Arab Spain

Muslims need first of all to insist before the world that the Iberian peninsula (Jazirat al‑Andalus) flourished, culturally speaking, under Islam. Those nine Islamic centuries (711‑1610) were glorious, and they made the rest of Europe look pale and barbarous by comparison. 

The southern portion of Spain that is still called Andalusia remains as al‑Firdaws al‑Mafqud or `Paradise Lost' in the North African imagina tion, for Arab Spain was the source of their finest forms in art, letters and music, al‑ 'adab al‑'andalusi as this is still known and admired through out the Arab world. 

At the same time, present‑day Spaniards and Latin Americans have an uneasy conscience about the genocide and devastation that the Catholic Inquisition brought upon Spanish Muslims and indeed upon the Hispanic mind itself; even modern liberal Spaniards or Portuguese know surprisingly little about this heritage if they have read only their own history books, though the monuments built by the Andalusian Muslims, or the captiveMudejar or Mudajjan workmen who lived after them, exist all around them. 

This lack of knowledge is a fact not only in Spain and Portugal themselves, but also from Mexico to Chile in Latin America. Ask any contemporary person who speaks Portuguese or Spanish about what the Islamic past means in his culture, and he will give you only vague and prejudiced clichés about the "Moors", as modern Spanish and European textbooks still call the Spanish Muslims. 

A personal friend of mine from Malaga on the Mediterranean coast, which was founded and named not by the Arabs, but by the Phoenicians hundreds of years before them, did not know much about the history of his own city until I got him interested in it. Of course events like the seizure of Malaga by the Castilians in the year 1487 and the perfidy of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, towards its disarmed Muslim citizens who had surrendered to their mercy, do not make pleasant reading when contemporary civil rights are mentioned. They gave up their wealth as ransom, and yet were sold as slaves. 

Cordoba and Seville were likewise cruelly depopulated and plun dered when the northern Spaniards seized them in 1236 and 1248 respectively. Yet these cities plus Granada (Qurtuba, Ishbiliyya and Gharnata in Arabic), have been used by Chrysler, General Motors and Ford to name their most recent cars, reminding us of the exquisite craftsmanship for which the Andalusian Muslims were known, just as Toledo or Damascene swords are similarly famous. 

Islamic Spain and Portugal had great thinkers too like Ibn Hazm, the first student of comparative religion in Europe, who wrote per ceptively on love, or Ibn Tufayl, the Muwahhid physician and minister of state who originated the tale of Robinson Crusoe in Morocco and Spain seven centuries before Defoe did so in England; and his brilliant student Ibn Rushd or "Averroes" in the barbarian rendering of his name, who revived the study of Aristotle in the late XII century only a few decades before the rise of universities like Paris and Oxford in Western Europe.

The Spanish‑Tunisian philosopher Ibn Khaldun founded the science of sociology and the philosophy of history long before the West picked them up through Vico and Saint‑Simon, or now with Spengler and Toynbee, because the Tunisian watched the social and political unrest around the Mediterranean at first hand, and he knew Peter the Cruel of Castile in Seville where his family house: still stood a mere century after their expulsion, as well as Tamerlane in Damascus. 

Poets like Ibn Zaydun of Cordoba and King Muctamid of Silves and Seville sung as beautifully about love and misfortune as any poet during the European romantic movement. All these men of letters were Andalusian Muslims whose contribution to world culture needs study and revival. 

Thus any approach by contemporary Muslims from other countries to Ibero‑America should be made with the object of recovering this neglected heritage, and awakening interest in it that must be based on genuine research and knowledge and not on platitudes reflecting pre judice and fairy tales. The Alhambra was a magnificent complex of public buildings; but it was not the whole of Andalusia; it was a dying reflection from one small southern kingdom that for two and a half centuries valiantly resisted the northern mountaineers from Castile and Aragon. 

This Islamic heritage should thus be made real to the citizens of the Hispanic and Lusitanian countries today; but first it must become just as real to educated Muslims elsewhere in the world. Some Egyptian, Pakistani, Tunisian and Moroccan scholars have done research on this subject but more investigation and writing needs to be promoted. There is a group of Egyptians like `Abdullah Enan and Dr. Husayn Mu'nis, Moroccan professors like `Abdullah Genoun and Muhhammad Dawd, and the late Professor `Uthman Ka’ak of Tunisia who have made these studies. 

Moreover the information gathered must be publicized widely in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English and French. The Western myth that Arabs and Muslims are inferior, and should be called "Moors" and other contemptuous terms, must be laid to rest. 

The first place to start must be with reliable Portuguese and Spanish versions of the Qur'an itself, the basic document for under  standing the ethical system which prevails from Iberia and Morocco on the Atlantic coast through to Indonesia on the Pacific. A few translations exist today, and they are wretched; they have been carried out using no native Iberian Muslim sources at all, but only the usual carping European ones. 

There is a great potential wealth too in Aljamiado or Portuguese, Spanish and Aragonese ajamiyyah literature which we should revive, as well as increase discussion and commentary on it. Contemporary Western scholars dismiss it as having "only linguistic interest", which is too often its spiritual death in academic circles. Yet several Aljamiado Qur'ans are waiting to be published in the Escorial library in the moun tains northwest of Madrid and in the National Library in the Spanish capital. Portuguese universities and archives likewise are rich in these documents.

Thus we need to prepare and publish adequate texts on Spain, on the religion of Islam itself, and on the history and culture of the vast Islamic world from Spain and Portugal themselves as far West as Mexico and the Philippines, and as far south as Chile and Argentina. We must remember that there are twenty‑odd countries that need to be studied, one by one, and that each has its own set of laws; but at the same time, how their own ignorance leads them back to the same circumstances based on the cruel expulsion of Islam and the Spanish Muslims from the Iberian peninsula. Today there is no place in southern Spain, for instance, where a pious Muslim can pray freely. Arab tourists should demand this right quietly but firmly from the Spanish authorities. 

The first Muslims who arrived in the New World may have been Muslim sailors from Lisbon in modern Portugal according to the Moroccan geographer al‑'Idrist Maybe some North Africans followed them, although Moroccan harbours have never been known for their adventurous seamen. The name of "Antillia" appears for a distant island on al‑'Idrisi's XII‑century map of the Atlantic, and this fact is impressive, as was the Moroccan's knowledge of even the far Indian Ocean where Sindbad sailed, all research that he had carried on from his study in the Mediterranean island of Sicily where he worked. 

At the same time there are frescos in a temple in Chichenitza on the Yucatan peninsula off eastern Mexico dating from before the year 1002 which show non‑Mayan sailors and warriors who have been taken prisoner in a sea battle. Bananas and peanuts are said to have travelled in this way to and from America even before Columbus.

Thus I recommend that Arab seafaring journals and archives should be investigated carefully; here is where the new universities in the Near East and Ibero‑America can do some of their research 

Then came the Iberian colonial period overseas, which might be called the American "middle ages". The methods which the Castilians and Aragonese used in conquering Andalusia were put to use in America where they made serfs of the Indians, the Aztecs in Mexico, the Mayas in Central America, the Chibchas in Colombia, and the Incas in Peru, by establishing what they called encomiendas or `stewardships' over them for the benefit of the conquerors, just as the vanquished Muslim artisans had been inserted in Catholic Spain. 

Some of these Muslim workmen, the so‑called "Mudejars", plus their Morisco brothers who were unwilling converts to Christianity, also crossed the Atlantic. We do not know who these workmen were, for much of this travel was clandestine and done under assumed and non‑Islamic names. Generally the immigrants were not allowed to bring their wives along with them; yet nonetheless they formed the basic population of Muslims in the New World, especially the artisan classes in the Caribbean and Andean countries. Wollofs from Senegal were shipped as soldiers to Chile; Mandingos from Mali and Fulani from the great savannas of West Africa also came to other countries. 

Any Muslims who arrived in Mexico, for instance, were eventually absorbed into that society, where they mixed with native Indians rather than with Spaniards of Creoles. Estevanico Dorantes was a Moroccan soldier who became an officer in the Spanish army and led an expedition into what is now New Mexico and Arizona m 1579. Belelcazar did the same in Ecuador and southern Colombia, founding the city of Popayan in the latter country. 

Colonial society was fluid, though oppressive; but since the cities were large, these forced immigrants had to settle down there, and they eventually disappeared. The same thing happened in Cuba, in Colombia (or New Granada as it was then called), in Venezuela and the Andean countries of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia (or Upper Peru) where there were silver mines and a concentration of urban wealth that demanded fine craftsmanship. Personally I need to know more about these aspects of Brazilian life. 

These skilled workmen were carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, tile workers in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The Mexico City council, after many Spanish Muslims and Moriscos were enslaved and shipped to the colonies abroad, passed ordinances in the early XVII century to deny them guild privileges. 

Their workmanship can be seen today in Guatemala, not only in the colonial buildings there, but also in modern structures which have adopted their style, especially in tiles on the floors and walls, in metal grillwork, both wrought‑iron, brass and copper, and in fine cabinet making. Church ceilings were built in Colombia and Mexico by Mudejar workmen who adapted their careful carpentry to protect these build ings against the danger from earthquakes. Peruvian cities have wooden balconies before the windows like those you can see along the Red Sea coast and the Persian Gulf, all designed to catch a breeze through their lattices. Ornamental doors made in Mudejar style are to be found in the mining towns of Bolivia. 

Thus Islamic art and Muslim workmen were busy even during the time of the cruel Spanish colony, for as that great genocide, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros, once said: "They lack Our faith, but we lack their works." For this reason even the intolerant Catholic church transported many of these artisans to decorate their buildings in the Portuguese and Spanish overseas colonies.

These workmen came without their wives, as has been said, and so they intermarried into local proletarian families; their Muslim identity was eventually lost, but their handicraft lives on in the metal grills, tiles and latticework of colonial and later buildings, as any visitor to Latin America can tell you. Today the danger is that any new immi grants to these countries may become nominal Muslims, as is their fate in North America too: Caracas is said to have as many as 30,000 Muslims, mostly of Arab ancestry, yet they have as yet built themselves no mosque. 

How can they be awakened to a consciousness of this spiritual need? They must help themselves first before any governmental or educational agency can assist them. 

The Black people living around Baia in Northeastern Brazil and in the West Indies need to recognize the truly Islamic features to be found in their present society. In Trinidad a Black who is also a Muslim is called a Mandingo, showing that his ancestors came originally from Mali or Gambia in West Africa. There is now a mosque on Dutch island of Curacao off the Venezuelan coast, but the Muslims there are largely East Indian and Arab in origin. Others live in Demerara in Guyana and in Barbados, where they have two places of worship. 

Yet in Surinam the qiblahs in the mosques face West as they do in Indonesia from which these Muslims came, not East towards Mecca. This reminds one of the Great Mosque in Cordoba in Spain, where it faces south as they do in many mosques in North Africa. 

Since these immigrants are assimilated into society, any study of this sort must be sociological and historical, so the new universities springing up through Ibero‑America and the Middle East have a duty to promote such research. Muslim scholars need to study Latin America country by country, all twenty of them, in order to rewrite their history since the discovery of America by Columbus, and from even before that date. 

They should study psychologically how their Islamic conscience and personality can be revived, so that Central and South America can rebuild their heritage and lines of communication with the Islamic world in Africa and the Middle East. Contacts with both ends are difficult, as could be seen in the XXX Orientalist Congress that was held in Mexico City in August 1976, where none of this vast heritage, rich though it is in Mexico itself, was brought to the fore by any Mexicans and explained to their Middle Eastern visitors. The visiting Orientalists likewise ignored it. 

The total population of Latin America thus comprises the descen dants of people from West Africa, Spain, Portugal and the Middle East who were already Muslims in their original homelands. In Trinidad and the Guyanas there further exist East Indian groups from the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia whose culture and religion have been neglected and muffled by the Dutch and British colonial authorities. With independence today they can win back that heritage and regain their pride in it again. 

Like the new Nation of Islam in the United States, these forced migrants from Africa to the Caribbean area and Brazil were not all slaves or serfs, but Hispano‑American laws have been construed against them, to make them conform and disappear into Christian society. The Portuguese and Hispanic colonies bred legislation and engendered police methods that enforced these disabilities within society itself. Muslims could not pray freely to the One God in any Spanish country; the prevailing official attitude was actively hostile, and this mood was rein‌forced publicly since it was written into the Spanish laws themselves. 

It was a harsh and cruel life for the victims, whose history has never been properly recorded; only Henry Lea, a Quaker historian from Philadelphia, tried to write it up at the beginning of this century, and few persons now read his writings on this heartless period. 

Unfortunately many of these attitudes still prevail. In Argentina, for instance, only the man's name of Omar can be legally used today; Islamic and non‑Christian names are forbidden by law, a legacy from the Inquisition, that "Holy" Office as the Catholic Church calls it. The whole school system has been contaminated for centuries: the modern republic of Colombia has a concordat or treaty with the Vatican that supervises all textbooks used in the public schools, not the church schools in that country 

This practice occurs still in Spain itself, where the terms "Moors" (moros) and "Mohammedan" (mahometano) are used loosely and with prejudice. Passports are not issued to persons who cannot produce a birth certificate, which is only given by their Catholic parish. Burial used to be subject to a similar nuisance in many Spanish‑speaking countries. Spanish and Hispanic laws are encrusted with such disabili ties.