Read Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain Online
Authors: Matthew Carr
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Spain & Portugal, #Religion, #Christianity, #General, #Christian Church, #Social Science, #Emigration & Immigration, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #Islamic Studies
Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (52 page)
BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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It was not until the nineteenth century that foreign writers like Ford and Washington Irving began to visit Spain’s neglected Islamic ruins and present a romanticized but nonetheless positive view of Moorish Spain to an international public. In the same period, a new generation of Spanish Arabists, such as Pascual Gayangos, Miguel Asín Palacios, and Eduardo Saavedra, began to excavate the cultural heritage of al-Andalus, and the first translations of
aljamiado
manuscripts began to shed light on the forgotten world of Morisco Spain—thus beginning a process that would ultimately lead to the reincorporation of the Islamic past into the stream of Spanish history.
aljamiado
manuscripts began to shed light on the forgotten world of Morisco Spain—thus beginning a process that would ultimately lead to the reincorporation of the Islamic past into the stream of Spanish history.
Of the Moriscos who left Spain there are more visible traces. Their journeys and destinations covered a wide arc. Moriscos were found in Egypt, Turkey, and the Balkans, in Lebanon, Greece, and south of the Sahara. Some settled in Syria, where the Ottoman sultan put aside lands for them. A small Morisco colony was founded in Timbuktu, where a detachment of “Andalusian” soldiers remained after an exploratory expedition on behalf of the Moroccan sultan. Most Moriscos were scattered across North Africa, where they were found in dozens of cities, towns, and villages, from Tetuán, Fez, and Tangier to Algiers and Tripoli. As many as eighty thousand Moriscos settled in Tunisia, most of them in and around the capital, Tunis, which still contains a quarter known as Zuqaq al-Andalus, or Andalusia Alley. Others moved to the lush Medjerda River valley and the fertile promontory of Cape Bon, whose proliferation of citrus orchards would have reminded many Morisco émigrés of the Valencian
huerta
(irrigated plain) and the lost splendors of the Granadan vega.
huerta
(irrigated plain) and the lost splendors of the Granadan vega.
These exiles tended to pursue the same occupations in their adopted countries that they had practiced in Spain. Some worked the land, others were craftsmen and artisans, adapting their skills to local needs or introducing innovations of their own, such as the red felt beret known as the
chechia
, which Tunisians still wear today. Other Moriscos worked as soldiers for North African rulers, as secretaries and translators, merchants and diplomats. In the immediate aftermath of the expulsion, many of them constituted distinct communities that corresponded to the regions of Spain they had come from. Their adaptation to their new situation was not always easy. Even when Moriscos worshipped as Muslims, they were often regarded as Christians or apostates by the local population. In Tunisia, many ordinary Tunisians resented the special tax status granted to the Moriscos by their sympathetic ruler Uthman Dey, and the Ottoman sultan was obliged to issue new orders to Uthman’s less well-disposed successor to ensure that the exiles were well treated.
chechia
, which Tunisians still wear today. Other Moriscos worked as soldiers for North African rulers, as secretaries and translators, merchants and diplomats. In the immediate aftermath of the expulsion, many of them constituted distinct communities that corresponded to the regions of Spain they had come from. Their adaptation to their new situation was not always easy. Even when Moriscos worshipped as Muslims, they were often regarded as Christians or apostates by the local population. In Tunisia, many ordinary Tunisians resented the special tax status granted to the Moriscos by their sympathetic ruler Uthman Dey, and the Ottoman sultan was obliged to issue new orders to Uthman’s less well-disposed successor to ensure that the exiles were well treated.
The Moriscos also struggled to accommodate themselves to exile. Many spoke no Arabic and were unfamiliar with the customs and culture of the countries in which they found themselves. Even the most devoutly religious Moriscos were prone to the powerful sentiment of longing, nostalgia, and homesickness that the Spanish call
añoranza
. In Tunisia the exiled Morisco poet Ibrahim Taybili celebrated his exile as a liberation from Christian oppression and wrote scathing verses attacking the religion and society that had expelled his compatriots. But there were also Morisco writers such as the anonymous Refugiado de Tunis (Tunis Exile), whose writings were a testament to the heterogeneous cultural legacy that Spain’s rulers had sought to eliminate. A devout Muslim, the Tunis Exile retained bitter memories of the treatment that he and his co-religionists had received from “Christian heretics” in his Spanish homeland where “we prayed to God our Lord by night and day to deliver us from so much tribulation and danger, and we wanted to be in the lands of Islam even if it be naked.” Yet his erotic lovemaking manual was written in Spanish and sprinkled with quotations from the verses of Lope de Vega and Góngora that he had committed to memory.
19
añoranza
. In Tunisia the exiled Morisco poet Ibrahim Taybili celebrated his exile as a liberation from Christian oppression and wrote scathing verses attacking the religion and society that had expelled his compatriots. But there were also Morisco writers such as the anonymous Refugiado de Tunis (Tunis Exile), whose writings were a testament to the heterogeneous cultural legacy that Spain’s rulers had sought to eliminate. A devout Muslim, the Tunis Exile retained bitter memories of the treatment that he and his co-religionists had received from “Christian heretics” in his Spanish homeland where “we prayed to God our Lord by night and day to deliver us from so much tribulation and danger, and we wanted to be in the lands of Islam even if it be naked.” Yet his erotic lovemaking manual was written in Spanish and sprinkled with quotations from the verses of Lope de Vega and Góngora that he had committed to memory.
19
Many other Moriscos felt the same contradictory emotions. In 1627 an English spy in Morocco named John Harrison told his government that the militant Hornacheros of Salé had offered to become vassals of the king of England in exchange for protection from the Moroccan sultan. Harrison pleaded their case and argued that the Hornacheros were ripe for conversion to Protestantism because “the greater parte [were] so distracted between that idolatrous Roman religion wherein they were borne and Mahometisme under which they now groane, as they know not what to believe.”
20
Yet in 1631 a deputation of Hornacheros from Salé wrote to Philip IV and offered to surrender their ships and facilities to Spain if they could be allowed to return to their former homes in Extremadura. They laid down various conditions: Hornachos was to remain entirely Morisco in order to avoid the “difficulties” that had preceded the expulsion; no priests or friars were to live in the town, and the population was to be spared the attentions of the Inquisition for twenty years.
20
Yet in 1631 a deputation of Hornacheros from Salé wrote to Philip IV and offered to surrender their ships and facilities to Spain if they could be allowed to return to their former homes in Extremadura. They laid down various conditions: Hornachos was to remain entirely Morisco in order to avoid the “difficulties” that had preceded the expulsion; no priests or friars were to live in the town, and the population was to be spared the attentions of the Inquisition for twenty years.
This unlikely proposal may have been partly motivated by the precarious position of the Hornacheros within the turbulent world of Moroccan politics, but their willingness to consider a return to Spain with all its attendant risks was another indication of the intense attachment that many Moriscos felt toward their homeland. There is no evidence that this proposal received a positive response, nor was it likely to have received one. As the years passed, such nostalgia faded as the Moriscos became more assimilated. Yet many of them continued to form a distinct “Andalusian” community in their adopted countries. Though they worshipped as Muslims and built their own mosques, many of them continued to speak Spanish among themselves and to marry other Moriscos. They incorporated Spanish architectural features and motifs into their new houses and mosques. They cooked the recipes from their former homeland. At weddings, parties, and festivals, they sang the old songs that the Inquisition had once prohibited and laid the basis for the national Tunisian musical genre known as
malouf
.
malouf
.
In 1720, Father Francisco Jiménez, a Spanish priest in a Christian hospital in Tunis, described a visit to the town of Testour, where he found a large number of descendants of “Andalusian and Aragonese Muslims,” some of whom still spoke Spanish and talked “of the very same things that Spaniards speak about when they talk, so much so that I felt I was in some village of Spain.”
21
The nineteenth-century English traveler Sir Arthur Capell Brooke found descendants of “Andalusian Moors” in Algiers who remained proud of their Spanish origins. Today traces of the Morisco migration can still be found in the towns and cities of North Africa in the “Andalusian” music of Morocco and Algiers and in the annual
malouf
festivals of Tunisia, where musicians still play the same instruments that their ancestors once brought with them during the great cleansing of 1609–1614 and still sing a song that has been passed down through the centuries:
21
The nineteenth-century English traveler Sir Arthur Capell Brooke found descendants of “Andalusian Moors” in Algiers who remained proud of their Spanish origins. Today traces of the Morisco migration can still be found in the towns and cities of North Africa in the “Andalusian” music of Morocco and Algiers and in the annual
malouf
festivals of Tunisia, where musicians still play the same instruments that their ancestors once brought with them during the great cleansing of 1609–1614 and still sing a song that has been passed down through the centuries:
May the rain sprinkle you as it showers!
Oh, my time of love in Andalusia:
Our time together was just a sleeper’s dream
Or a secretly grasped moment.
22
Epilogue: A Warning from History?
The seventeenth-century perception of the expulsion as a national calamity was partly based on an exaggerated idea of the number of Moriscos expelled. Fernández de Navarrete believed that 3 million Moriscos had been removed, and subsequent historical estimates have been similarly inflated.
1
Today most scholars estimate that Spain lost some 4 percent of an overall population of 8 million as a result of the expulsion, so that its national impact was less calamitous than Navarrete and his contemporaries imagined. But the consequences of the expulsion cannot be measured merely in terms of its economic repercussions or demographic statistics. The removal of the Moriscos was the culminating act in a historical continuum that began with the 1391–1412 conversions of the Jews, during which time Spain’s rulers ruthlessly dismantled the religiously and culturally diverse Iberian society inherited from the Middle Ages and imposed a single homogeneous Catholic identity on all their subjects.
1
Today most scholars estimate that Spain lost some 4 percent of an overall population of 8 million as a result of the expulsion, so that its national impact was less calamitous than Navarrete and his contemporaries imagined. But the consequences of the expulsion cannot be measured merely in terms of its economic repercussions or demographic statistics. The removal of the Moriscos was the culminating act in a historical continuum that began with the 1391–1412 conversions of the Jews, during which time Spain’s rulers ruthlessly dismantled the religiously and culturally diverse Iberian society inherited from the Middle Ages and imposed a single homogeneous Catholic identity on all their subjects.
For the American Hispanist Henry C. Lea, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, “The fanaticism which expelled the Jew and the Morisco hung like a pall over the land, benumbing its energies and rendering recuperation impossible” and transformed Spain into “a paradise for priests and friars and familiars of the Inquistion, where every intellectual impulse was repressed, every channel of intercourse with the outer world was guarded, every effort for material improvement was crippled.”
2
The social forces that made this transformation possible would continue to haunt Spain for many centuries to come, choking its intellectual and social development and acting as a barrier against modernization and reform. In 1876 the Spanish poet and politician Gaspar Nuñez de Arce blamed Spain’s cultural and intellectual decline on “the most sinister and prolonged religious persecution in the history of mankind” that followed the conquest of Granada in 1492. De Arce condemned the expulsions of the Jews and Moriscos and argued that both events had contributed to Spain’s subsequent cultural atrophy.
3
It would take years of economic and social evolution, civil conflict, and dictatorship before another Spain was able to emerge from these reactionary coils.
2
The social forces that made this transformation possible would continue to haunt Spain for many centuries to come, choking its intellectual and social development and acting as a barrier against modernization and reform. In 1876 the Spanish poet and politician Gaspar Nuñez de Arce blamed Spain’s cultural and intellectual decline on “the most sinister and prolonged religious persecution in the history of mankind” that followed the conquest of Granada in 1492. De Arce condemned the expulsions of the Jews and Moriscos and argued that both events had contributed to Spain’s subsequent cultural atrophy.
3
It would take years of economic and social evolution, civil conflict, and dictatorship before another Spain was able to emerge from these reactionary coils.
In the Civil War of 1936–1939, the liberalizing experiment of the Spanish Republic was extinguished by the Francoist “crusade,” with the support of the Nazis and the Catholic Church—and the assistance of Moorish mercenaries from North Africa, who acted as shock troops for the Nationalists.
4
Though religious pluralism existed in principle under the Franco dictatorship, the Catholic Church retained its dominant position, and Catholicism remained at the core of Spanish national identity. The “National Catholicism” of the regime was also infused with a powerful streak of Castilian cultural chauvinism, which suppressed any expression of Basque and Catalan cultural and linguistic difference in ways that the Moriscos would once have recognized.
4
Though religious pluralism existed in principle under the Franco dictatorship, the Catholic Church retained its dominant position, and Catholicism remained at the core of Spanish national identity. The “National Catholicism” of the regime was also infused with a powerful streak of Castilian cultural chauvinism, which suppressed any expression of Basque and Catalan cultural and linguistic difference in ways that the Moriscos would once have recognized.
Franco often demonstrated a Janus-like attitude toward Spain’s Islamic past. On the one hand, he continued to exalt the Reconquista as a glorious achievement to the Spanish public and placed himself in the same tradition as the Catholic Monarchs, even to the point of praising the expulsion of the Jews during World War II. In the postwar period, however, Franco often invoked Spain’s Arab–Islamic past in his attempts to cultivate good relationships with the Arab world, to whom he presented himself as “Sidi Franco.” The regime also astutely exploited Spain’s Moorish and Gypsy heritage at a time of political isolation from the rest of Europe in order to attract foreign tourists to the country during the economic boom of the 1960s.
In the decades since Franco’s death, Spain has been transformed in ways that would once have been unimaginable. In 1978 religious pluralism was written into the country’s first democratic constitution, and today the land of Bleda and Cisneros is one of the most tolerant countries in Europe, where gay marriage is now legal and whose increasingly irreligious population was once condemned by the previous pope as neopagans. Today Spaniards no longer celebrate the date of Columbus’s arrival in the New World as the Day of the Race, and Basques and Catalans can speak and promote their own languages without being arrested or ordered to “speak Christian” and the “language of empire.” In the last two decades, a country with a long history of emigration has become a primary destination for migrant workers from the Third World. As a signatory to the Schengen Agreement abolishing visa requirements within the European Union, Spain is charged with sealing off Europe’s southern frontier from immigrants from Africa. Yet each year thousands of illegal immigrants cross the Mediterranean in leaky boats known as
pateras
, looking for work in Spain or Europe. Most are arrested on arrival and turned back, but thousands have drowned making the attempt. Others have succeeded in entering the country illegally or have obtained increasingly elusive work permits, and their presence has turned many Spanish cities into cultural microcosms of the wider Mediterranean world.
pateras
, looking for work in Spain or Europe. Most are arrested on arrival and turned back, but thousands have drowned making the attempt. Others have succeeded in entering the country illegally or have obtained increasingly elusive work permits, and their presence has turned many Spanish cities into cultural microcosms of the wider Mediterranean world.
Many of these immigrants are Muslims from North Africa. After centuries of holy wars, purges, and expulsions, Islam is once again a significant presence in Spanish society, and the number of Muslims in Spain is now estimated at one million, just over 2 percent of the overall Spanish population. For the country of the Moorslayer and the Reconquista, where Catholicism was until recently a cornerstone of its national identity, Spain has in many ways adapted surprisingly well to the return of Islam. In 1992, Spanish Islam was officially recognized during the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of Granada, when the Spanish government signed a series of cooperation agreements with organizations representing Muslims, Jews, and Protestants. Another landmark moment in Spain’s reconciliation with the past occurred in 2003, when a new mosque was constructed in the Albaicín district of Granada directly opposite the Alhambra, following a campaign of nearly twenty years by a local Muslim.
Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of Spain’s evolution was its reaction to the horrific Madrid subway bombings in March 2004. Even when it became clear that this atrocious crime had been carried out by Muslims of North African origin, there was no significant anti-Muslim backlash, and the socialist government that came to power afterward actively resisted attempts to depict the atrocity within the “clash of civilizations” paradigm that has become so prevalent in recent years. In 2006, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero cosponsored the UN Alliance of Civilizations, whose mission statement warned that “classifying internally fluid and diverse societies along hard-and-fast lines of civilizations interferes with more illuminating ways of understanding questions of identity, motivation and behavior.”
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BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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