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Spains Scars From 800 Years Of "Moorish" Colonisation...(odd / Interesting Read) by RandomAfricanAm: 8:33am On Apr 12, 2013 |
Excerpt from... The Interference of al-Andalus Spain, Islam, and the West by Hishaam D. Aidi Of the African American volunteer fighters who heeded the call of the Communist International in 1936 and went to battle Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish civil war, most were galvanized not only by socialist and anti-imperial ideals but also by a Pan-Africanist consciousness that prized Islamic Spain as a glorious era when African civilization extended into Europe. Inspired by Spain’s Moorish past, these black fighters hoped to rescue tolerant, pluralist Spain from the gathering flames of European fascism. Many were thus stunned by Franco’s use of Moorish troops in his anticommunist “crusade,” by the rabid anti-Muslim racism of the Republican forces, and, more broadly, by how the Moor and Spain’s historic relations with the Islamic world figured so centrally in a civil war fought ostensibly for domestic reasons. African American soldiers were so appalled by the hatred of Moors on the Republican side, that some — especially those who were mistaken for Moroccans and shot at by fellow Republican troops — contemplated quitting and returning to the United States. Langston Hughes was particularly intrigued by the racial dynamics of Spain’s “Moorish question.” “I knew that Spain once belonged to the Moors, a colored people ranging from light dark to dark white,” he wrote. “Now the Moors have come again to Spain with the fascist armies as cannon fodder for Franco. But, on the loyalist side, there are many Negroes of various nationalities in the International Brigades. I want to write about both Moors and Negroes.”1 [b]The question of Moorish influence and the so-called Black Legend, regarding Spain’s oriental and African genealogy that had allegedly left the Spaniards a “sensual and inferior race,”2 have preoccupied Spanish intellectuals for centuries, pitting those who proudly or lamentingly concede Islamic influence in Spain and Hispanic civilization against those who deny such vestiges and, in the words of the novelist Juan Goytisolo, prefer to believe in a “clean-shaven Hispanic civilization” (“la afeitada civilizacion hispana”) free of Semitic influence. The memory of the “intrusive” Moorish presence lies deep in the Spanish psyche. And at critical moments in Spanish history — in 1898 with the collapse of the empire, in the 1930s during the Spanish civil war and its aftermath, in the late 1970s with the end of Francoism and the democratic transition, and in 1986, with Spain’s accession into the European Union — the country has gone through moments of painful self-examination about its “qualified Westernness,”3 pondering if it was the eight-hundred-year Muslim presence and Spain’s subsequent cultural and ethnic hybridity that kept the country mired in poverty and despotism as the rest of Europe progressed.[/b] The war on terror, the Iraq war, and the 3/11 attacks on Madrid, along with increasing clandestine migration from North Africa and disputes with Morocco over Spanish enclaves in that country’s northern coast, have revived what in Spain is historically called the “Oriental question”: what it means to be so close to the Arab world, and Europe’s “shield” against Islam. The attacks of 3/11 triggered much public agonizing about Spain’s being caught in the cross fire of a clash of civilizations (“in the eye of the hurricane,”4 as one journalist put it), between a strident, retaliatory Western nationalism that seeks to spread democracy in the Middle East and a militant Islamism that targets Spain for partaking in the war on Iraq and views the Iberian Peninsula as a long-lost Islamic dominion, to be regained the way Zionism repossessed Palestine millennia after its loss. [b]The international political situation after 9/11 and 3/11 has brusquely resurrected questions about Spain’s location between Africa, the Orient, and the Western world, with the epoch known as “al-Andalus” appearing at the center of discordant historiographies and “imaginative geographies.” The historian María Jesús Viguera Molins has noted the “conflictual” nature of the “historiography of al-Andalus,” with Spanish historians at different periods of their nation’s history either romanticizing or denigrating the Moorish era; the influence of contemporary politics on their writing was such that, as she put it, myth risks replacing history and the present risks displacing the past.5 Liberal historians often romanticized al-Andalus, while conservative historians saw the Muslim presence as an interruption, an “interference” in an essentially Spanish nation and course of history. Over the past century, imperialism, decolonization, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have polarized interpretations of al-Andalus even outside Spain, with Left-leaning writers across the West adulating the tolerance of Granada and the role of Moorish culture in sparking the Renaissance, but with conservatives seeing the Moors as “enemies of learning” whose insidious influence doomed Iberia (and southern Italy) to centuries of “cultural backwardness.”[/b] I begin this essay by discussing Spain’s centuries-old disquiet about the “Islamic interregnum” and show how at critical historical moments, intellectuals have revisited the Oriental question from varying ideological standpoints. Focusing on the twentieth century, I examine how the Spanish state has mobilized the country’s Islamic past and maneuvered the Spanish political and geographic imagination to use the country’s proximity to North Africa for different political purposes: to justify colonial incursions into Africa; to rally African and Arab states against the United States, Great Britain, and France after World War II; to demand membership in the European Union by underscoring Spain’s historic role keeping Muslim hordes off Western soil. The Spanish state’s mobilization of history and manipulation of geography richly illustrates Edward Said’s argument about the political power of “imaginative geographies” and how the hardy, seemingly ageless, entities we know as “Europe,” “the West,” and “the Orient” are, at bottom, “ideological confections” whose contents and borders are shaped by conflicting state interests and nationalisms.6 Since 9/11 and 3/11, Spain is again a country facing two directions: searching for a place in the Western world and trying to define its relationship to the Orient, a process that requires the country to reexamine its ties to its historic others — Jews and Moors, two peoples who now have their own states and nationalisms. After Franco’s death, the Spanish state began to reassess the dictatorship’s historic amity with the Arab world and hostility toward Israel, and its leaders are still trying to negotiate a place between American and European approaches to the Orient and their differing visions of the Jew’s and the Arab’s relationships to the West. The current crisis has fractured Spain politically, producing different political blocs, each with a different vision of the country’s position in the West, its relationship with the Orient, and of the Muslim’s and Jew’s places within the Spanish nation. Hughes’s depiction of Spain as an ideological battleground and a country with profound racial and cultural anxieties holds true seven decades hence. Al-Andalus and the Rise of the West The dispute over Moorish influence in Spain touches not only on the issue of Islam in the formation of modern Spain but on broader, equally uncomfortable questions of Spain’s position in Europe and the role of Islamic Spain in the formation of Europe and the rise of Western civilization. Did Andalusia, as claimed by many historians, and Arab and Muslim nationalists, serve as a conveyer of knowledge from the classical worlds of Islam and ancient Greece to Europe above the Pyrenees? Was Islamic Spain an era of cultural efflorescence that helped spark the Renaissance? Historians have bitterly contested this perspective, maintaining that Islamic Spain was neither as tolerant nor as oriental as its champions claim, nor did it have the impregnating cultural influence on the rest of Europe. The Western philosophers who developed the idea of “Europe” drew a continuous line from ancient Greece through Rome right up to the Renaissance, largely ignoring the role of the Judeo- Islamic centers of learning in Andalusia or Sicily that had translated and contributed to the classical heritage “rediscovered” by these modern thinkers. The ascending Christian Europe was defining itself against the Orient, principally the Arab-Muslim world, and European nationalists were not going to acknowledge a cultural debt to their main adversary. Spain, which had been occupied by Muslims, has been the least willing to acknowledge any substantive Islamic cultural influence. But the possibility of “cultural borrowing” and “reactive adaptation” that may have occurred between 711 and 1609,7 after which the remaining Moriscos of Alpujarras were expelled, has bedeviled Spanish historians for centuries. If between the eighth and eleventh centuries historians portrayed “the Moor” as invariably brutal and menacing, writers from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries began to romanticize the Islamic epoch and produce a literature of “Maurophilia.”8 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Spanish historians began to acknowledge the achievements of Islamic Spain, but insisted that this was the work of people who may have been outwardly oriental but were still ethnically and biologically “Spanish”; Spain, to these scholars, was the product of an unbroken cultural continuity whose origins could be traced back as far as the ancient Celtiberian past. The debate about the Orient’s role in Spain’s formation has been most personified by the acrimonious exchange between the historians Américo Castro and Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz. Castro celebrated Spain’s mixed ancestry, arguing that Spanish cultural identity arose in the Middle Ages through the symbiosis of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian elements; Sanchez-Albornoz saw Muslim Spain as an “interruption” to an eternal “Spanish” continuum. Castro argued, in his influential España en su historia, written in exile after Spain’s fall to the fascists, that Spain was not an “eternal” entity but one that came into being after the Muslim invasion of 711 and the interaction of what he called the “three castes” — Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Castro celebrated Spain’s hybridity, emphasizing that Andalusia’s tricultural heritage had influenced figures like Cervantes and, in crossing the Pyrenees, affected the thought of numerous European philosophers.9 In España, un enigma historico, Sanchez-Albornoz replied to Castro that the latter had overstated the impact and misunderstood the nature of the contact between Muslims and Christians, which was fundamentally conflictive and not amenable to positive and creative cultural exchange. He maintained that most of the components of “Spanish” culture are either idiosyncratic or consist of Roman, Gothic, and elements of non- Semitic provenance. [b]If Castro viewed 711 as momentous in the birth The Interference of al-Andalus 71 of Spain’s hybridity, Sanchez-Albornoz saw the Moorish invasion as a national disaster and the principal cause of his homeland’s entrapment in despotism and economic backwardness. He argued that twelve centuries have gone by, and Spain has still not been able to overcome that “tragic” and “fateful” moment of 711. The prolonged military struggle against Islam had drained Spain’s economy and held the country back from the rest of Europe: “Slow-witted, barbaric Africa . . . twisted and distorted the future fate of Iberia, and took it down a path, which cost Spain dear.”10 Sanchez-Albornoz insisted, though, somewhat contradictorily that Islam affected but did not modify Spain; his homeland must not be viewed as a nation with a “hereditary defect,” the “base offspring of a corrupt father,” “an offshoot of Islam,” or “diseased because of an Oriental virus.” Spain is in fact a member of Europe, and in the Middle Ages created and conveyed a vibrant civilization to the rest of Europe, but its sacrificing to shield Europe from the onslaughts of Islam and Africa left it an intolerant and impoverished society.11[/b] Curiously, both Castro and Sanchez-Albornoz saw Spanish imperialism as a response to Islamic expansionism, if not a direct Islamic influence. Castro argued that the myth of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor killer) and his shrine in Compostela, which played a crucial ideological role in the Reconquista of Spain and the conquest of the New World, was itself an Islamic influence, in that it essentially mimicked the idea of a “warrior-prophet” like Muhammad with a shrine and pilgrimage center like Mecca. Castro underlines the importance of this myth in the dialogue between Christian Spain and Europe beyond the Pyrenees, and in the emergence of a European identity, since all over Western Europe Santiago’s shrine was seen as a Christian Mecca (“to face the Mohammedan Kaaba”) and led to the forging of a common European self against a common adversary.12 These arguments about Spanish militarism being a necessary response to jihad, the Spanish Inquisition as a “necessary evil,” the cult of Santiago as the patron saint of “fortress Spain,” and Spain as protector of Europe against Islam have been made by different Spanish leaders in varying political contexts, from Franco’s forays into Morocco to Spain’s participation in the Iraq war. Franco and the Colonial Imagination [b]The Spanish-American War of 1898 and the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines at a time when European powers were seizing territories in Africa had profound political repercussions in Spain and generated much agonizing about the country’s lesser position in Europe. After 1898 Spain would shift its attention to the European front, and to Africa where it would attempt to carve out a small empire to make up for its lost possessions in the Caribbean, beginning a long-standing practice of trying to dominate North Africa to gain acceptance in the West. The liberal prime minister Conde de Romanones put it bluntly in his memoirs, “Morocco was for Spain her last chance to keep her position in Europe.”13 Joaquin Costa, a noted “Africanist,” as government experts on North Africa were called, and one of the strongest proponents of regeneracionismo, post- 1898 economic and political regeneration, would explain the 1898 defeat and loss of empire in terms of the Black Legend (“the Africa that has invaded us”), yet still argue that Spain should lay claim to some territory in Africa, since colonizing that continent, specifically Morocco, was crucial to his nation’s return to glory.14 Throughout the twentieth century, Spain would try to establish control over Morocco — or at least over the frontier with Morocco — to gain acceptance in Europe, where, paradoxically, it was excluded and seen as backward because of its historic ties to North Africa.[/b] When Miguel Primo de Rivera became leader of Spain in 1923, the anticolonial struggle in northern Morocco was raging, and the “Moroccan question” was one of the most pressing and divisive political issues. Franco, however, adamantly opposed a withdrawal from Morocco and, during the Spanish civil war, would oddly make Spain’s Islamic past and colonial presence in Morocco central to the fascist cause against the “infidel” Republicans. Franco, who had learned Arabic while crushing the Moroccan rebellion in 1921, would lead tens of thousands of Moroccan mercenaries (“tropas mulatas”) in what the generalissimo described as his crusade against the “Red, atheist Republic.” Franco defended the use of Moroccan troops, saying the fascist side was defending Christian values in an alliance with Muslim believers against the “godless” communists. Moorish troops were in fact often baptized before going into battle. If the fascists used the Moroccans both as cannon fodder and as psychological weapons, the Republicans, in turn, revived the centuries-old cry of “Moros en la costa!” (“Moors on the Coast!”), warning of the savage, sexually rapacious Moorish invaders “awaited by virgins in paradise” and describing their side as defenders of Europe against el Oriente.15 |
Re: Spains Scars From 800 Years Of "Moorish" Colonisation...(odd / Interesting Read) by Nobody: 3:17am On Nov 12, 2013 |
Bump. 1 Like |
Re: Spains Scars From 800 Years Of "Moorish" Colonisation...(odd / Interesting Read) by RandomAfricanAm: 7:06pm On Nov 12, 2013 |
You have good taste in threads . If your up for a currently on going interesting read I suggest you try https://www.nairaland.com/1501884/what-does-igbo-notion-personal#19487182 . That said maybe I should tend to this topic with pictures of moors in spain along with those weird festivals the Spanish have each year where they dress up in black face(not all of them) to commemorate kicking out the moors. [size=24pt] Fiesta de Moros y Cristianos [/size] [img]http://2.bp..com/-vs6LZ-cYCX0/TxBgW52YG-I/AAAAAAAABLg/5V_qO1Q-p4M/s1600/DSC_0061+copia.jpg[/img] [img]http://fiestas.edreams.es/images/2009/02/moros-y-cristianos-alcoy1-420x315.jpg[/img] [size=24pt] V.S [/size] [img]http://www.xn--espaaescultura-tnb.es/export/sites/cultura/multimedia/galerias/propuestas_culturales/moros_cristianos_alcoy_t0300884.jpg_1306973099.jpg[/img] The Moors' last sigh Slaughter by the sea By CHRIS WRIGHT | July 7, 2011 On a recent Saturday night, as Americans prepared for fireworks in celebration of a long-ago battle for independence, the Spanish seaside town of Moraira was gearing up for a holy war. It took place, as always, on the town's main beach, and it involved women and children, as well as bare-chested men. As tourists, we headed down to watch the Christians kick the hell out of the Muslim invaders — again. Each year, communities up and down Spain's Costa Blanca hold what they call Fiesta de Moros y Cristianos — a spirited, multi-day celebration of the Reconquista. For locals, the story is a familiar one, if not strictly historically faithful: Muslims invade Spain in the early hours of the eighth century; in 1492, the Spanish kick the troublemakers out. In reality, the Moorish period was an age of art, science, and religious tolerance in Spain, but that doesn't matter. It's the bloody expulsion that Moraira's celebrants are interested in. The occasion is marked with parades, dancing, and the wholesale purchase of fake blood. This year's rehashing of the story began when a rabble of grumpy-looking Moors overran a small hill near the beach. The Christians didn't respond in earnest until the following evening, when they filed onto the sand carrying banners and swords, kitted out in period costume, applauded by the inhabitants of a temporary bleacher. The opposing armies hollered at each other for a while, in Spanish, an exchange that seemed to amount to: "Get off our hill!" "No!" At one point, a marauding horseman rode around setting fire to market stalls, only the stalls wouldn't catch, and the marauding devolved into frustrated fiddling, the kind you see over an uncooperative barbecue grill. After more shouting, the combatants began firing fake guns at each other, the noise of which caused some of the children in the audience to weep. The kids' discomfort intensified as a man paraded around with another man's head on a pike. It wasn't a real head, but try telling that to a two-year-old. Soon, corpses littered the ground. Never mind that one of the dead could be seen checking his watch, it was an unsettling spectacle, and not only for the pre-schoolers. "Yes, um, well," remarked a middle-aged woman named Jan, from Chicago, who was seated in the front row. "I'm not sure we'd see anything like this at home." When the subject of American Civil War re-enactments was raised, the woman frowned and said something about "the whole 9/11 thing," before being drowned out by another volley of gunfire. What Jan-from-Chicago seemed to be getting at was this: in her part of the world, the notion of Christian armies beating the bejesus out of Muslim armies has uncomfortable political connotations. Not so for a young local man named Tomas, who came to watch the battle from the nearby town of Benissa. "This is not politics," he said. "It is historical." I didn't stay to watch the end of the fight. My own little girl appeared to have been slightly traumatized by the sight of the dripping, disembodied head, and I already knew how it ended. As we walked away, fireworks streaked into the sky, crackling triumphantly. The small hill had been retaken. Mission accomplished. Moros y Cristianos (Spanish: [ˈmoɾos i kɾisˈtjanos]) or Moros i Cristians (Valencian: [ˈmɔɾoz i kɾistiˈans]) literally in English Moors and Christians, is a set of festival activities which are celebrated in many towns and cities of Spain, mainly in the southern Valencian Community. According to popular tradition the festivals commemorate the battles, combats and fights between Moors (or Muslims) and Christians during the period known as Reconquista (from the 8th century through the 15th century). The festivals represent the capture of the city by the Moors and the subsequent Christian reconquest. The people that take part in the festival are usually enlisted in filaes or comparsas (companies that represent the Christian or Moor legions). The festivals last for several days, and feature parades with bombastic costumes loosely inspired by Medieval fashion. Christians wear fur, metallic helmets, and armor, fire loud arquebuses, and ride horses. In contrast, Moors wear ancient Arab costumes, carry scimitars, and ride real camels or elephants. The festival develops among shots of gunpowder, medieval music, and fireworks, and ends with the Christians winning a simulated battle around a castle. -Wikipedia |
Re: Spains Scars From 800 Years Of "Moorish" Colonisation...(odd / Interesting Read) by tpiander: 4:30pm On Sep 10, 2015 |
Green and white, really? Lord have mercy. |
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