religious pluralism within h s .a Western societies, and particularlyw to debates on the place of Muslim minorities w w within Europe. m o .c te a g h s .a w II w w

m o .c te The most provocativea and influential interpretation of the Moorish contribution g h s to the formation.a of Spain written during the twentieth century is that of Americo w 3 w . Writingw from exile in the US in the early years of the Franco regime,

m o Castro came.c to formulate an understanding of Spanish history which saw te a g “the enthronementh of mental ineptitude and paralysis,” exemplified by the Franco s .a dictatorship,w as a direct consequence of the Inquisition, the cult of pure blood, and w w

m o .c te a3 While Castro wrote many works on Spanish literary traditions, the most important g h statements of his broader vision of the Moorish and Jewish contributions to Spain is found .a w w inw his Espana en su Historia, first published in 1948. © Copyrighted Material The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain 231 © Copyrighted Material

the historiographic operation by which a Spanish essence was secured throughm o .c te a compulsive denial of the constitutive role of Jewish and Muslim traditionsa in g h s shaping Spanish life. Castro rejected a long tradition of Spanish historiographya . w w that posited the origins of the nation in the Visigothic state, and viewed wthe 800

m years of Muslim presence as a national parenthesis, finally to be overcomeo by the .c te a Reconquista and the return to religious and territorial unity, and to itsg essentially h s .a Western identity. Rather, he argued, the uniqueness of Spanish identityw was the w w product of a creative symbiosis among Muslims, Jews and Christians set in motion m o .c by the occupation of Spain by the Moors in 711. As he summarizes:te “that which a g h made possible such great works as the Celestina and the Quijote,s and hence the .a w European novel and drama, was a certain vision of man in whichw were woven – as w

m in an ideal and precious tapestry – the Islamic, Christian, ando Judaic conceptions .c te of man” (Castro 1961: 13, my translation). Castro was nota an historian by training, g h s but rather a literary scholar, and his romantic and existentialist.a vision of history w w w took language and literary works as its primary material. Through a brilliant and m o original reading of medieval and .c literary forms, he sought to te a g elucidate how this conjunction of the three “castes”h (castas) had produced a unique s .a form of life, or what, in his existentialist vocabulary,w he termed a morada vital, w w a dwelling place of life; namely, a weave of moral,m aesthetic and religious values o .c that conjoined to form a distinctly Spanish wayte of reflexively inhabiting a specific a g h context of possibilities and obstacles. Hiss inquiries gave particular attention not .a w only to grammatical and semantic hybrids,w but also to the way in which Spanish w

m literary expression had incorporated a visiono of human life – of love, joy, pain and .c te a death – directly from Muslim and Jewishg traditions. h s Influenced by German .,a Castro understood the task ofthe w w w historian to revivify the dynamic relation between past and present, and thereby m o 4 release the creative potential of.c historical events from their temporal prison. In te a g this, he saw himself as the inheritorh of a long lineage of liberal and Romantic s .a w thinkers – historians, Arabistsw and literary scholars – going back at least as far w 5 as the mid-nineteenth century.m It was in this period, one marked by a growing o .c te rift between liberal anda conservative political currents, that the notion of Spain’s g h s inferiority and decadence.a in relation to the rest of Europe acquired considerable w w force both outside thew country and within it. In this context of dissatisfaction

m and frustration, manyo of the leading intellectuals grew disillusioned with the .c te a continuous attemptsg to Europeanize, and began to promote, in response, an anti- h s .a historicism emphasizingw Spain’s unique spiritual foundations as embodied in its w w ancient traditions. One product of this romantic reassessment of the distinctness m o .c of Spain’ste historical vocation was a body of scholarship demonstrating the a g h s .a w w w 4 For some useful essays on the intellectual currents that influenced Castro’s thought, m o see Lain-Entralgo.c 1971. te a g5 The Spanish Orientalist tradition has been explored with great insight and depth h s by.a James Monroe (1970). The Spanish scholar Bernabe Lopez-Garcia (1990) has also w w providedw a useful assessment of the tradition. © Copyrighted Material 232 Islam and Public Controversy in Europe © Copyrighted Material multiplicity of ways in which Arabic and Jewish cultural forms had left their m o imprint on European knowledges and institutions (Monroe 1970: 151–2). .Forc te a g h at least some of the scholars of this generation, notably the Arabists Julians .a w Ribera y Tarrago and Miguel Asin Palacios, this exhumation of a buriedw and w fragmented Moorish past was seen as necessary to the revitalization ofm Spanish o .c te cultural and educational institutions, much as Americo Castro would arguea half a g h s century later. .a w w The encounter of cultural and historical horizons articulated inw a variety of

m o forms by nineteenth-century scholars was conditioned by the.c orientalization te a of Southern Europe that began a century earlier. As Europeang was h s .a reaching its apogee in the mid-eighteenth century, a new logicw of European self- w w definition emerged in which the Oriental other was internalized, translated and m o 6 .c relocated into Europe’s own south. Europe’s antithesiste was now incorporated a g h within its own heterogeneous topography. In Hegel’ss formulation, Europe is .a w the site where all of the civilizational principles unitew within a single unfolding, w

m “the continent where the infinite process of civilizationo can be traced” (cited in .c te Dainotto 2000: 380). As literary scholar Roberto Dainottoa observes: g h s .a w w w The “infinite process of civilization” – the teleological movement from what m o was to what is now – institutes then a geographical.c past of Europe, an “origin” te a g that is no longer elsewhere – in the wildernessh of or in the flatlands of s .a Asia – but right in the middle of the “liquid”w and “centerless” mare nostrum. w w

Europe, in order to become a totality,m invents its own south, the place, namely, o .c where the “other” civilizations are tetranslated into, and internalized as, a past a g h moment in the giddy progress of Europe.s (Dainotto 2000: 380–81) .a w w w

m Not surprisingly, it is preciselyo at this historical juncture that the question of .c te a Moorish roots emerges as a problemg within Spanish historiography. h s .a Forced to inhabit the rolew of the nobly savage past within the total system w w that consolidates Europe’s identity, react in two directions. One, m o evident in most historical.c writing up to the present day, is to insist on its essential te a g h Europeanness, often throughs the erasure or denigration – almost as a ritual act, .a w the textual embodimentw of the Christians and Moors ritual – of its own African w

m and Middle Easterno genealogy. A second direction, however, personified in Castro .c te and his nineteenth-centurya predecessors, has been to exploit the gaps opened up g h s within Spain’s historical.a experience by its very peripheralization so as to articulate w w a unique rolew for Spain within the story of modern Europe, one constituted, in

m o part, by the.c imprint of al-Andalus explored across a variety of expressive media, te a g language,h literature, architecture, art and so on. It is worth remembering here that s .a Germanw Romanticism, a movement that powerfully shaped the sensibilities of w w Spanish historians from the nineteenth century onward, was not concerned with m o .c te a g h s 6 Roberto Dainotto has written insightfully about the impact of this orientalization of .a w w Spainw on Spanish intellectual life (2000, 2006, 2007). © Copyrighted Material The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain 233 © Copyrighted Material

recovering past practices or with inventing an imaginary tradition where nonem o .c te existed, as critics of Castro and his contemporary followers often assert. In othera g h s words, the sense of belonging articulated by the Romantics was not understooda . w w as something simply given; it was both real and imaginary, built upon a dynamicw

m and creative engagement with the past. The historian Charles Larmore brilliantlyo .c te a captures this aspect of Romanticism in the following quote: “theg Romantic h s .a imagination in general aims to be creative and responsive at once,w attuned to w w experience as it also enriches it. So it may well be true that the Romantic sense m o .c of belonging is inescapably an act of the imagination, transfiguringte as it does its a g h favored traditions in a traditionalist spirit that they themselves dids not have before. .a w But this does not mean that such forms of life do not reallyw exist. And where w

m they do exist and move our being, our imaginative identificationo of them can .c te count as an expression of reason” (Larmore 1996: 63). Ita is this imaginative act, g h s both creative and responsive, by which forms of sedimented.a historical experience w w w relegated to the margins of Spanish public life are animated and deployed within m o contexts of political action that characterizes the .c historiographical tradition to te a g which Castro contributed. h s .a The style of inquiry pioneered by Spanishw Arabists continues to shape w w contemporary investigations into the country’sm Moorish past. I provide one o .c relevant example. Barbara Fuchs, in a te recent article, explores the highly a g h ambivalent relationship that sixteenth-centurys Spaniards had with the Moorish .a w culture they so vehemently attempted tow negate. On ceremonial occasions, she w

m notes, it was common that participantso would adorn themselves in Moorish .c te a attire. This still takes place today, notablyg in the mock-battles between Christians h s and Moors enacted in many parts .a of the country. As opposed to contemporary w w w festivals that celebrate the defeat of a mortal enemy, in many sixteenth-century m o festival occasions, all celebrants.c wore Moorish garb. Such usages of Moorish te a g style, she suggests, could be andh have been interpreted as “ethnic cross-dressing” s .a w – a practice of staging othernessw as a means to fabricate, by counter-position, w a Spanish national identity.m However, while this is clearly one feature of the o .c te practice, the identificationa with Moorishness is far more contradictory than this g h s suggests. This is because.a in many instances, Fuchs observes, Moorish style w w was not fetishized orw marked as “other” in any way, but was simply made to

m represent Spanishness.o In other words, it was through such a self-orientalizing .c te a gesture that, paradoxically,g Spain constructed certain elements of its own h s .a identity in thew sixteenth century. As Fuchs concludes, “whether embraced or w w stigmatized, Moorishness becomes an essential component in the construction of m o .c national identity.te The process is not one of simple othering but a more complex a g h negotiations between past and present, intra- and extra-European pressures, and .a w fictive widentities crafted both at home and abroad” (Fuchs 2007: 97). This double w

m gestureo by which Moorishness is both denigrated and celebrated, both expunged .c te anda embodied, points to a far more complicated relationship than that which we g h s see.a today in the simultaneous enthusiasm for the Noble Moor coupled with an w w woften racist discourse on the Arab immigrant. © Copyrighted Material 234 Islam and Public Controversy in Europe © Copyrighted Material

III m o .c te a g h I have attempted so far to sketch out the rudiments of a Spanish tradition geareds .a w towards creatively interrogating the past as a practice of ethical and politicalw w self-fashioning, a task oriented towards a present of determinant demandsm and o .c te possibilities. I now want to shift focus to look at some of the contemporarya g h s practices and movements that this tradition animates. To do so, I will.a focus on w w some facets of the contemporary regionalist movement in .w

m o Although the Andalucista movement has its origins back in.c the early years te a of the twentieth century, it is not until the late 1970s, with the g end of the Franco h s 7 .a era, that the movement acquired particular momentum. Manyw of the men and w w women who gravitated towards Andalucismo in these years were intellectuals and m o .c political activists who, disillusioned with the social and politicalte transformations a g h that accompanied post-Franco Spain’s integration into thes global economy, came to .a w embrace a regionalist model of politics centering on the renewalw of local histories and w

m traditions. This movement has since generated a vasto proliferation of associations .c te and advocacy groups emphasizing the contemporarya importance of Andalusia’s g h s Moorish and Jewish heritage and organized around.a a wide variety of social and w w w political causes. m o A number of the activists involved in.c the formation of this movement te a g eventually converted to Islam, and today Andalusiah has the most rapidly growing s .a8 community of converts in all of Europe.w Many of these converts have played w w an active role in tying the movement form regional autonomy to a cultural politics o .c aimed at establishing connections to thete . They have also frequently a g h lobbied for legal protections on behalfs of Muslim migrants. This group represents .a w w a dynamic and well-organized forcew within the political scene, especially in

m , where they have been instrumentalo in securing official representation for .c te a Muslim celebrations, in extendingg greater protections to Muslim historical sites h s .a and in organizing the constructionw of a large , despite a highly organized w w movement to oppose the project. m o As many scholars have.c noted, the project of producing a unified Europe has, te a g h paradoxically, led to as reassertion of regional identities and the proliferation of .a w numerous subnationalw movements pressing claims for greater autonomy (Payne w

m 1991; Stolcke 1995).o Seen in this light, Spain’s convert movement has been .c te interpreted as onea face of the contemporary politics of identity, attractive to g h s frustrated elites.a dissatisfied with more New Age options and allured by Islam’s w w current counter-hegemonicw aura. While I do not want to entirely discard this view,

m o .c te a g h 7 Ons the history of the Andalucista movement, see Cortes and Luis 1994; Sanchez- .a w Manterow 2001; Moreno 2008. w

m 8 o A vast body of scholarly writings on conversion to has appeared .c te duringa the last decade. See in particular Bahrami 1998; Stallaert 1999; Olmo 2000. Javier g h Rosón-Lorente’ss (2000) ethnographic study of relations between Muslim converts and .a w w Spanishw Christians is particularly useful on this topic. © Copyrighted Material The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain 235 © Copyrighted Material

I do want to briefly point to some aspects of the conversion phenomenonm that o .c te challenge the adequacy of such a framing. a g h s One association formed by the early wave of converts to Islam foundeda a . w w University of in Cordoba. The University’s own founding narrativew

m echoes a set of tropes common within convert circles: o .c te a g h s .a The revival of Islam in Andalus, Spain, has been a cherished idealw of the w w Muslims since the fall of in 1492. The Holocaust coming in the wake m o .c of the down-fall of the Muslims was unprecedented in the annalste of human a g h history. The Inquisition carried out by the Spanish church in the names of religion .a w undoubtedly tarnished the image of Christianity in the eyesw of the impartial w

m observers and students of history … In spite of this bleak o period hundreds of .c te thousands of Muslims retained their religious commitmenta and strived hard to g h s impart some sentiments of Islamicity to their forth-coming.a generation … There w w w has always been a feeling in the educated class of the that their m o real identity was different from the Northern Spaniards.c who denied this right to te a g their Southern compatriots. This long feeling foundh expression in the conversion s .a process started soon after the ending of Generalw Franco’s dictatorship. Several w w

thousands of people embraced Islam within ma short span of time. (Ibn Rushd, o .c University website) te a g h s .a w Many converts experience their turn tow Islam as the gradual liberation of that w

m barely perceptible trace left dormant acrosso the generations. .c te a Karim Viudes, now in his late seventies,g is an historian and architect affiliated h s with the recently built Mezquita de.a Granada. His conversion story is not unlike w w w that of many others Spanish converts: “I was living in Paris in 1968, in exile from m o the dictatorship of Franco. It was.c there that I read Ignacio Olague’s book on the te a g Islamic Roots of Spain, whichh prompted me to take an interest both in Spanish s .a w history as well as in Islam.w A few years later, an occasion came for me to travel w to New York where I hadm the possibility of studying with a Sufi Shaykh from o .c te Iraq. It was that way thata after a few years I became convinced of the truths I g h s encountered in the religion,.a and I decided to convert.” w w Olague’s book isw a commonplace in many Spanish conversion stories, despite

m the fact that its centralo claim – that there was no occupation of Southern Iberia by .c te a Muslims from Northg Africa and the Middle East in the eighth century, but rather h s .a a mass conversionw by the local community – has been shown to rest on numerous w w 9 historical errors. However, it is not the accuracy of Olague’s text that is crucial, m o .c but the processeste of historical exploration and self-transformation that it serves a g h s .a w w w 9 Despite his enthusiastic reception by Andalusian activists and converts, Olague m o was in.c no way a moorophile, nor did he have any interest in the Arabic language or the te a Middleg East. Rather, as Maribel Fierro (2010) has recently, examined, he was first and h s foremost.a a Spanish nationalist, and one, moreover, with strong links to certain Spanish w w fascistw intellectuals. © Copyrighted Material 236 Islam and Public Controversy in Europe © Copyrighted Material to set in motion. Viudes links his personal trajectory with his place of birth, the m o city of , established in the ninth century by Abd al-Rahman II, the Emir.c of te a g h al-Andalus, and then called Medinat Mursiya: “I am a witness to history withouts .a w wishing to be so, by my family origin, which extends as far back as thew 13th w century, a descendent of a family present at the colonization of al-Andalusm after o .c te the fall of Granada, and by my personal experience of having observeda the time g h s we live in for three quarters of a century, with acuity and depth” (Viudes.a 2005). w w Viudes weaves himself into the past genealogically, but also throughw his “acute

m o and deep” engagement with the present. In this regard, a motto. c frequently cited te a by Spanish converts states: “Somos moros viejos y musulmanesg nuevos” (“We are h s .a old Moors and new Muslims”). w w w Viudes played an important role in the establishment of the Mezquita de m o .c Granada, completed in 2003 after a 20-year struggle againstte local and national a g h opposition, designing the interior. In preparing for the task,s he spent many years .a w studying Moorish architectural and decorative styles, andw also traveled throughout w

m the Middle East, visiting Islam’s greatest architecturalo accomplishments. The .c te mosque that resulted from his inquiry and designinga skills is extraordinary, g h s fusing stylistic elements from some of the most .aoutstanding examples of Islamic w w w architecture within an overarching aesthetic form derived from Andalusian m o traditions. Thus, the mihrab, or prayer niche,.c is a replica of the one found in the te a g Red Mosque in Cordoba; colored marbleh panels repeat a pattern found in the s .a al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem; some of thew stained-glass windows reproduce those w w of the Blue Mosque in . The mosaicsm lining the and prayer hall were o .c made by craftsmen in Fez who had preservedte traditions of design and techniques a g h of production used in al-Andalus. sFor Viudes, the construction of the mosque, .a w w the first in Granada in 500 years,w is not about the return of al-Andalus, as others

m sometimes describe it. “Al-Andaluso is gone,” he says, “but from its ruins we are .c te a creating something new, that gis spreading throughout Europe.” Viudes’ mosque, h s .a a frequent site stop for Muslimw dignitaries traveling to Europe, inhabits an w w imaginative geography that fits uncomfortably within the conceptual and material m o contours of Europe. .c te a g h Another Spanish converts to Islam, Mansur Abdulsalem Escudero, a long- .a w standing advocate forw Muslims in Spain and the founder of a vast Internet archive w

m of contemporary ando historical writings on issues of concern to Muslims, views .c te the rebuilding ofa Islamic institutions in southern Spain by converts and Muslim g h s immigrants within.a an eschatological frame: w w w

m o al-Andalus.c will continue to be al-Andalus, for all Muslims at all times. This is te a g given;h we didn’t create it. Here we have our dead, who still live on, waiting for s .a thew . Today, on the spiritual plane, saints from all Muslim w w regions reunite here in al-Andalus, as they have always been reuniting. The m o .c te Islamic presence has always existed, without interruption, in spite of the a g h s fact that we were apparently expelled in the 17th century. We are not few, .a w w w © Copyrighted Material The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain 237 © Copyrighted Material

but rather multitudes, but there are those who see this and those who don’t. m o .c te (Escudero 1999) a g h s .a w w Al-Andalus for Escudero has escaped historical time, as if a place heldw in the

m mind of God (along with its dead) until the Last Day. Who are the multitudeso only .c te a apparently expelled by the Christian armies? The dead themselves, everg passing h s .a through on a spiritual plane? The present-day inheritors, some of whomw are now w w awakening to this fact and returning to Islam? The final clause – about those m o .c who see and those who do not – echoes the Koranic verses concerningte the two a g h categories of people: those who see and hear the truth of God’ss word and those .a w who cannot. It is only within eschatological time that the eventsw of Andalusian w

m history – past and present – achieve their true dimensions ando significance. .c te Let me finally turn to a second activist movementa that also has its rootsin g h s Andalucismo and that includes both Muslims and non-Muslims.a alike. The movement w w w I am referring to centers on a campaign to replace the Catholic-nationalist festivals m o celebrated (seemingly without pause) throughout .c southern Spain with festival te a g forms emphasizing Andalusia’s pluralist and liberalh traditions – the Convivencia s .a of Jews, Muslims and Christians during the Moorishw period, but also the liberal w w martyrs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,m from Mariana Pineda to Federico o .c Garcia Lorca, themselves inheritors of the telife-blood of this tradition (as Lorca a g h certainly recognized). For its organizers, thiss campaign is a vehicle for promoting .a w and creating an open, tolerant, multiculturalw society in southern Spain, and many of w

m the group’s activities focus on the policieso and politics of immigration. .c te a Paco Vigueras is one of the primaryg coordinators for this group, sometimes h s known as the “Collective of the 2nd.a of January Manifesto.” Like Karim Viudes, w w w Vigueras’ first encounter with a different Spain was through Olague’s work, m o though he has since read Castro.c and many other historians of Moorish Spain, te a g as well as the works of Blash Infante, the intellectual and political father of the s .a w Andalucista movement backw in the 1920s and 1930s. For close to 15 years, he has w worked tirelessly to counterm the and intolerance he considers inherent o .c te in contemporary Andalusiana cultural forms and public life, through an ongoing g h s effort to give public recognition.a to the region’s rich cultural legacy. In a statement w w criticizing the Dia dew la Toma, the annual celebration of the conquest of Granada

m in 1492 that markedo the end of the Moors in Spain, he observes: .c te a g h s .a The poet-kingw al-Mutamid was as Sevillian as ; the w w philosopher , as much a son of Cordoba as Seneca; and King Boabdil m o .c (the lastte Moorish ruler, who surrendered to the Spanish), no less Granadan than a g h our Federicos Garcia Lorca … In these times, when xenophobia has returned to .a w thew old continent, it is useful to remember that Andalucía was much more than w

m beaches,o sun, bulls, and subsidies; that while Europe wrapped itself in shadows, .c te a and agitated itself with the phantom of the Inquisition, al-Andalus knew how to g h s .a share, to exchange, to create. w w w © Copyrighted Material 238 Islam and Public Controversy in Europe © Copyrighted Material

IV m o .c te a g h For many residents of Granada, the “2nd of January Manifesto” and others such .a w efforts are based on a fictitious past. “They don’t want to acknowledgew the real w ,” as one woman told me, though what counts as “real”m in such o .c te comments, that which Juan Goytisolo has called a “clean-shavena g h s civilization” – a Spain free of Islamic and Jewish influence – clearly .a owes its force w w to a vast endeavor of historical fiction. It has become common todayw for Spaniards

m o to hold together the two rather contradictory ideas that the Moors,.c in some fashion, te a left a permanent imprint on Iberian soil and that the real historyg of Spain is to be h s .a found in an ideal that crystallized with Ferdinand and Isabella.w The same gesture w w by which Islamic and Jewish roots are posited is also that which prophylactically m o .c consigns them to an irrelevant past. te a g h While I was in Granada a few years ago, a story appeareds in the newspaper .a w El Pais indicating that recent archaeological work wsuggested that San Isidro, w

m the Patron Saint of Madrid, had most likely been ao , a Muslim forcibly .c te converted to Christianity in the sixteenth century.a A very popular comedic g h s television program called el Intermedio, Spain’s.a answer to Jon Stewart, reported w w w the findings, spinning them into a series of skits set up by the host’s question: what m o if the Moors had never been defeated? Lots. c of headscarves, turbans, beards and te a g orientalist paraphernalia were then dutifullyh donned and paraded about in some s .a role reversal fantasy, a fetishization of thew exotic Muslim “other” in response to w w an anxiety produced by San Isidro’s Muslimm genealogy. But that anxiety can lead o .c in two directions. te a g h I have attempted here to outline,s in a tentative fashion, what might be seen .a w w as a tradition whose advocates wand adherents seek to adjust their lives to a

m different geopolitical imaginary,o understood by many as an ethical response to .c te a the xenophobia and theyg see around them. While often relegated to the h s .a margins of Spanish public memory,w this tradition nonetheless has repeatedly found w w expression in literary and aesthetic domains, as well as within political life. It is m o worth noting here that over.c the course of the last 25 years, Spain has gone further te a g h than most other Europeans states in recognizing and responding to the demands .a w of its religious minorities,w especially Muslims. A key moment in this evolution w

m is the Cooperation o Agreement of 1992 between the Spanish state and the Islamic .c te Commission of Spain,a an agreement that makes explicit reference to the historical g h s contribution of .aIslamic traditions to Spanish identity. This agreement is exceptional w w in the Europeanw context for the variety of rights it extends to recognized Muslim

m o communities.c in Spain, among them the right of Muslim children to receive te a g Islamic religioush training in public schools, the right to be exempted from work s .a on Fridayw at the time of prayer and the right to food in public institutions w w such as schools and the military. Moreover, the previous m o .c underte the socialist Zapatero passed a measure that granted amnesty to as many a g h as s one million Muslim immigrants who were in the country illegally, a step .a w stronglyw at odds with the policies of other EU nations. Admittedly, many of these w © Copyrighted Material The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain 239 © Copyrighted Material

measures have yet to be implemented and continue to be viewed by many asm a o .c te dangerous accommodation to an undeserving religious minority, as well aas a g h s betrayal of Spain’s Catholic identity. However, what is interesting in these debatesa . w w is the way they have reintroduced into public discourse the question of w Spain’s

m Islamic heritage in relation to contemporary deliberations over issues ofo Muslim .c te a immigration. The legacy of Castro and his predecessors remains a vitalg point of h s .a reflection for Spaniards, and Europeans more generally, concerned w with the place w w that Muslims will occupy within European social, political and religious spaces. m o .c te a g h s .a w References w w

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