Spain Unmoored

Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam

Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780253024893
• eBook ISBN: 9780253025067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Long viewed as Spain's "most Moorish city," Granada is now home to a growing Muslim population of Moroccan migrants and European converts to Islam. Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar examines how various residents of Granada mobilize historical narratives about the city's Muslim past in order to navigate tensions surrounding contemporary ethnic and religious pluralism. Focusing particular attention on the gendered, racial, and political dimensions of this new multiculturalism, Rogozen-Soltar explores how Muslim-themed tourism and Islamic cultural institutions coexist with anti-Muslim sentiments.

1

HISTORICAL ANXIETY AND EVERYDAY HISTORIOGRAPHY

INVOKING AL-ANDALUS

Much recent scholarship on Islam and migration in Spain takes as its starting point the late 1970s, when Spain became a democracy and transitioned from being a “labor-exporting” country to a “labor-importing” country, with the first migrants to Spain coming mainly from Morocco (Cornelius 2004, 387). Perusing a random stack of books and articles on migration and Islam in Spain, one finds that nearly all begin with a proclamation of this demographic shift. As a result, scholars and politicians alike often consider the Muslim minority in Spain a “new” phenomenon, a fresh challenge of democracy and Europeanization. However, in the course of conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I have been consistently struck by the fact that people in Granada overwhelmingly understand questions of migration and religious pluralism as being shaped by encounters between Spain and Morocco not since the 1970s, but since the 700s. Through longue-durée historical narratives that foreground cultural connections and population movements between Spain and Morocco since the eighth century, my research participants conceptualize North Africa and southern Iberia as a semicontiguous space of Mediterranean entanglement. Ideas about local Muslim history are central to understandings of what it means to be Granadino and Andalusian today, with high stakes for the politics of multiculturalism.

These stakes are clearly expressed in popular Andalusian music. In October 2009 the beloved Andalusian pop star David Bisbal released the hit song “Al-Andalus,” in which he serenades medieval Islamic Spain and contemporary Andalusia, conflating them in an exotic, powerful goddess he calls al-Andalus. See the lyrics that follow.

Esta es la historia de una diosa como nunca hubo ninguna. Corría el arte en su mirada de color verde aceituna. De padre moro y de mujer Cristiana, con piel de reina y cuerpo de sultana, movía sus manos como una gitana, y su embrujo te robaba el alma. Dicen que hubo muchos que intentaron conquistarla, y otros tantos se quedaron hechizados solo por mirarla. Aunque hace tiempo nadie ha vuelto a verla yo sé que ella no es una leyenda y sé muy bien donde podré encontrarla, a esa que todos llamaban: Al-Andalus, Al-Andalus.

This is the story of a goddess like no other. With artistry running through her olive green gaze. From a “moro” father and a Christian mother, with the skin of a queen and the body of a sultan’s wife, she would move her hands like a Gypsy, and her spell would steal your soul. They say there were many who tried to conquer her, and still others were bewitched simply by looking at her. Although no one has seen her in a long time, I know that she is not just a legend. And I know exactly where I can find her, That woman who everyone used to call: Al-Andalus, Al-Andalus.

Bisbal’s ode to al-Andalus nicely captures the competing historiographies of medieval Islam that pervade social life in Granada. First, his lyrics demonstrate the enduring centrality of Andalusia’s Muslim past, transposing historical al-Andalus onto the contemporary region. As Bisbal searches for the goddess al-Andalus, he casually lists the Moorish monuments of each modern Andalusian city in passing. By mentioning that “no one has seen her in a long time,” Bisbal acknowledges the official silencing of medieval Islam in dominant Castilian history telling. But he intimates the limitations of that silence by insisting that it is nevertheless obvious where he “can find her,” since Andalusia is simply a present-day incarnation of al-Andalus. Second, the song indexes Andalusians’ profound ambivalence about this legacy. The protagonist unequivocally celebrates al-Andalus but also makes clear her alterity—referencing her mixed parentage, likening her to “a Gypsy,” and personifying her in markedly orientalist and gendered fashion with references to her desirability (later lyrics state outright: “You are desire, al-Andalus”) and unnatural danger (she bewitches onlookers and robs them of their souls).

In sum, Bisbal’s song is both an ode to the marginality of al-Andalus and an anthem of southern pride. Bisbal is known for trumpeting his regional pride in other songs about modern Andalusian identity as well. His earlier hits included “Corazón Latino” (Latin Heart), a dance number that unabashedly advertises Andalusia as a playground for northern Europeans, inviting them to visit the “nonstop party by the shore” to enjoy “wine,” “rum,” “hot-bloodedness,” and “tanned bodies” (Vale Music 2002). The song “Al-Andalus” invokes the imprint of medieval Islam on Andalusia, while “Corazón Latino” offers up Andalusia as a place for Europeans to consume southern difference and debauchery.

These two images—of an Andalusia marked by its Islamic past and of the contemporary region’s otherness within Spain and Europe—are intimately connected. Together, Bisbal’s songs tell a story familiar to many Andalusians, linking marginality today to the region’s disproportionately long Muslim period. In this chapter, I pick up this conceptual link, examining both historical memories of al-Andalus and historical narratives of more recent Andalusian experiences of poverty, mass emigration, and regional stigma. While these “old” and “new” histories are separated by centuries, I unite them here because, like Bisbal’s lyrics, my research participants predominantly understood Andalusia’s medieval and modern histories as intertwined, and this “structuring narrative” (e.g., Bourdieu 1977) set the parameters for discussions of Islam in the city.

To explore this discursive linkage, I trace “everyday historiography,” that is, the ways in which Granada’s nonacademic public engages in the same kinds of fierce debates about the meaning of Spain’s Muslim past that have animated the historical scholarship of Spain discussed in the introduction.¹ While their narratives may not be canonized or institutionalized as a part of official history, in the course of everyday social interactions, they commonly drew on the city’s Muslim past to make sense of religious pluralism in the present. They did so in ambivalent narratives that involved both historical description and political prescription and expressed both Islamophilic and Islamophobic sensibilities. “Everyday historiography” ultimately refers to the ways people in Granada marshaled history to make moral claims about the meanings of Islam and Andalusianness in the present.

I use ethnography of everyday historiography to illustrate people’s often heartfelt sense of political urgency in discussing the contemporary weight of Spain’s Muslim past. Other scholars frame the persistence of this past in terms of Freudian and Derridian ghosts and hauntings (e.g., Flesler 2008a, 2008b) or emphasize instrumentalized economic and political uses of the Moorish past (Dietz 2004; Rosón Lorente 2008). I have tried to take my interlocutors’ historical claims seriously and to assess them in the present. Their discussions of al-Andalus (as idea, identity, memory, or trope) seemed to me to reflect deeply felt beliefs and anxieties about Islam and local identity that inform social life with immediacy and with serious political consequences.

Historical memory always implies a particular—even if unacknowledged—ethics or politics, and often a particular configuration of time and space (Huyssen 2000). In particular, historical memory often becomes an especially politicized component of place-making in cities like Granada, where urban politics are inextricably linked to the production and consumption of local heritage (Herzfeld 2009). In Granada, everyday historiography becomes the cornerstone of what Jonathan Shannon calls “nostalgic dwelling,” the “ways of inhabiting and articulating lived experience in places embedded with a heightened awareness of the past” (2015, 8).² Everyday historiography, with its shades of Islamophobia and Islamophilia, exudes both anxiety and nostalgia for al-Andalus, shaping future-oriented political projects as well as animating relationships to the past (cf. Boym 2001).

While the politics of historical narrative are crucial to local, urban place-making in Granada, my research participants also engage with time and space in broader scope, impacting conversations about Islam and migration in politically significant ways by radically shifting the political frames that are most meaningful, or even possible (cf. Tilly 1994). Their deep historical framing explodes common truisms about border crossing, local belonging, and the dichotomy of place that takes for granted a clear distinction between homelands and hostlands, hosts and guests in the study of mobility. The places that are now Morocco and Spain have been in near-constant historical encounter, with populations moving both north and south, and each alternating between dominant and subordinate colonial positions. Depending on when one begins the story of Spanish-Moroccan entanglement, designations of “homeland” and “host country,” “host” and “guest” will change (Nair 2005; cf. Rosello 2001). This is why Moroccans’ arrival in Granada may be referred to as a rightful “return” of those wrongfully expelled during the Inquisition in addition to a process of “immigration.” Through their actual population mobility and their manner of characterizing it, Granada’s residents socially and temporally reconstruct Mediterranean geography (Tsing 2005), often discursively transforming Granada “from a destination to an origin” (Ho 2006, 48). The intersection of these spatial and historical tensions creates palimpsestic and chronotypic (Mandel 2008) relationships between historical and contemporary actors and events, fueling anxiety over religious and cultural difference (Flesler and Melgosa 2003).

The remainder of this chapter is divided into two parts. The first section traces celebratory and anxious narratives that invoke Granada’s medieval Muslim past. The second half focuses on narratives about the more recent past, showing how ambivalence about Moorish heritage has been central to the construction of Andalusia as unmodern and stigmatized but also as Europe’s greatest hope for multiculturalism.

HISTORICAL ANXIETY IN THE LAST MUSLIM KINGDOM

From the first days of my field research, residents of Granada from all walks of life continually invoked Granada’s Moorish period, construing Granada as an indelibly Muslim and Arab space. References to Islam and assertions that Granada was Spain’s “most Muslim city” were the single most common topic of first conversations I had with people I met in all kinds of contexts, even those not aware of my research focus. Each person had his or her own understanding of Andalusian history and its contemporary meanings, but running through most of them was a deep ambivalence about al-Andalus. Andalusia’s supposedly Moorish character was felt as both deeply prideful and painfully embarrassing, and as both an indisputable aspect of Granada’s city identity and unresolved, debatable history.

I interviewed Marta, a woman in her twenties born to Spanish convert parents, in a shop where she worked near the Alhambra in the old, Moorish-built quarter. For much of our talk, Marta criticized racism toward Muslims, including toward Muslim migrants. After a sigh and a pregnant pause from recounting incidents of discrimination she had seen or heard of, she said thoughtfully, “The truth is, this city was Muslim for a very, very long time, and that’s something that can never be undone. . . . What I mean to say is that, we have this in our blood, I think. I think we have Arabness in our blood.” Speaking in ironic tones about Spaniards’ rejection of Arab migrants, she mused, “If surely their great-great-great-grandparents had Arab blood, why are they acting this way?” The first part of Marta’s commentary tells a clear and conclusive history of Islam in Granada. Extrapolating from the “Arab blood” running through the veins of the population to the level of the city itself, Granada is by nature a Muslim space, and this fact is irreversible and undeniable. Yet Marta’s final comments also acknowledge the contingency of history-telling: despite the “fact” of their Arab blood, some of her fellow residents choose not to recognize Granada’s Muslim history as a basis for openness toward Muslims today.

The narratives of history and regional identity that I encountered fell roughly into two categories that reflect each of the two sides of Marta’s comments. Some narratives interwove discourses about biology, the senses, and inevitability to naturalize present-day Granadinos’ attitudes (both positive and negative) toward Islam and migration. Others insisted on contingency and responsibility, framing the contemporary importance of al-Andalus and convivencia in terms of history, politics, and calls for social responsibility in interpreting the past. Though their narratives differently constructed the meaning of medieval Spanish history, people in both cases were navigating contemporary social life in Granada through active cultivation of particular relationships to the past.

“Natural” Histories of al-Andalus

The notion that contemporary Granada’s built landscapes, cultural norms, and sensibilities flow inevitably from (and are explained by) the city’s Moorish history appeared in the narratives of both those who lauded and who lamented the city’s “Muslimness.” Residents’ biological commentary sometimes naturalized Granada as open and accepting of Islam, and sometimes explained exclusion. Those who understood contemporary Granada as a “natural” product of the city’s Muslim history often used words like ancestry, nature, biology, blood, and genetics to describe how Arab and Muslim cultural traits had been passed down, working their narratives of Granada’s “natural” Muslimness into descriptions of the city and its social issues.

While discussions of blood lines in assessments of ethnic and national heritage are more commonly found in nationalist discourses that emphasize purity or essence, in Granada, invocations of blood were leveraged in multiple ways. Some people discussed blood to emphasize shared descent and relatedness between contemporary Muslims and Christians, denying religious and cultural differences between them by insisting that all current residents share blood lines. Others discussed blood and ancestry in narratives that posited mixing, but among discretely understood populations, imagining Christians, Muslims, and Jews as ancestral communities that mapped onto racial categories of people who shared a city. In this view, Granada was shaped by a history of successful relationships across lines of social-racial-religious difference, rather than a space of sameness. Still others discussed blood as an indication of danger; shared ancestry was something unpleasant to avoid re-creating today.

In addition to emphasizing blood and ancestry, these narratives also illustrate how a sense of natural social relations becomes infused into people’s experience of city spaces. Research participants focused on sensory experiences of Granada’s material culture, heralding the Moorish aesthetics of the city’s built landscape, the “rasgos” (phenotypical characteristics) of contemporary Granadinos, and what one young woman called the “feeling of being” in Granada, a city she said was made from Moorish scientific, architectural, culinary, and social building blocks. Noelia, a now self-identified “semi-secular” woman who was raised in a Catholic family that “went back generations” in Granada, worked with me at a nonprofit antiracism association. She considered herself an authority on Granada because of her family’s longevity in the city and their roots in local political activism. She frequently described Granada as essentially formed by convivencia.

One afternoon we were talking about convivencia and I asked her how she had come to know this history, whether she had read about it, studied it at school, or encountered it elsewhere. Opening with the authority-claiming statement, “Well, I’m very Granadina. I’m as Granada as they come,” she answered that knowledge of Granada’s Muslim history was much simpler and also more profound than what might be gleaned from textbooks. It came from simply being there, from using one’s senses to take in the material remnants of convivencia, and from acknowledging one’s place in relation to this history. She said,

It’s a natural thing. My family is from the area of Carrera del Darro street. That means we’re right in front of the Alhambra, in the Albayzín. That whole area has narrow streets and so many names that are Jewish and Arab. It’s the Jewish-Arab culture. So, it’s normal. It’s not something that you study, no. It’s that, this is what Granada is! From my grandmother’s apartment, you have the Alhambra in front, Santa Ana church to the right, and then the Arab baths. So, you know, for me, it’s not, “Oooh, the three cultures of Granada!” [in a voice mimicking a sudden, self-aware realization]. I just know it. What’s more, it’s just my culture. All of this is mine, too. Because I’m from Granada.

In Noelia’s estimation, experiencing daily life amid the Muslim- and Jewish-built architecture meant that the city’s history of religious pluralism became part of Granadinos’ very constitution—forming their surroundings, feelings, and embodied experiences of city space. To be from Granada was to unconsciously internalize its multicultural nature into an essential selfhood that included tacit knowledge of place, social identity, and lineage, all expressed through sensory appreciation of Moorish architectural remains. Noelia exemplifies the way Granada’s urban materiality facilitates its consolidation as a place that makes and is made by historical memory. Her analysis included a kind of double synchronicity—a temporal one between Moorish and contemporary Granada, and a scalar one between her personal, internal sense of self as a Granadina and her view of the kinds of social dispositions and relations that should exist in the city.

New Muslim residents often echoed Noelia’s emphasis on the built landscape and shared social background of “the three cultu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Between Convivencia and Malafollá: Coexistence or Exclusion?
• Introduction: Andalusian Encounters and the Politics of Islam
• 1. Historical Anxiety and Everyday Historiography
• 2. Paradoxes of Muslim Belonging and Difference
• 3. Muslim Disneyland and Moroccan Danger Zones: Islam, Race, and Space
• 4. A Reluctant Convivencia: Minority Representation and Unequal Multiculturalism
• 5. Embodied Encounters: Gender, Islam, and Public Space
• Conclusion: Granada Moored and Unmoored
• Bibliography
• Index