Posted on 11/14/2003 4:53:34 PM PST by blam
Spain forced to face past 'evil' of expelling Moors
(Filed: 15/11/2003)
Very little has changed in Spanish attitudes towards the non-Christian, non-European aspects of its heritage, writes Isambard Wilkinson
Leaning against a farm outbuilding with his large, swarthy hands jammed into the tops of his trouser pockets, Jose Antonio Lopez was disgusted.
"No! For God's sake!" he exploded at the suggestion that he could be descended from North African Moors, despite his dark olive complexion. "We did not have any moro in the family. We drove them all out centuries ago."
The farmer's outright denial of a mixed or mestizaje past is typical of the majority Spaniard view of the non-Christian, non-European aspects of Spain's heritage.
While the architectural jewels of Islamic Cordoba and Granada are claimed for Spain, blood ties with its Moorish past have always, albeit sometimes to avoid the attentions of the Inquisition, been assiduously covered up. But now a new debate has opened over the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from the peninsula that began in 1492, prompted by the discovery and publication of a pamphlet by one of Spain's great intellectuals, Gregorio Maranon, who died in 1960.
The 49-page paper, found behind some books in the author's house, already typed and hand-corrected, argues that, after nearly eight centuries of fighting, intermarriage and conversion in Iberia, the Muslims' expulsion "was an evil, but a necessary evil, because it was better than the existence and growth within the Spanish state of a foreign and hostile people".
Maranon, a polymath who wrote scores of books on subjects ranging from rheumatism to the Iberian soul, is revered as one of the great Spanish intellectuals of the 20th century and his views have re-ignited the debate.
Newspaper columns are full of the issue and next week a panel of leading historians will discuss the high level of integration between Christians and the moriscos, Spanish Muslims.
The debate was given added poignancy this week when the Moroccan ambassador to Spain, Abdesalam Baraka, accused the Spanish authorities and media of "enjoying and fomenting hatred towards 'the Moor'." He called for an end to a primitive, centuries-old hatred.
At the beginning of the 11th century, three quarters of Spain's population was Muslim but, as soon as Ferdinand and Isabella completed the reconquest of the country for Christianity, the Muslims were ordered out. Since then the Moor "bogeyman" has remained deep in Spain's collective psyche.
Just two years ago it cast its shadow over the "invasion" of the tiny Parsley Island by a handful of Moroccan gendarmes, who provoked a full special forces operation, backed by four frigates and two submarines, to remove them. Much of the media coverage was in language reminiscent of the old rivalry.
By contrast, although the Sefarad, Spain's Jewry, were also expelled and for 400 years there was no Jewish community in the country, rancour between Jews and Christians has largely dissipated. In 1992 King Juan Carlos wore a yarmulka to attend a service of reconciliation in a synagogue.
Opinion polls conducted by the state-run CIS and Elcano Institute think-tank repeatedly show that Spaniards regard North Africans as "violent" and "untrustworthy".
As many as 71 per cent of them say of all foreigners they meet Moroccans "arouse the most animosity".
About a quarter of Spaniards would not like to live in the same block of flats as a "Moor".
Mustapha El Mrabet, the head of an immigrants' association in Madrid, said: "Very little has changed in Spanish attitudes towards us for centuries.
"Now they want to replace us with Latin Americans, because they are Catholic, speak Spanish and, they say, have Spanish blood in their veins. They deny their past. Wherever we look we see Arabic names. 'Madrid' itself derives from the Arab Majerit. Even the cathedral, the Almudena, has an Arabic name."
Not far from Mr Lopez's farm lie the ancient walls of Toledo, for 300 years an important centre of an Islamic kingdom.
Toledo's past is romanticised as the "City of Three Cultures", a place where learned Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together in a harmonious pursuit of knowledge with only the odd massacre and purge.
But Mr Lopez chooses to emphasise his Catholic credentials. He pointed to a pig sniffing among some rubbish in the farmyard.
"Next month that pig will be killed in the matanza," he said proudly.
The matanza, literally "the slaughter", is an old custom dating from the days of Islamic rule. It separated the Christian Spaniards from their Muslim conquerors. After 1492, it became an overt signal that one was not a closet Muslim or Jew.
Hate to argue with the great man, but there is nothing evil about expelling savages to save your country from being subjugated by them. Nothing evil at all.
The Basque were the 'original' settlers. They were already there when everyone else arrived.
to be continued........
In 1492 those Jews and Muslims who weren't willing to convert to Christianity were expelled. That doesn't seem to me to be so unreasonable a solution, given that, in that time, one's national identity was closely tied to one's religious faith.
Perhaps with the qualification of no major outside assistance, otherwise you'd have to include the Hungarians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians and Greeks.
Galicia in the NW served as a launchpad for an invading Cornish army to begin an entirely different Conquest.
Substantial numbers of French knights adhered to the cause of Carvajal, Castile and Leone over the several centuries it took to achieve dominance, but the "native" people in the South did nothing other than become good Moslems!
Then, as the Reconquista was wrapped up, most of the Moslems and most of the Jews then in Spain who had not already become Christians, did so.
There really wasn't any mass explulsion of any kind. People were given a choice and took it.
... and just how did the Muslims come to be in Iberia and what had happened to the Christian who were there first?
"The basic problem of the moriscos was a problem of integration. The moriscos remained a class apart, with their own language and religion and a way of life directed by Islamic law. In Aragon and Valencia, descendants of those who had submitted to forced conversion, they were a geniune enclave of Islam within Spainm resistant to christianisation and hispanisation, with their own leaders and upper class, their rich and their poor, all equally immune to integration. And as their spiritual home was outside Spain so, it was suspected, was their political allegiance.....
"Muslim Spain was south-eastern Spain. It was here that the real danger was seen to lie. The rapid growth of moriscos of Valencia and Aragon threatened to soon...tip the balance in favor of Islam.
"...on 9 April 1609 it was decided to expel the moriscos from the whole of Spain, beining with Valencia. It was here, as has been seen, that the problem of the moriscos was considered most acute, because of their numbers, their concentration in mountain fastness, their situtation near a coast-line easily accessible from North Africa. It was logical to expel them first, before they organized...or called in outside help...
"...While the diligence and efficiency of the moriscos are not in doubt, it is a myth that they were the only productive classes in Spain; most of the trades and occupations in which they (moriscos) specialized, including irrigation, were also widely practiced by Sparniards....If we are to judge by wage and price levels in those sectors of the economy where the moriscos had been most productive, the expulsion had little material consequences..."
Hmmm... that sounds like what's happening in AmericaTODAY !!!
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