History points finger at revenge for lost Moor kingdom

Telegraph ^ | Filed: 13/03/2004) | Isambard Wilkinson in Madrid

[Eurotwit]

New forensic evidence on the bombings has raised an uncomfortable question for Spaniards. Is Osama bin Laden dreaming of exacting revenge for the loss of Al-Andalus, the ancient Moorish kingdom in Iberia?

A group close to bin Laden's al-Qa'eda network, the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, sent a message to a London-based Arabic newspaper explaining the reasons for attacking Spain.

"This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader and America's ally in its war against Islam," the statement said.

While the authentiticy of the message is open to doubt, there is no question that it reflects the thinking of Islamists, who hold that any land which has once been part of the Muslim community should forever remain under Muslim rule.

At the beginning of the 11th century, three quarters of Spain's population was Muslim but, as soon as the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed the reconquest of the country for Christianity, the Muslims were ordered out.

The humiliation has never been forgotten in the Arab world.

The sense of hurt has grown since Spain, for decades a friend of the Arab world, backed the US-led war on Iraq, despite vast domestic opposition.

A dozen al-Qa'eda-linked suspected terrorists have been arrested in Spain from among its burgeoning community from North Africa.

Bin Laden has identified Spain as a worthy target, and the "settling of old accounts" will send a tingle down many an old Spaniard's spine. Bin Laden gave warning that Spain would be singled out for attack in a taped message released last October through al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel.

He said Spain would be among six nations considered "special" targets for its role in the Iraq war. Bin Laden has also spoken of Al-Andalus, regarded with nostalgia by Islamists as the halcyon age of Muslim power and artistic achievement.

The tale of the "Moor's last sigh" is recounted to epitomise the loss of one of the Islamic world's great jewels.

When King Boabdil fled the city of Granada, the last bastion of Moorish rule, he looked back and wept. His mother chided him with words that have sent a painful message down through the ages to Muslims: "Do not weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man."

Moorish armies from North Africa conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century and transformed the region into an integral part of the Muslim umma, or nation.

The year 1492, when Granada was ceded to Ferdinand and Isabella, is a talismanic date for some Islamist scholars who consider it as the beginning of the decline of the Muslim world which continues to this day.

Most Europeans see the years of Islamic rule in Spain as a period of scholarship, leisured lifestyle and inspired architecture, though Islamists would focus on the vibrancy of the faith which allowed the Muslim armies to force their way deep into Christendom.

The jewels of Islamic Cordoba and Granada are still claimed by some who resent the expulsion of the Muslims from the peninsula. None of this proves that bin Laden was behind the bomb attacks on Thursday. An emotional attachment to a place does not automatically mean readiness to blow up innocent commuters.

If there is an Islamic connection, it may owe more to the availability of active cells and explosives.

But there is no doubt that the mere suggestion of an Islamist connection has sent a shudder through Spaniards.

Last year after a wait of more than 500 years, Spanish Muslims succeeded in building a mosque in the shadow of the Alhambra, once the symbol of Islamic power in Europe.

Perhaps Thursday's attacks were another return to the past, in this case a revival of Spain's ancient animosities.

[DeuceTraveler]

"Most Europeans see the years of Islamic rule in Spain as a period of scholarship, leisured lifestyle and inspired architecture"

Love the European media. It was also a period where Christian churches were being destroyed, France and northern Spain was under constant threat of invasion, Christian people were treated as third class citizens while jews also were second to the Moors, and people could be grabbed and made slaves of such as many women forced into harems.

[FITZ]

Why sadly? The Spaniards learned after 700 years what needed to be done about Muslims ---- I'm sure they were pretty glad to be rid of them.

[Patton@Bastogne]

.


Eurotwit,


Thanks for the post.


One quote stands out :

"Islamists, who hold that any land which has once been part of the Muslim community should forever remain under Muslim rule".

What a quaint idea. I suppose that someone should tell that to the Babylonians, Druids, Aztecs, Greeks, and Romans ...

Of course, that Islamic philosophy is light-years beyond the Western Europeans' idea of "Manifest Destiny", since the Islamists have tied their "Moon God" Ali into the equation ...


Patton@Bastogne
Free Republic member since 1998



.

[CatoRenasci]

Actually, no. The Inquisition is notorious not for its retaliation against moslems, but for its mistreatment of Christians deemed "heretical" and Jews.

No one who was not raised as a devout Roman Catholic can but shudder at the very mention of the Inquisition. Whatever success it may have had, the ill-will the Inquisition engendered remains to this day in the hostility to Roman Catholicism one finds in so many countries with protestant traditions, even this one.

[quadrant]

Muslins used to rule what is now Hungary and the Crimea. No doubt Islam will get around to claiming those areas as well.

[JimRed]

An emotional attachment to a place does not automatically mean readiness to blow up innocent commuters.

Tell that to the Palestinians.

[Verginius Rufus]

The Muslims ruled southern France for a while in the 8th century...maybe Chirac should think about giving it back to them, to assuage their anger over the schoolgirls wearing scarves controversy.

Sicily was also under Muslim rule for a period.

In Ivo Andric's novel The Bridge on the Drina, there's an inn in the town of Visegrad (Bosnia) which is maintained by income from properties in Hungary; after the Turks lose Hungary to the Habsburgs, the inn falls into ruin.

[SunkenCiv]

No surprise, this. Moslems invaded Spain (the cover story was an "invitation") and had to be evicted by force. But, Europe isn't the US. Tossing out or imprisoning members of a violent group -- and banning all of their activities -- is still politically acceptable in Europe.

Islam isn't a religion, it's a fascist political movement. Always has been. It's time to crack down on it in the US. Past time, in fact.

[SunkenCiv]

The humiliation has never been forgotten in the Arab world.

Except in places where the Arab Christian population was slaughtered by the Moslems. The dead Christian Arabs have forgotten all about it.

[SauronOfMordor]

The year 1492, when Granada was ceded to Ferdinand and Isabella, is a talismanic date for some Islamist scholars who consider it as the beginning of the decline of the Muslim world which continues to this day.

Most Europeans see the years of Islamic rule in Spain as a period of scholarship, leisured lifestyle and inspired architecture, though Islamists would focus on the vibrancy of the faith which allowed the Muslim armies to force their way deep into Christendom.

Islam is necessarily an expansionist ideology. To survive, and maintain a "leisured lifestyle", they need to maintain a steady inflow of loot and slaves through conquest, piracy, and pillage.

As soon as Islam's expansion was stopped, and Muslims had to actually PRODUCE what they were to consume, Islam went into decline

[Eurotwit]

Spain Forced To Face Past 'Evil' Of Expelling Moors
The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 11-15-2003 | Isambard Wilkinson


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.

[SauronOfMordor]

Kind of puts the Spanish Inquisition in a different light, doesn't it?

I believe the appropriate term is "Payback's a b----, ain't it?"

[freedumb2003]

Weren't the Celts run out of pretty much everywhere?

Larry Bird, Kevin Kevin McHale, Robert Parish -- man, that was the ugliest team to ever step foot on a court. No wonder they were run out of town (well, by the Lakers mostly)

[wi jd]

"It's not the Moops, you idiot. Its the Moors." [/Bubbleboy]

No, I'm sorry. The card says "The Moops."

[bwteim]

[Savage Beast]

The Spanish are now paying for all those siestas during history class, and the rest of the Europeans are about to learn that, as George Santayana observed, if you flunk history, you have to go through the whole mess again. It's much easier in the long run to do your homework and pay attention. But how can you expect these people to remember the past? They can't even remember what Santayana said about it.

[Bismarck]

...and it is time for the Spaniards to strike back. Investigating mosques, tracking down Muslims and starting to detain their religious leaders. Furthermore I'd welcome the eventual closure of these mosques and related cultural centers. Mohamnmed wants to play tough? Then have Mohammed suffer!

[BabsC]

The Jews should broadcast the entire history of their treatment at the hands of the islamonihilists.

And the Hindus who had/have it as bad or worse. That religion is pretty provocative and picturesque....probably really scared the hell out of those beduin tribesmen when they first came across them.

[sheik yerbouty]

They should be put down..They are rabid creatures who should be sent to the devil.

[SunkenCiv]

vanmorrison's posts on FR.