English

The New Saracens

Publicado por Fernando Bravo López el

Islam and the Andalusi past were used in the nineteenth century as an intellectual battlefield on which to settle differences regarding how Spain, its history and, above all, its future were conceived. It was not so much a matter of understanding the past as of designing a national project for times to come

Fernando Bravo López
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Detail of a caricature published in La Flaca, 30 January 1873. Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa histórica.

Spanish version

After the expulsion of the Moriscos, Spain became a country officially «cleansed” of any Islamic “stain”. The spectre of Islam seemed to have been banished forever. Yet, like any ghostly entity, it could reappear at any moment to cast doubt upon the identity of a nation being constructed on the image of itself as the most Catholic among nations. From then on, any vindication of Spain’s Islamic or Jewish past would be interpreted by many not only as a betrayal of the “true faith”, but also as a betrayal of the nation. Through expulsions, the pyres of the Inquisition, wars and indoctrination, a hegemonic image of Spain was imposed as the antithesis of all that was Islamic or Jewish. Thus, there was no better way of appearing truly Spanish than by appearing fiercely anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim. But if there were no longer Jews or Muslims to attack, they had to be invented in order to flaunt one’s Spanishness Political enemies served this purpose well: they were the perfect target.

In this way, the best strategy for attacking political adversaries while simultaneously flaunting an uncompromising Spanishness was to identify them with the ancestral enemies of the nation: Jews and Muslims. This made it easy to transform a political rival into an enemy of the nation. The image that gradually emerged of what might be called an “anti-Spain” bore unmistakable Semitic traits from the outset. An Islamophobia without Muslims was born, together with an “antisemitism without Jews”, whose main victims were no longer real Jews or Muslims, but metaphorical ones: compatriots and co-religionists who did not conform sufficiently to the image that the guardians of orthodoxy considered to be the true Spain, “the hammer of the heretics”.

That this vision of Islam, Judaism and Spain was hegemonic does not mean it was the only one, nor that such hegemony was not gradually eroded over time as the Church’s tutelage came under question. The emergence of alternative, “heterodox” views of Islam in Spain was favoured above all by the fact that the Ottoman Empire was no longer perceived as a threat. From the late seventeenth century onwards, it showed clear signs of exhaustion, and this gradual decline allowed fear of the Ottomans to fade and cordial diplomatic relations to be established. In general, Islam was no longer seen as a threat, either to the Church, or to the security of the Monarchy. But, as we have said, it would have an impact on the image of the Spanish nation then under construction. The image of Spain as an essentially and exclusively Catholic nation had been built in opposition to Jews and Muslims; it was natural that any alternative vision of the nation would almost inevitably tend to vindicate the place of those excluded from Spain’s history, thereby questioning their traditional representation as the sworn enemy of all things Spanish.

Thus, by the late eighteenth century, influenced by the so-called “Enlightenment”, some Spanish thinkers began cautiously to incorporate the Islamic, together with the Jewish and Protestant past of the Peninsula, into the narrative of Spanish history, no longer merely —as hitherto— as the antithesis of Spanishness, as the enemy against which Spain had been forged, but also as something that could be defended. Although Al-Andalus and Islam continued to occupy the place of the enemy, which had to be eradicated for the «resurgence» of the nation to take place, certain positive aspects of that past began to be highlighted, which might be reclaimed, if not as one’s own, then at least as something deserving commendation. One could praise science and philosophy, art and literature, and, at a time when some voices were being raised —albeit timidly— against religious intolerance, begin to celebrate Islamic “tolerance”.

As a reaction to these new intellectual trends, and thanks to the influence of French counter-revolutionary thinkers such as Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), Spanish Catholic “integralists” were able to offer a response to the Enlightened and liberal vision. The anti-Islamic thought of these authors continued to draw upon the most hackneyed motifs of the medieval anti-Islamic tradition, whilst adapting it to the new times. Many of the most absurd anti-Muslim legends perpetuated since the Middle Ages gradually disappeared, though they hung on as long as possible. For example, in the late eighteenth century Manuel José Martín was still able to publish a biography of Muhammad based entirely on ninth-century texts by Eulogius of Córdoba and seventeenth-century texts by Jaime Bleda. And shortly afterwards, between 1793 and 1795, in response to the biography of the Prophet published by the Enlightened thinker Claude-Emmanuel de Pastoret —which had been translated into Spanish—, friar Manuel de Santo Tomás de Aquino returned to fourteenth-century texts attributed to Pedro Pascual to reassert Muhammad’s malevolent character.

Thanks to the influence of these French counterrevolutionaries, the discourse changed: it incorporated the form and some of the vocabulary —though obviously not the content— of Enlightened philosophical discourse. Islam was no longer only a false religion inspired by the devil, contrary to reason and nature, but also an impediment to human progress, opposed to civilisation, indeed its most perfect negation. In that case, by the eradication of Islam —which nascent European colonialism in the Islamic world seemed to anticipate— not only would Europeans be protected against a latent danger, but Muslims would also be saved from error, led along the path of the only civilisation worthy of the name: that of the Christians.

This “eradication of Islam” was significant not only in colonial policy, but also in national policy. It was necessary to eradicate “the Moor within”, so to speak. The revival of the most hostile images of Islam and Muslims, which exalted the Catholic identity of the nation by resurrecting figures such as the “voluntary martyrs” of Córdoba or Santiago Matamoros, was not undertaken merely to attack flesh-and-blood Muslims in the context of colonial wars, but also to assail the “new Saracens”: those “anti-Christians” and “anti-Spaniards” who sought to destroy what counterrevolutionaries, integralists, Carlists and later national-Catholics considered the true Spain.

Heading of the Catholic newspaper La Regeneración, 4 January 1860. Hemeroteca Digital de la BNE:
«Catholics before being politicians; politicians as much as politics leads to the practical victory of Catholicism»

In this sense, liberals —and later, even more so, socialists and republicans— embodied an “anti-Spain”: they were “traitors”, new “enemies of the faith” who, in the image and likeness of the Moors of old, sought to drive the “true Spain” back to the mountains of the Asturias. A new Reconquista would be necessary. As José Canga Argüelles, director of the neo-Catholic newspaper La Regeneración, declared in 1856, protests against liberalism were not enough; more radical measures were needed:

«It is necessary to raise the standard of the Cross, enlist its resolute defenders, place all our strength and power at its disposal, wave it aloft, and, marching together, with the Cross in the left hand and the sword in the right, present our proud brow to that miserable rabble of sectarians and impostors, enemies of God and of Thrones, and cast from our midst those new Saracens, even more fearsome than the followers of Muhammad, those Ibero-Anglican heretics».

(Canga 1858, págs. 251-252).

Thus were born —in broad terms— two tendencies that remained at odds throughout the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries, and whose main object of discussion was not Islam or the Islamic past of the Peninsula per se, but the “being of Spain”, Spanish national identity, and, above all, the place accorded to religion within it. Islam and the Andalusi past were used as an intellectual battlefield on which to settle differences regarding how Spain, its history and, above all, its future were conceived. It was not so much a matter of understanding the past as of designing a national project for times to come. Those who did not wish the Church to continue to police Spanish customs, thought, social life and even the State itself, praised the tolerance towards other creeds that Andalusi society had shown as an example to follow, proof that such tolerance bore fruit in the realms of thought, art, science and progress. The social project these thinkers proposed for Spain’s future was their blueprint for overcoming Spain’s galloping decline: liberation from ecclesiastical tutelage.

Conversely, those who continued to defend the union of throne and altar —of State and Church— opposed to the positive image of the Islamic past advanced by some Enlightened thinkers —and later by some liberals— an image of Islam as the antithesis of all that was good and desirable: as a world governed by unreason, violence, lust, intolerance and, ultimately, the most absolute despotism. There was no freedom in error; evil begot only evil; and the much-vaunted “splendour of al-Andalus” was no splendour at all and could not have been so. If there was anything good in Andalusi science, literature, philosophy or even theology, the Muslims must have stolen it from the Christians. As the academic Vicente Lafuente disdainfully remarked in his reply to the address delivered by the Arabist Francisco Codera upon his admission to the Royal Academy of History:

«The modern rationalist school, as we know, sides with the Moor, or as it is now said, with the Arab; for this man, who in his own land and in Algeria is lazy, idle, deceitful, thieving and sly, in Spain must now be portrayed as a perfect gentleman, gallant, truthful, a troubadour, musician, poet, artist, farmer and even a theologian, of course of a sui generis theology».

(Codera 1879, págs. 87-88)
Vicente Lafuente (1817-1889)

The “traditionalist school”, as Lafuente called it, saw that vindication, praise or exaltation of the Islamic past of the Peninsula was being used as a weapon with which to attack the role of the Church in Spanish society, to propose a future society in which the Church would no longer hold the pre-eminent position it had hitherto enjoyed; and what was even more serious, to cast doubt upon the essentially Catholic identity of the nation. To highlight the contributions of Andalusi Muslims in the fields of philosophy, literature, art and science, to admire and even praise them, was something many, even amongst the militant Catholics, were willing to accept; but to consider that those same Muslims were in some way as “Spanish” as their Hispano-Christian contemporaries was going too far. The Muslims of al-Andalus were in no way Spanish. Thus, Lafuente felt obliged to point out when speaking of a hypothetical Muslim writer “of Spain”: “I do not say Spanish Moor, for I believe that being from Spain is not the same as being Spanish” (Codera 1879, pág. 90 nota 1).

It would not be until the late nineteenth century, with the efforts of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and of the Arabists who were disciples of Francisco Codera, that these points of view began to change among Spanish conservatives; and even then, without much success.

For most of the most reactionary Spanish conservatives, that Andalusi past, however splendid it may have been —if indeed it was, and many did not believe so— was not “ours”. The “ours”, the “true Spaniards”, rode alongside Santiago Matamoros. From this perspective, therefore, regeneration, the overcoming of Spain’s decline, would come only with the total rejection of foreign ideas that were corrupting the people and with a return to an authentic Spain: that of the battles against Muslims at Covadonga, Las Navas and Lepanto. To counter the images brandished by some liberals, these traditionalist authors thus dredged up the most hackneyed images of the anti-Islamic polemical tradition, and used them to attack, with unusual virulence, those compatriots whom they considered traitors, monstrous enemies of Spain:

«Then the Lord will look upon us with affection. Then He will visibly show us His love; then He will say to us as to the invincible Maccabees, “take that holy sword and with it you shall vanquish the enemies of my people”; and it, in the hands of Catholic princes, will be the axe that severs the throat of the monster that seeks to corrupt the world: impious liberalism, the father of the modern Saracens».

(El Alicantino: diario católico, 16 de julio de 1890)
Detail of a caricature published in La Flaca sobre el carlismo, 30 January 1873. Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica.

It is worth recalling that the violence of this rhetoric was not the product of an unrestrained outburst of anti-liberalism, but formed part of a propaganda strategy which, for century, was disseminated through numerous traditionalist Catholic publications, and which ultimately served to legitimise ideologically three civil wars against “the hydra” of liberalism —the Carlist wars (1833–1840, 1846–1849 and 1872–1876)—, and which continued to be used long afterwards, in expectation of the Pelayo who would at last liberate Spain from the evil of liberal democracy:

«Today Spain is once again the slave of an invasion as barbarous as that of the Arabs; the invasion of liberalism has taken hold of her; it seeks to extinguish the Catholic Religion, allows error to progress and even imposes it; if it is not the Mohammedan error, it is the liberal one; while curbing the advance of Catholicism, it destroys the unity of the Fatherland and sells its colonies; it strives to make its glories forgotten and to obscure its greatness… But will God permit this criminal and tyrannical invasion to last as long as the world endures so that Spain, His beloved people, and beloved of His Most Holy Mother, should forever be the slaves of heresy and the victims of utilitarians and scoundrels? … Will He not grant us in these modern times a new Pelayo? ».

(El Porvenir: periódico carlista, 11 de septiembre de 1907)

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