Specters of the Moor

As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, western Europe seems to be, once again, struggling with its old Muslim problem. About four hundred years ago, Spain, the southwestern frontier of the continent, expelled all its citizens of Muslim or Moorish descent, closed a nine-century history of living with Islam, and reveled in the purity of its faith and the racial homogeneity of its people. The Moor became, over time, a bad memory from the past. But Europe’s expansion across the Atlantic in 1492, and eventually in Africa and Asia, upset the world order and threw all nations into the vortex of a European-defined globalization. Soon, the Muslims who had come to Europe first as conquering warriors in 711, then as grand chiefs and caliphs who turned marginal Iberia into the most ad vanced nation in western Europe, returned to the continent as lowly immigrants, determined to eke out a living but resolute in their commitment to their faith and ways. As Europe’s population continues its downward trend, and as more immigrants are needed to fill jobs, the Muslim presence on European soil is being depicted as a major challenge to European identity even though polls have shown that the vast majority of Muslims in nations such as the Netherlands and France subscribe to the republican, secular model of government.

It is nearly impossible to keep track of the mind-bending furor swirling over the future of Europe in the age of Muslim minorities. Whether it’s Muslims erupting into violence to condemn cartoons that defame their faith and their Prophet, protesting the pope’s selective allusion to the image of Islam in the medieval period, complaining about the beheading of the prophet Mohammed in an opera, condemning the selection of a Muslim woman for Miss United Kingdom, objecting to Britain’s political leaders for their views on the niqab (the head-to-toe veil that shrouds the Muslim woman’s body), a week rarely goes by without the West being reminded about the Muslims’ strange costumes and customs. As if this were not enough, the problem of violence and terrorism complicates the controversy, because now, as in the decades and centuries following 1492, the Moors—all Moors—are suspected of being potential fifth columnists, members of sleeping cells, or secret agents of nebulous organizations in the rocky and rugged mountains of central Asia.

Even if there were no threat of terrorism, Muslim minorities and non-Muslim majorities would disagree loudly. Europeans would express the same anxieties over the upsetting of a familiar way of life and their diminishing control over the shape of their societies. In the last half millennium or so, most of the world has experienced such disruptions from European colonial powers; but when most of the world’s nations obtained their political independence and were gradually incorporated into the process of globalization, Europe lost the ability to manage the global game of human movement and national destinies. It is, therefore, not inconceivable that what we are witnessing today is the last phase of the classical Reconquista, when first Spain and then the rest of Europe emerged out of their long war against Islam as the masters of the modern world. Moreover, if the rise of the West started in the fifteenth century, as Fareed Zakaria has shown in his recent book The Post-American World (2008), the leading Western power, the United States of America, is being challenged on every front—economic, cultural, and even political—by the ascendancy of non-Western nations that, only a few decades ago, had no resonance whatsoever. Nowadays, these emerging markets account for almost 40 percent of the global economy. By 2040, China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico “will together have a larger economic output than the G-7 countries, the seven Western nations that have dominated global affairs for centuries.” Ours may well be a new historical era as Europe and Anglo America are frantically trying to come to terms with the steadily collapsing tenets of the ideologies that have given them absolute power since 1492. “The descent of the West,” wrote the historian Niall Ferguson in The War of the World (2006), is “the most important development of the twentieth century.”1

In other words, as the myths of Europe’s crusading, conquistador, and settler cultures are being challenged by the rise of new, nonwhite powers abroad and new demographic realities at home—the “blowback” or “boomerang” effect of relentless economic dispossession and endless military crusades—Western nations are understandably concerned about a future of diminished control over people of non-European heritage. Since the defeat of the Moors in Spain and the conquest of the New World, Euro-Americans have simply not had to worry about their racial and cultural hegemony. Now that they do, they are beginning to sound like the conquered and colonized of yesterday. Tensions keep mounting and, barring the massive deportation of more than 15 million Muslims from Europe, there is no clear path ahead. This is the dilemma hanging over Europe’s future.

The United States is in the same situation in relation to both its Muslim immigrants and, especially, its Hispanic ones. As Mexicans and Hispanics keep pouring into the country, a growing and outspoken chorus of U.S. nationalists are describing their country as besieged and threatened by cultural changes that might very well imperil the republic. The United States, for them, is the unalloyed product of Anglo-Saxon ingenuity and has no option but to hold on to this legacy if it is not to go the retrograde way of Latin America. This view of the foundations of the nation often implies that American greatness was achieved by white Europeans and might very well be undermined by a Hispanic population still upset over the loss of their lands to Anglos in earlier centuries. A nation is great, according to them, only when it is culturally and racially unified. Thus, with a much smaller Muslim immigrant population and a much larger Hispanic one, the United States is wrestling with the same dilemmas besetting its European counterparts.

Indeed, anyone watching the events unfolding in Europe and the United States in recent years cannot help but be struck by the confluence of the two overriding concerns of these two continental states: the mounting anxiety over coexisting with Muslims and the seemingly unstoppable waves of illegal and nonassimilable immigrants. All sorts of explanations have been offered about these twin elements fueling the global crisis—bookshelves are filled with books about Islam, minorities, and questions of immigration—but no one seems to be reading the intense debate over immigration and minorities who resist assimilation as the continuation of a much older confict, the one pitting Christendom against the world of Islam. We are often being asked to ponder “what is wrong with Islam” and “what is wrong with the West,” as if these two abstract, ideological entities suddenly bumped into each other in their travels and were jolted by the shock of discovery. The West encountered an archaic Islam stuck in the primitivism of premodern cultures, whereas Muslims discovered a dizzying, fast-dissolving secular West that is guided by the fleeting fantasies of materialism. All of this is by now amply documented. Yet what I propose in this book is that a secular, liberal Western culture and Islam were never really parted, that they have been traveling together since (at least) 1492, despite all attempts to demarcate, first, zones of Christian purity and, later, national homogeneity.

Without Islam, there would be no European identity to speak of, and no America, with all the consequences the “discovery” of this continent has entailed for the future of human civilization. By authorizing Christopher Columbus’s mission to the East via the western Atlantic route, the Spanish monarchs King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sponsored what amounted to a crusade whose ultimate goal was nothing less than the recapture of Jerusalem.2 Even before the Renaissance, especially during the fifteenth century, when the Moor emerged as the foil against which Europe would define itself, the vexed relationship (or confrontation) with Islam had been the primordial element in the constitution of an unconscious form of Europeanness.3 In his recently published history of the early encounters of Christians and Muslims in Europe, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis shows that the term Europenses, or Europeans, was coined by Isidore Pacensis, an eighth-century Andalusian priest, to describe the new identity of Christians who defeated Muslim armies near Poitiers in 732. So significant was this confrontation in the formation of a sense of common European identity that early twentieth-century historians such as the French Ernest Lavisse and the German Hans Delbrück could still claim that this was the most decisive battle in the history of Europe or the West.4 Christendom’s conflict with Islam appeared so permanent that, as Samuel Huntington notes in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996), the “term guerra fría [cold war] was coined by thirteenth-century Spaniards to describe their ‘uneasy coexistence’ with Muslims in the Mediterranean.”5 Islam, in other words, whether in medieval Christendom or in the secular West, has consistently maintained its troubling strangeness. Its specter has never vacated the West’s unconscious.

Because of his or her quintessential difference in the long European imagination, the Moor, I want to show in this book, is not only someone who is religiously Muslim; even more importantly, he or she is also a figure that stands for anyone who is not considered to be part of the social mainstream. It is only in this symbolic or metaphorical sense that minorities living in the West after 1492 are the descendants of the Moors. Given that the archetypal Other of Europe before 1492 was the Muslim, the world’s non-European natives or religions were all stamped with the taint of Muslim impurity. The Moor was, in the words of Emily Bartels, “first and foremost a figure of uncodified and uncodifiable diversity.”6 The West’s minorities, whether Native Americans, enslaved Africans, Jews, or non-European, particularly Hispanic, immigrants (legal or illegal), would become indispensable for the expanding European and American, or Euro-American, sense of self after 1492, just as the Moor had been for Christian Europe up to that time. Not only this, but African Americans and Jews would embrace their Moorish heritage to fight back their exclusion or forced assimilation, whereas others, such as Hispanics and nonwhite immigrants of all sorts in the United States, would simply be invested with the Moor’s quintessential attributes without anyone’s making the connection between the Christian Crusades against the Moor and national policies to stem immigration.

My purpose, therefore, is to make those connections more visible by showing that, despite all our claims to modernity, we are far from having overcome medieval animosities and that the West and Islam are still locked in the fatal embrace that has been the distinguishing feature of their identities. This is not to give a one-dimensional interpretation of the long histories of discrimination against Jews, blacks, people of darker skin, and immigrants, nor to attribute such discrimination to Europeans and people of European descent only. Not at all. Most Arab nations, for instance, are more xenophobic in their immigration policies than even the least enlightened European country. Entire generations of a single family can live in an Arab country without qualifying for citizenship. The genocidal behavior toward minority groups in some parts of Africa, for another instance, dwarfs anything that is happening today in Western nations.

To the extent that minorities have been crucial in forging modern national identities, one needs to take into account—among other contributing factors—Christian Spain’s pivotal role. So indispensable were Jewish and Muslim minorities to the nascent Castilian state that it instituted what amounted to racial safeguards against assimilation. Almost fifty years before Granada was taken by Catholic forces, a new law stressing purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) was promulgated in Toledo to avoid integrating converted Jews into the main professions and occupations. In this way, the state could unite the nation around a faith that would never, in theory, be accessible to descendants of Jews and Muslims. Minorities in this new scheme (which the church rejected, at first, because it undermined the redemptive powers of baptism) would serve as a rallying point for consolidating national unity, but these very useful minorities would also have to suffer permanent exclusion and harassment. The modern nation that was emerging in Catholic Iberia both depended on and deliberately punished its Others. This double contradiction, in some ways, has been the defining fate of nations ever since.

One simply cannot fully appreciate the precarious position of minorities in the modern world without having some sense of the historic clash between Christianity and Islam, and without seeing modern-day minorities as latter-day Moors—Muslims in disguise, as it were, wearing the masks of different religions and speaking different languages. Ideologically speaking, then, all minorities in the modern West can trace their genealogical origins to the Moor in Christian-ruled Spain. To say so is not to obviate the fact that the plight of the outsider is a universal and timeless condition, but only to propose that, to the extent that the condition of minorities today is coterminous with the rise of nation-states with membership ideologies and exclusion policies, the place of Islam in post-Reconquista Spain can no longer be ignored.

One might argue that the tragedy of the Moors is not a major concern to nations founded on the vilification of Islam, but how could one think about the long history of Western racism, the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, the horrors of the Holocaust (ironically, it was Spain, as we shall see, that devised the first concentration camp, in Cuba), and the dreadful Communist police apparatuses without thinking about Spain’s anti-Moorish legacy? The rise of a surveillance society in the last few decades and the steady encroachments on the right to privacy as necessary undertakings to protect nations against terrorists and immigrants are elements of a story that was promoted by the Inquisition in early modern Spain to maintain Iberia’s cultural purity. By worrying about their national homogeneity and the integrity of their civilization, many conservative and right-wing Europeans and Americans unwilling to contemplate the fact that mixing is often the inevitable lot of nations, particularly in an age when national boundaries are too porous to allow for dreams of insularity, are replaying an old story, one that is full of pain and sorrow.

Muslims don’t do much better in taking stock of this tragic episode, leading one of the most prominent scholars of Morisco culture to suggest that Muslims are more interested in promoting (ad nauseam, I might add) the legacy of great medieval Muslim philosophers or “the heroic conquerors of earlier periods.”7 It often appears as though Muslims spend more time reminding the West of the diminishing glories of the past than meditating on the failures and tragedies of their own history. When Muslim fanatics, for instance, recall Muslim Spain, or al-Andalus, it is often in terms of loss accompanied by the violent threat to reclaim their western outpost. But such remembrances and threats somehow disguise the fact that Spain had been Christian before it was conquered by the Muslim troops led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Moroccan Berber, in 711. This selective memory—often emanating from the Middle East and beyond, almost never from next-door Morocco, except in the case of the Spanish enclaves on Moroccan territory proper—doesn’t help us think better about the problems facing Muslim minorities in non-Muslim states.

In many ways, Samuel Huntington was right to point out, in his era-defining book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, that the persistence of cultural memories is at the root of the problems besetting the world today. A whole range of literature exists to confirm the enduring and primordial importance of civilizations—sprawling, large, geographically imprecise, and evolving agglomerations of peoples, nations, and states sharing religion, language, ancestry, and values—and it would be utter folly, as Fernand Braudel suggested, to overlook this fact.8 In this sense, Huntington provides a healthy counterbalance to Edward Said’s broad-brush theory of Orientalism (first published in 1978), whose effect—although it was not necessarily Said’s intention—is to present a one-dimensional story of (Western) villains and (Muslim or Arab) victims. Daniel Martin Varisco’s exhaustive study of Said’s book, as well as of its reception and influence, shows clearly that Said was too selective and polemical to have given us a good sense of the vexed history of East and West.9 But if Said was speaking as a third-world pugilist fighting back against a West that had trampled on his tradition back in Palestine and the Middle East as a whole, Huntington is speaking as an American realist, one who despite being aware of the vicissitudes of history still wants to hold on to Western supremacy for as long as possible. He knows that the West is fighting against the odds of globalization and the inevitable rise to power of unfriendly nations. As the West’s share of world populations and territories is receding, the only options it has left to contain its diminished influence are to restrict the dissemination of technology to non-Western civilizations (a policy that is now being vigorously pursued by the United States in relation to Iran, for instance) and to implement anti-immigration policies.10 This is where Huntington’s realism went astray in the 1990s, and it continues to muddle his thinking in his more recent book on Hispanic immigration, Who Are We? for such stopgap measures have the effect of maintaining violence at the heart of global relations and poisoning the promise of cultural goodwill without, in the long term, yielding the sought-after outcomes. To think that a society or civilization can be frozen into an essence is exactly the trouble with the kind of nationalism pursued by the anti-immigrant patriots of all nations.

To disagree with Huntington’s shortsighted solutions is not to deny that religions and cultures have a tendency to clash. The persecution of Moors and Moriscos is part of a complex history that began with the advent of Islam in the seventh century and the long struggle for supremacy between the two contending faiths. Each party had reason to suspect and mistrust the other. Moreover, highlighting the Christian injustices committed against Muslims (and Jews) in Spain after 1492 in no way implies that Muslims have been innocent bystanders or that they are not capable of similar behaviors. There is no denying that Islam and Christianity had been at war—hot or cold—since the birth of the younger faith, just as there is no overlooking the real tensions arising today among devout Muslims who inhabit the West’s liberal and secular spaces. The dictates of Islam’s strict and rigorous monotheism do hamper successful integration into culturally pluralistic societies, which is, in my mind, a far more pressing issue to resolve than the overtrumpeted idea of a clash of civilizations. Two or more cultural tendencies can and do coexist within a single nation, which is why many Muslim fundamentalists—as well as their Christian peers in the United States—target their own national institutions with the same passion that they malign rival faiths and civilizations. If Moors, therefore, appear as victims in this book, it is only because they are essential to understanding the cultural origins of minorities in the West. Given that minorities presume the existence of a nation united around a common heritage (whether such heritage is primarily ethnic, religious, racial, or any combination of the three), they are, like the Moors of old, both indispensable sacrificial bodies (burnt offerings) and the target of exclusionary policies ranging from expulsion to genocide.

It is the Moors’ religious and cultural difference that allowed sixteenth-century Castilian monarchs to forge a slippery notion of identity, one that sounds ominously modern in its racist assumptions, even though, strictly speaking, it was not informed by the scientific notions of race that led to the genocidal policies of colonial powers and fascist regimes in the modern age. Spain’s purity-of-blood statute was a departure from classic forms of exclusion and discrimination, because, at least semantically, faith and blood were united in an indivisible whole. Modern racism would seemingly separate these terms to privilege one (biology) over the other (religion); but in late medieval Spain, the combination of blood and faith formed the cornerstone of a new apartheid regime, one whose consequences were quite tragic. The expulsion of Moriscos in 1609—what the eminent historian of Spain Henry Kamen called “the biggest ethnic cleansing to have been carried out in western history” until the twentieth century11—was, then, part of a Castilian political philosophy whose aim was to conflate religious and political unity into an undifferentiated ideology, one that would enable Castilian monarchs (in alliance with the Aragonese ones, joined in marriage since 1469) to seek imperial ventures overseas and at home. The Moors and Moriscos turned out to be an invaluable device to unite the fragmented Iberian Peninsula around this vision; by doing so, Spain inadvertently defined the role of minority communities in post-Reconquista nation-states, and so shaped the destiny of the modern world—our world—in profound ways.

Chapter 1 of this book, “Pious Cruelty,” named for the phrase Niccolò Machiavelli used to describe King Ferdinand’s cynical treatment of his Moorish vassals, shows how the effects of the Spanish notions of nation, race, and minorities have led to the worst horrors of our own times. If Spain didn’t invent modern racism, it certainly was the first to racialize religious and cultural difference on a massive scale. Only in the nineteenth century did it rescind its purity-of-blood policy, by which time a more insidious form of racism was taking hold of Europe’s imagination.

Obviously, the expulsion of Moors and Moriscos from Spain and the multiple decrees to prevent Muslims from residing anywhere in Spain’s empire across the Atlantic did not eliminate Muslim presence from either continent. Despite authorities’ repeated attempts to prevent their presence in the New World, both Jews and Muslims (among other undesirable groups) were part of the sixteenth-century transatlantic culture. The Moorish legacy was introduced to the Americas by the Spaniards themselves, for Spain was so hopelessly multicultural that neither the Inquisition nor the expulsion of Jews and Moors was sufficient to cleanse its heritage from centuries of cultural borrowing and influences. Islam was, thus, paradoxically carried to the Americas in the arms of Christian conquistadors.

Christian Spain’s long history of clashes with the Moors was encoded in the names and design of new towns and expressed in a variety of cultural practices. America’s indigenous people, makers of some of the greatest civilizations in history, were treated like Moors and subjected to a relentless war of extermination. “The conquest of the Indians,” wrote Francisco López de Gómara in his Historia general de las indias (1552), “began after that of the Moors was completed, so that Spaniards would ever fight the infidels.”12 Indians were seen as less than human, unworthy of much except total submission to European rule. “God has never created a race more full of vice and composed without the least mixture of kindness or culture,” the Dominican Tomás Ortiz told the Council of the Indies, the king-appointed body that had ultimate authority over Spain’s extensive dominions.13 The crusade against Indians was devastating, but the persecuted natives resisted as best they could, thereby extending the Christian-Muslim war, at the symbolic level, to our times.

The Moors also arrived in America as black slaves who set out to fight for their rights from the moment they landed. Like their coreligionists in Spain, the Moriscos, Muslim slaves in the Americas resisted oppression and held on to their faith and languages in spite of isolation and the passing of time. Because Islam reconnects many contemporary African Americans “with a heritage of Afro-Islamic identity that was broken by the Atlantic slave trade,” Robert Dannin has called the conversion of African Americans to Islam (which turns the converts into a “double minority”) a “black pilgrimage to Islam.”14 As late as 1964, Malcolm X could still provocatively claim that he was not an American but “one of the 22 million black people who are victims of Americanism.”15 The story of African Muslims in America is the subject of “New World Moors,” the second chapter of this book. Although this aspect of American history still requires a more systematic academic approach, I take heart in the admirable pioneering scholars whose work has guided me in my own explorations.

Muslims found their way to the New World and Islam survived in European culture, either through its extensive cultural legacy or, in one of the most remarkable episodes of Semitic solidarity in the face of an upstart European civilization, through many Jews’ identification with Islam and Moorish traditions. Many Jews, or “Mosaic Arabs” in the expression of Britain’s legendary prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, adopted their Islamic heritage to better resist Europe’s design on the Orient and its people. Thus, as Africans were struggling against slavery and racism in the United States, and America as a whole, by relying on the strength that Islam provides, Jews in Europe were proudly displaying their Moorish heritage to counter European anti-Semitism with the claim that they belonged to the far grander stock of the Arab nation. Not only did many prominent Jews, including Disraeli, see themselves as Arabs or admire the Islamic faith, but also many Jewish communities used Moorish designs to build their synagogues, some claiming that Moorish architecture was the closest to the original model of their ancient temple in Jerusalem. The U.S. government, recognizing the close cultural bonds of Jews and Muslims, deliberately appointed the former to important ambassadorial and consular posts in Muslim nations such as Turkey. When the Jewish Simon Wolf, biographer of Mordecia Noah, was appointed consul in Cairo in 1881, right in the midst of Ahmad ‘Urabi’s revolt against the corrupt khedive and his Western masters, Wolf sympathized with the revolt and expressed a not-uncommon view: “As an Israelite, a brother of the Arab branch of the human family, I fully appreciate all [the Egyptians] long for. I feel grateful for Mahammadens for their shelter and protection and [the] freedom my brethren enjoyed for years in Moslem countries.”16 I examine such affinities in chapter 3, titled “Muslim Jews,” by looking at the common fate of Jews and Muslims as Christian Europe’s Others since the Middle Ages. As the Christians launched the Crusades against Muslims, Jews came to be seen as “Muslims” at home and therefore were persecuted as the natural allies of the crusaders’ Muslim enemies. To cite but one example: in 1321, one year before they were expelled from France, French Jews were accused of conspiring with Moors in Spain and Morocco to poison wells and were burned.17

Indeed, Jews and Arabs were rather indiscernible in the European imagination well into the modern period, partly because, as Gil Anidjar points out in his book Semites (2008), race and religion operated in one and the same register. Religion, a nineteenth-century European concept, was simply a cover for race. This explains why the prominent French philologist Ernest Renan’s declared war on la chose sémitique (the Semitic thing) targeted Jews and Arabs indiscriminately: both religious communities represented “the Semitic spirit” in its purest form. In this reading, ancient Israel is part of Arab culture—a defective part, to be sure, as the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated in his description of Jews as Palestinians. Thus, in Renan’s quest for a higher social order, the “eternal war” on the Semite “will not cease until the last son of Ishmael has died of misery or has been relegated to the ends of the desert by way of terror.”18 Reading through this history makes us wonder how things ended up the way they are now, especially if Zionism itself would not have been conceivable without the Jews’ strong consciousness of their oriental heritage.19 Even the atheist Karl Marx, the dark-featured descendant of German Jews, was called “Moor” by his family and close friends. It was as a Moor that the man who announced the specter of communism signed his last letter to Friedrich Engels in January 1883.20

It is within this broad historical context that the current debate over Muslim and Hispanic immigration in Europe and the United States (the subject of chapter 4, “Undesirable Aliens: Hispanics in America, Muslims in Europe”) begins to appear to be another instance of Spain’s crusading medieval spirit, another anxious quest for national purity, even as the world’s communities are increasingly aware of the instabilities generated by a global economic system that pays no heed whatsoever to such archaic sentiments. With the assimilation of the Jews and their migration to Israel, the Moors of old returned to Europe as immigrants unable to fully assimilate into European culture. Anti-Semitism, which condemned Jews to exclusion because of their racial unfitness during the high age of nationalism, has now given way to Islamophobia, the new political platform of the European Right, allowing right-wing movements to shed their old, untenable hatred of Jews and replace it with the condemnation of Islam as a culture that is incompatible with the principles and high aspirations of a European civilization.21 (Islamophobia is a term that is assumed to be of recent coinage but was, in fact, used as early as 1966 by the Peruvian scholar Rafael Guevara Bazán to describe sixteenth-century Spain’s fear of Muslim immigration to the New World.) These immigrants, like their Hispanic counterparts in the United States, are now triggering the free rein of ancient prejudices. In the chapter I will read Samuel Huntington’s book on Hispanic immigration, Who Are We? (2005)—a natural follow-up to his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order—within this context and the long history of nativism and Anglo-Saxon racism in the United States. With the idea that nations and civilizations have immutable cultural and racial characteristics being given such academic legitimacy, no wonder journalists and pundits who preach the same message are finding receptive audiences in both Europe and, particularly, the United States.

Europe, in the Spenglerian pessimism and doomsday predictions of anti-Muslim immigrant advocates, has turned into Eurabia, a concept borrowed from the title of a newsletter founded in 1975 and given ominous connotations by the Egyptian-born, Switzerland-based British citizen Bay Ye’or (the pen name of Giselle Litmann), author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005). Such conspiracy-laden views were once associated with the neofascist fringe but have now entered the cultural mainstream, not only diffused by pundits and journalists such as the late renowned and controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (“the grand dame of Eurabian discourse,” in Matt Carr’s expression)22 and the Canadian conservative Mark Steyn, but also invoked by scholars such as Bernard Lewis, the historian Niall Ferguson, and Winston Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert. It is in this sense that the fear of European cultural and racial extinction dovetails seamlessly with Samuel Huntington’s thesis in Who Are We?

Consider, for instance, the warnings of Fallaci following the attacks of 9/11. During her self-imposed exile in Manhattan, she witnessed the tragedy from close range and decided to embark on a “crusade of words” and fight back the “nazifascism” of Islamic fundamentalism—a laudable goal, if that’s what Islamic fundamentalism is—and take on any challenges that might result. In The Rage and the Pride (2002), her initial salvo (or “sermon,” as she called it) against Islam in the West, Fallaci downplays the Muslim contribution to world civilization, because she is far more concerned about the assault of Islamic fundamentalism on Western culture and traditions.23 With a few exceptions, such as the medieval Aristotelian philosopher Averroës, as well as “some poets and some mosques and the way of writing the numbers,” Islam, she asserts, doesn’t even come close to matching the achievements of the West.24 Yet it is this backward civilization, blindly praised and defended by a host of politically correct or liberal westerners, that is now threatening the great achievements of Europe. Little do these duplicitous “cicadas,” as Fallaci calls the self-defeating Western liberals, know that only the United States could save the West from the Muslim barbarians.25 These are the same views advanced by Canadian conservative Mark Steyn, whose doomsday warning about the Islamic takeover of the West in the book America Alone (2006) not only made the New York Times best-seller list but also was read and recommended by President George W. Bush. “You can’t win a war of civilizational confidence,” the witty, tough-minded Steyn commented, “with a [European] population of nanny-state junkies.”26

Predictably, the ailing Fallaci’s uncensored comments turned her into the “Orhyena” of the liberals she dismissed—as the Italian newspaper La Repubblica dubbed her, an ignorant “exhibitionist posing as the Joan of Arc of the West”27—but she also became a darling of political conservatives who shared her views. While the author’s courage for writing The Rage and the Pride and denouncing Islam after 9/11 was suspected by the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy to be a new form of anti-Semitism, it was praised by French philosophers such as Alain Finkielkraut and American conservatives.28 In a speech she gave in New York to the Center of the Study of Popular Culture on November 28, 2005, during which she was awarded the Annie Taylor Award in recognition of her “resistance to Islamo-fascism,” whose Qur’an is the “Mein Kampf of a religion which has always aimed to eliminate the others,” she was once again unsparing in her hatred of liberals and members of the “Caviar Left,” the new Torquemadas such as Noam Chomsky and the filmmaker Michael Moore, people she hated “as much as I hated Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and Company.” She reminded her admirers in New York that they were a truly embattled group, “outlaws-heretics-dissidents” fighting, against overwhelming odds, a mostly Islamophilic, Westphobic, and anti-American media. (Before she gave this speech, she had been indicted by an Italian judge for vilipendio, or defamation, and expected to stand trial in June 2006.)29 Neither of the Left nor of the Right, and considering herself a mere “revolutionary” struggling for “the No,” Fallaci was already seeing the time when Europeans would become “natives,” the “indigenous” or the “aborigines” of the continent.30

Fallaci’s New York speech capped a fascinating, Cassandra-like warning in The Force of Reason (2006), a book she again translated herself, from the Italian La Forza della ragione, as if the betrayals of translation pertaining to such life-and-death matters as the Muslim invasion of Europe were somehow attenuated by the use of awkward idiomatic and syntactic English. Feeling persecuted by a new, secular inquisition that tortures the soul, not the body, the “Christian atheist” Fallaci was bent on alerting a somnolent Europe to the fact that, like Troy, it is burning, because Europe is becoming a province, a “colony” of Islam. Remember, she said, had Charles Martel not won the battle of Poitiers in 732, the French also would be dancing the flamenco. Because of this historical precedent, the tens of millions of Muslims living in Europe (however defined) today constitute the new armies of Muslim reconquest. The eighth-century French, as Mark Steyn suggests, had the unshakable will to repel the marauding Muslim armies, but “today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman.”31 Consequently, Europe has become a real Eurabia with pure Arab or Maghrebian cities such as Marseilles. The case of Spain is even worse, for in this border zone “Islamization [sic] occurs with more spontaneity,” as if Islam were in the blood. The Muslim Albaicín quarter in Granada is literally a state within a state, even with its own currency! (Fallaci didn’t seem to realize that Albaicín is the old morería, or Muslim ghetto, of post-Reconquista Granada.)

In Italy, too, Fallaci finds attempts to carve out similar Muslim spaces. Not only that, but Muslims in Fallaci’s country are trying to ban the teaching of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures, and Voltaire’s works (because of his Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète), as well as to erase offensive frescoes in cathedrals, bury their own against health regulations, build mosques against zoning laws, and so on—all with the sheepish complicity of liberals and leftists. Of course, there are now grand mosques in all the major capitals of Europe, let alone the hundreds of smaller ones that dot the continent.32 Don’t self-hating Europeans know, Fallaci asks, that Constantinople was desecrated by Muslim rapists and pedophiles, and that the Crusades were a “counter-offensive,” and don’t Italians remember when their ancestors, on the lookout for marauding Ottomans, screamed, “Mamma, li turchi!” (Mother, the Turks!)?33 Despite such views, Fallaci insists that she is not a right-wing conspiracy monger, particularly given that what passes for Right and Left today are mere semantic fictions, for the “filthy, reactionary, obtuse, feudal Right” has not been a feature of Europe since the American and French revolutions; this Right has survived only in Latin America (“where western civilization is a dream never achieved”) and, especially, in the world of Islam.34 Thus, in one inadvertent stroke, Fallaci manages to conflate Muslims and Latinos as anti-Euro-American and invites us to consider the two social groups as a serious threat to the West.

While Europe’s high culture is being besieged by the invasion of Muslim hordes, unchecked Hispanic immigration, the conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan warns in his State of Emergency (2006), is hastening the death of the United States and the end of Western civilization. If Europe has become Eurabia, California is already Mexifornia, paving the way for further inroads into the nation’s Anglo identity. Enthralled by the god of markets and influenced by the elites’ empty talk about diversity and multiculturalism (since, unlike the anti-immigrant working classes, elites rarely have to live next door to poor Spanish-speaking immigrants), U.S. political leaders have lost all will to defend their nation and heritage, even when an intifada has already erupted at the U.S.-Mexican border. Though his treatise is devoted mostly to the United States, Buchanan takes some time to reflect on European affairs, calling the presence of 20 million Muslim immigrants Europe’s “return of the Moor.” He displays a sense of history that is central to the argument of this book, namely, that the Western civilization that emerged in the aftermath of the defeat of Islam in Spain is coming to an end: “From 1492 to 1914, Europeans went forth to conquer, colonize, and command the peoples of this earth. Then, between 1914 and 1945, Europe’s imperial powers indulged themselves in two of the bloodiest wars in all history, on their own continent. Comes now the closing chapter: the colonization of the mother countries by the children of the subject peoples that Europe once ruled.”35 Let us be clear, says Buchanan in the last chapter of his book, “Last Chance”: “The existential crisis of Western civilization does not come from Islamic terrorism” but from the West’s “paralysis” on the issue of immigration.

Instead of seeing the current form of national identity as no longer suitable for new global realities, as I will eventually show, Buchanan gives biological and tribal shapes to nations, unwittingly taking us back to medieval and early modern Spain, for it was there that national identities, made possible by the persecution of Jewish and Muslim minorities, were imagined in such terms for the first time. It’s hard to remember that much (but not all) of what applies to Muslim minorities today once applied to the Jews as well. To its credit, when reviewing Fallaci’s The Force of Reason, the conservative New York Sun (now a defunct publication) thought it prudent to make a connection that is ultimately the problem with this sort of nationalism:

The more serious problem is the sweeping nature of [Fallaci’s] condemnation of Islam and Muslims. She faults them for the fact that “they breed like rats”; for requiring their meat to be slaughtered in a “barbaric” manner she says is similar to kosher butchery; for having their own schools, hospitals, and cemeteries; for immigrating; and for wanting accommodation of their religious holidays and Sabbath in schools and workplaces.

Much of her complaint about Islam, in other words, might as well be directed at Orthodox Jews, and a good deal of it at American Catholics.36

The attack on Muslim and Hispanic immigrants is not merely an academic matter. I will discuss the case of the two communities more extensively later in the book, but it’s worth noting here that political and legislative debates in Europe and the United States are very much attuned to such “warnings.” Although both Moroccans and Mexicans have strong historical attachments to the nations they are now trying to immigrate to, the Spanish scholar Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo has argued, Spain (and, by extension, Europe) and the United States imagine their southern borders as the last defense against the dissolution of their national identities.37

Not long after Fallaci, Steyn, and Buchanan issued their apocalyptic sermons, an extreme right-wing Swiss political party, eager to warn Swiss citizens about the perils of unchecked immigration from darker nations, including Muslim ones, published a picture of three white sheep standing on the Swiss flag while kicking a black one out. The Swiss People’s Party, or SVP, claimed that its anti-immigrant policies, including the deportation of the innocent relatives of immigrants who committed crimes (a common practice in Nazi Germany), were simply a security measure designed to protect the purity of the Swiss nation.38 Around the same time, French-and Dutch-speaking Belgians, caught in a heated argument over the identity of a nation divided between Wallonia and Flanders, abruptly suspended their squabbles and united over the threat immigrants posed to their country.39 A few months before the Belgians and the Swiss publicly wrestled over what to with their Muslim immigrants, the U.S. Congress and the White House had come to a virtual standstill over the issue of illegal, particularly Hispanic and Mexican, immigration. For many U.S. politicians and scholars, the matter was not to be taken lightly: as Buchanan suggested, the bedraggled, Spanish-speaking border crosser or settler has become the ultimate security threat to the American nation. According to this logic, the Mexican state, which actively encourages immigration and promotes the rights of its citizens in the United States, might as well be blacklisted as a sponsor of terrorism.

It’s hard to find the right place to start when talking about the swirling debate over Hispanic immigration in the United States, but one place as good as any is an April 2006 speech by President George W. Bush, who came into office promising some sort of entente with President Vicente Fox of Mexico on the contentious subject. Bush, addressing an audience in Orange County, California (one of the most anti-Hispanic enclaves in that state, as we shall see), acknowledged to business leaders that the topic of immigration is “emotional” and that, regardless of what position one might take on it, “massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic. It’s just not going to work. You can hear people out there hollering it’s going to work. It’s not going to work.”40 What is remarkable about President Bush’s statement, repeated when he spoke directly to the nation from the Oval Office on May 15 of that same year, is that deporting an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants must have been a serious option—or else why would he plead with his audience to realize the impossibility of the task?41 Relieved that mass deportation was not an option, one man wrote to the New York Times and described what such an operation might entail:

First, each arrest would require probable cause. (A bullhorn and a police wagon will not suffice.) And if the arrestee declined to speak and had no papers, an investigation would have to be conducted to determine where he hailed from. Scores of lockups and courts would have to be built, and thousands of police officers and judges would have to be hired. Many, many vehicles for transporting the deportees would need to be procured. . . . Some illegal immigrants would die trying to escape apprehension, and others would die on the journey home. Some would lose their possessions; others, their loved ones. Not pretty. Not pretty at all.42

Reading this, I couldn’t help but hear a disturbing echo of sixteenth-century Spain’s high-level deliberations on what to do with the Moors and Moriscos, as chapter 1 will show. The Times reader’s picture of the logistics involved and the impact on the deportees and the society at large is eerily reminiscent of the periodic persecutions visited on the Moors after 1492. The more I listened to the acrimonious dispute over the fate of illegal aliens in the United States, the more I realized the extent to which modern Western nations are still operating by the principles of Spanish conquistadors and inquisitors in their war against Islam. Spain’s crusade for religious purity was not a blessing to that nation, but the delusion that a nation could regain its strength by excluding those who are different, the minorities who don’t belong to the common stock, continues to drive states to the brink of folly.

The controversy over immigration reform emerged when the House of Representatives passed the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005—better known as HR 4437—sponsored by the Republican representatives F. James Sensenbrenner, from Wisconsin, and Peter King, from New York, and passed (233 to 189) on December 16, 2005, making illegal aliens and those who harbor or assist them felons, tightening up the Mexico-U.S. border, and screening inbound airline passengers to the United States, among many other tough, security-minded provisions.43 Interfaith organizations quickly signed a statement to denounce this scheme and highlight the obligation, stated in the Bible and Qur’an, to honor the stranger as one’s own.44 Cardinal Roger Mahony openly declared his dissent in the pages of the New York Times and led marches in Los Angeles, the largest archdiocese in the nation, which is also “75 percent Latino.”45 Such Las Casas–like figures and dozens of similarly minded organizations soon inspired some of the largest mass protests in American history.46 On March 25, 2006, tens of thousands of Hispanics and their allies protested in cities across the nation; in Los Angeles alone, between 500,000 and 1 million people, including thousands of students waving Mexican flags and chanting “Viva Mexico!” marched to denounce this draconian bill. “Attendance at the demonstration,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “far surpassed the number of people who protested against the Vietnam War.”47 A few weeks later, even bigger rallies were staged around the nation. In Dallas, more than 350,000 people came out in support of immigrants’ rights. One granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who had fled czarist Russia joined the crowds in New York to register her solidarity.48 More powerfully, the bill reminded Andrew S. Grove, a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany and former chairman of Intel Corporation, of his own childhood experience hiding from the Nazis in Hungary. “I saw,” Grove wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “how the persecution of non-Jewish Hungarians who hid their Jewish friends or neighbors cast a wide blanket of fear over everyone. This fear led to mistrust, and mistrust led to hostility, until neighbors turned upon neighbors in order to protect themselves. Is this what we want?”49

In fact, even when they came to the United States as “displaced persons” in the 1950s, Holocaust survivors were met with the same disdain and persecution reserved today for other minorities. So harsh was their treatment at times that one survivor, a father of three, told his caseworker that “he was more concerned and more disturbed now than he had ever been in the Warsaw Ghetto.” These survivors turned out to be far more resilient and a more important asset to their new nation than any of the patriotic officers who harassed them. As with the Jews of that era, Pedro Biaggi, the boyish “host of the morning show on Washington’s 99.1 El Zol,” declared in 2006, “Never have we Latinos felt as insecure and persecuted as we do now. I’m Puerto Rican. But I’m brown, too.” But Biaggi added, “I am my audience, and I feel totally committed to helping them.” A Salvadoran construction worker agreed that “racism in this country has grown so much it’s time to say, ‘Enough!’”50

Of course, the strong anti-immigrant forces haven’t vanished. (After all, polls often show that most Americans are against illegal immigration.) In 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that Michelle Dallacroce, a Lexus SUV driver, had formed Mothers against Illegal Aliens “because she feared for the future of her two young children, who could be ignored in a United States dominated by Mexican-born people.” Without a moment’s hesitation, she described Mexicans’ invasion of her country and their use of social services as “genocide” and “rape” (exactly how Fallaci described the Muslim takeover of Europe).51 When flared tempers calmed down a bit and the issue began to fade from view after the HR 4437 protests, Gustavo Arellano, a “fourth-generation descendant of naranjeros (orange pickers)” and the author of ¡Ask a Mexican! a column in the OC (Orange County, Calif.) Weekly, reflected on anti-Mexicanism as a whole—particularly in Orange County, headquarters to Taco Bell yet “the Mexican-bashing capital of the United States” and the very place where President Bush addressed business leaders, telling them that deportation was impractical. The occasion was the staging of The Mexican OC, a play that highlights the discrimination against Mexicans in the “county of milk and Mickey.” Grim as it is, the play, in Arellano’s view, nevertheless omits sentiments such as, “Illegal aliens shouldn’t be deported; they should be deep-fried,” a statement once made by a former Republican Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner and Newport Beach resident, Harold Ezell, as well as the common profiling of Mexicans as criminals. Racism explains Orange County’s “Mexi-phobic streak,” because the county’s “psyche is wired to view brown-skinned folks as perpetual peons.” It is that simple for Arellano.52

The prejudice against Latinos extended to the area of language, given that the category of Hispanic conflates race and language.53 When “Nuestro Himno,” the Spanish version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” whose chorus reads, “Tell me! Does its starry beauty still wave / Above the land of the free, / The sacred flag?” was aired in April 2006 (mostly on Spanish-language radio stations), the Anglo reaction was swift and immediate. President Bush commented that “people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English,” a comment he repeated in his address to the nation on May 15, 2006.54 (It is interesting to note that around the same time that the U.S. national hymn was produced in Spanish, Germans were debating whether to allow a Turkish version of their own.)55

Three days after Bush’s speech, the U.S. Senate voted to accept two amendments to its own immigration bill: one, by James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, declaring English the national language of the United States and directing the government and its agencies to communicate only in English, except in authorized cases; the other, simply adding the banal statement that English unites all Americans. Both measures seem to have been founded on nativist fears, given that a university study, based on the 2000 census, had reported in 2004 that children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants preferred English over any other language. The New York Times lashed out at this insidious form of xenophobia masquerading as public policy, a policy that is, moreover, “exclusionary, potentially discriminatory and embarrassingly hostile to the rest of the world.” The Times made a point of reminding its readers of the nativist strain that runs through American history, citing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Know-Nothings, and the Ku Klux Klan as examples.56 However, one can go even further, both in space and in time, to realize that the “Hispanic panic,” as the great-great-grandson of a Swedish immigrant who died speaking his native tongue in Iowa put it, is a problem with deeper roots in the United States and also applies to Muslims in Europe.57 A few months before Senator Inhofe’s amendment passed, the Netherlands’ conservative minister of integration and immigration, Rita Verdonk, caused an uproar in her homeland by sharing her plans to allow only Dutch to be spoken in the streets.58 (Verdonk was the same woman who infuriated much of the Western world by trying to revoke the citizenship of the Somali-born critic of Islam and member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali because Ali had misrepresented her biography to gain asylum and, later, citizenship.)59

In reporting on the passage of Senator Inhofe’s amendment (the vote was 63 to 34), the British Independent titled the news “At Last, America Has an Official Language (and Yes, It’s English).” The newspaper saw fit to add the facts that the colonists attempted to defeat German for the honor of the national language; that German was the language of instruction for 6 percent of American schoolchildren before World War I (losing ground only when German Americans became suspect fifth columnists, as Marc Shell shows in his study of language politics in America);60 and that today more than 47 million Americans “speak a language other than English at home.”61

In fact, German was such a contender for the American colonies’ primary language that, in 1732, Benjamin Franklin published the first German newspaper in North America. Perhaps because of the failure of this venture, he turned against both Germans and their ways. In “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751), Franklin complained about German aliens—“Palatine boors,” he called them—who stuck to their native ways and resisted anglicization, settlers who “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”62 Did we hear “complexion”? Yes, because for Franklin, most Europeans (including the French, Swedes, and Germans) were “swarthy” and only the English were truly white. “These are the arguments used against Italians, Jews, and others a hundred years ago,” comments Roger Daniels, a senior historian of American immigration, “and may be heard today against ‘Mexicans, Latinos, Hispanics, etc.’ The targets have changed, but the complaints remain largely the same. Their gravamen is simply this: they are not like us.”63 That immigrants often speak and write in their native tongues is, of course, a common experience in American history. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen reminded his readers in 2006, early in the twentieth century Henry Adams expressed contempt for the Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Lower East Side of New York City, yet the people “doing Kosher” printed newspapers in their native language to participate in the democratic life of their adopted land, and their progeny grew up to be masters of English, while their old quarters have turned into the chic East Village.64 Things do change.

Spanish is not considered good enough for Anglo-American democracy; it’s the language of the “brown-skinned” folks, the “peons” who should be “deep-fried.” When an article published in the National Interest around the same time that HR 4437 was passing in Congress (fall 2005) sets out to explain that Anglos are best suited to rule the world because of their innate comfort with capitalism and long history of good governance, both of which generate the necessary wealth to arm them adequately for their global tasks,65 one gets a sense that Pedro Biaggi, the radio host, and Gustavo Arellano, the OC Weekly columnist, are confronting deeply ingrained nativist and racist forces that only a demographic overhaul of this self-conscious, exclusive world could force to change.

Not long after the uproar over and the fiasco of HR 4437 (only the border-fence provision, reintroduced as the Secure Fence Act on September 13, 2006, was rescued from the comprehensive immigration act and passed by the Senate), Senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, introduced the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 to bring an end to the escalating issue. Although President Bush supported legalizing qualified aliens, the vitriol generated by interest groups and right-wing organizations, such as NumbersUSA, led to the removal of the bill from the Senate agenda on June 28, 2007. During the debate on the Senate floor, Republican senators Mel Martinez, of Florida, Richard Burr, of North Carolina, and Lindsay Graham, of South Carolina, received threatening calls and letters urging them to oppose the “amnesty bill.” Senator Graham knew that racism was the issue. “Nobody likes to talk about it,” he said, “but a very small percentage of people involved in this debate really have racial and bigoted remarks. The tone that we create around these debates, whether it be rhetoric in a union hall or rhetoric on talk radio, it can take people who are on the fence and push them over emotionally.” A cosponsor of the bill, Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, asked about his opponents’ plans: “What are they going to do with the 12 million who are undocumented here? Send them back to countries around the world? Develop a type of Gestapo here to seek out these people that are in the shadows?” Fears of globalization and anxiety over jobs and stability were definitely a significant factor in the emotional debates surrounding the bill (major U.S. businesses supported the bill), but there was also no doubt that immigrants were seen as a cultural threat to the nation. Tom Tancredo, the Republican representative of a privileged, mostly white Denver suburb in Colorado and a presidential aspirant, simply said, “I believe we are in a clash of civilizations.”66

Thus, while nations are stumbling over one another to sign free-trade agreements, fences and boundaries, both real and digital, are being mounted on the fault lines separating poverty and wealth to maintain the fiction of national essences. The truth is that the edges of privilege are being militarized within and between nations, as gated communities and other exclusive housing schemes dot the global landscape to keep the approaching hordes of barbarians at safe distances. As I argue in the conclusion, “We Are All Moors,” to think that displays of militant chauvinism are an answer to the question of legal and illegal immigration in a world marked by massive social inequities, or that nativist crusades against trespassers and those who are different could preserve the elusive identities we imagine for ourselves, is simply to delay the day of reckoning and aggravate the fallout from the clashes still lying ahead. There is reason to believe that the forced exclusion of minorities will lead to the unity and stability imagined by national purists or scheming politicians. Yet, more than five hundred years after Castile captured Granada and expelled Jews, the Iberian Peninsula’s unity has never materialized in quite the way the Catholic Monarchs had dreamed. (The Catalans and Basques, for instance, continue to resist Castilian hegemony to this day.) Furthermore, globalization has turned us all into strangers desperately reaching out to dreams of wholeness, and unless we reconsider the notion of human economies that enrich lives not as specters to be exorcised from our imagination but as virtues to be eagerly embraced, chasing Moors and minorities will remain a futile pursuit and a dangerous and colossal waste of time in a world that has yet to find its way out of medieval obsessions.

If I pay attention to Spain and limit my discussion to African Americans, Jews, and immigrants in this book, it is because I was born and spent my formative years in the Moroccan city of Tangier, only a few miles away from the edges of Europe and the older realm of Christendom. This ancient, borderline city, renowned for its laissez-faire attitudes, where calls for any kind of purity keep stumbling over the imperfections of our human nature and our multiple ethnicities, has certainly shaped my approach to the charged concepts of culture, history, and community. On our side of the Mediterranean, I was on Berber, African, Arab, and Muslim land at once. I also grew up in close proximity to vibrant Jewish traditions that long preceded the arrival and institutionalization of Islam. From my experience with Jewish neighbors who shared in our joys and tragedies, and the constant support I got from my American Jewish mentors and friends, I knew instinctively that Jews and Muslims share more than they realize. Morocco’s sense of kinship with its ancient Semitic heritage used to be displayed on the emblem of the nation, for the Moroccan flag, before the French colonialists brought their own prejudices, once featured the seal of Solomon (Star of David), not the five-pointed star (pentagram) we see today.

When Muslim terrorists attacked a synagogue (among other targets) in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, 1 million Moroccans, including Muslims and Jews, refused to be intimidated or divided, joined hands, and walked out in protest, a remarkable event described by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as “an amazing, and unprecedented, sight.” Almost four years later, Serge Berdugo, the president of the Moroccan Jewish Community Council, wrote, “As the flames of anti-Semitism continue to be fanned across much of the Islamic world, there is a risk that today’s youth will grow up believing that Arabs and Jews were simply not meant to coexist, let alone thrive together. That idea conflicts with history—and is a falsehood today.”67 As if to illustrate his point, in 2007 a Jewish author of books on Jewish life in Morocco, Maguy Kakon, a member of the newly created Parti du centre social (Party of the Social Center) who traces her family origins back to the fourteenth century, ran for a parliamentary seat in September elections and was helped and warmly received by her head-covered Muslim fellow citizens in some of the poorest districts in Casablanca. (She was one of five Jewish candidates.)68

In July 2008, hundreds of Jews from around the world converged on the coastal city of Safi to pray at the shrine of Abraham Ben Zmirro, “a rabbi reputed to have fled persecution in Spain in the 15th century.” These pilgrims, led by Aaron Monsenego, the great rabbi of Morocco, were joined by the governor of Safi and other Muslim dignitaries, who all prayed for the health of the reigning Moroccan king and his family. Although Morocco may seem unique these days (it’s the only country in the Arab world with a Jewish museum), Muslims there did, and continue to, come to the rescue of their Jewish neighbors, as Albanians did during World War II and Muslim Iraqis did in 2003 when they formed a militia to protect a synagogue.69 The more I read on this subject, the more I realized that Jewish-Muslim ties were even stronger in the centuries leading up to the mid-twentieth century, despite genuine theological differences and the not-inconsequential episodes of Jewish persecution by Muslims.

At only nine miles from our Mediterranean shore, Spain clearly framed the daily horizons of my youthful vision. I never learned Spanish in school, but I managed to use the language by watching soccer games and music shows on television, reading magazines, and talking to friends (whether Spaniards or not) in the streets and cafés of Tangier. I was able to get a closer look at Spanish culture, with its indelible Moorish traits and strong drive for membership in the European Union. Many people in Tangier read Spain’s quest for this northbound modernity as an attempt to repudiate its Moorish legacy, but we also knew that Spain was no typical European country. Spain was part of who we were; it was our rival and semblable at once.

No Christian country’s fate has been more intertwined with Islam. Even as Spanish crusaders, with the help of foreign legionnaires, spent centuries trying to reclaim the lands lost to Islam in 711, the peninsula they were trying to liberate was being molded into an indelibly multicultural place. As the Song of Roland, composed around 1100, tells us, French foreigners such as Charlemagne (grandson of the same Charles Martel who repelled Muslims from Poitiers in 732), with little knowledge of Islam, launched crusades to defeat Muslim kings in Spain. Yet in the Poem of El Cid, composed a century later, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the legendary Spanish man of the people known as El Cid (from the honorific title in Arabic sayyid, or “master”), a warrior familiar with the shifting fortunes of Iberian kingdoms, liked and disliked by Muslims and Christians alike, harbored none of the zealotry expressed by his northern neighbors, whose image of Muslims was mostly imaginary. This explains why the distant French, in their ignorance of Spain’s complex social realities, saw the world in black and white, a view that, unfortunately, would over time grow into the policies of exclusion and give rise to the political structures of our own world. Even Alfonso VI, the king of Léon and Castile who conquered Toledo in 1085 and banished El Cid in 1089, proclaimed himself “Emperor of the Two Religions.”70

It is true that memories of the Moorish invasion linger. A Spanish-Moroccan dispute over an uninhabited rock in the Mediterranean in the summer of 2002 and the terrorist attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004, brought ancient grievances back into public view. El Mundo, a major Spanish newspaper, published a special report titled “Morocco: The Unfaithful Brother,” on the old war with the Moors, to provide background information to what was essentially a trivial border dispute. When the conservative prime minister José María Aznar, a major ally of President Bush who would be defeated in the 2004 elections following the Madrid attacks, addressed students at Georgetown University, he told them that the battle of Islam began in 711: “Spain’s problem with Al-Qaida starts in the eighth century . . . when a Spain recently invaded by the Moors refused to become just another piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its identity.” So influenced was Aznar by his country’s legacy of the Reconquista that he sent Spanish troops to Iraq with the cross of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moorslayer) on their uniforms.71 Yet Aznar’s memories, though widely shared, have not made Spain tougher on Islam; few European nations, if any, can match Spain’s liberal attempt to amnesty its illegal (mostly Muslim and Moroccan) immigrants, examine openly the wounds of history, and even consider granting Spanish citizenship to the long-expelled Moriscos. Spain is constantly being reminded of its Moorish heritage, although it has become a vibrant part of the European Union. Even when Spain was engaged in a colonial war in northern Morocco in the early twentieth century, Spanish writers such as Joaquín Costa openly rejected their country’s claim to a superior European heritage. “Spain and Morocco,” wrote Costa, “are two halves of a single geographical unit[;] they form a watershed whose exterior limits are the parallel ranges of the Atlas mountains to the south and the Pyrenees to the north. The Straits of Gibraltar are not a wall separating one house from the other. Quite the contrary, they are a gate opened by Nature to allow communication between two rooms in the same house.”72 It is this Spanish cultural and racial ambivalence that may hold the key to a more positive rapprochement between the West and Islam, as we shall see in the conclusion of this book, even if, as the great Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo noted during the dispute over the contested island in 2002, the Moor is still the target of an undying Spanish prejudice.73

Tangier is in Africa, too, which makes me African, whatever tint (depending on climate and season) my skin color may assume. Because Morocco is deeply connected to its African heritage, I developed a side interest first in Muslim slaves in the Americas, then in African American Islam as a whole. The epic journey of Muslim slaves in early America, as well as the significance of their legacy to contemporary African American history, is a story that has yet to take its proper place in the canons of American culture and world history. When it does, it may help us see the tortured relations between the United States and Islam in a different light.

To be from Tangier is to have grown up watching immigrants sailing away and back—sometimes legally, sometimes not—across the Straits of Gibraltar, the mythical Pillars of Hercules. Almost every family I knew had at least one member in a European country. It was, therefore, natural for me to develop an interest in Hispanic cultures when I came to the United States and eventually to pay attention to immigration issues. My discovery of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest tripled my interest in Spain and its legacies, as I saw Mexicans and New Mexicans, from all races and walks of life, work out their own vexed relationship with the country that had chartered their destiny, for better or worse. The further I looked at the fabric of Spanish America, the closer I felt to my native country. Gradually, the Mayas, Zapotecs, Navajos, and other indigenous people, as well as precolonial Mexico’s mestizo populations, turned into the mirror image of Moroccans with their mixed Berber-Arab heritage and its multiple layers of cultures, chief among them (especially in the north) the Spanish one. Historically, Mexico was a country fashioned by the same men who had fought Muslims and Moroccans. I could see that.

Like the unfortunate Moroccans and Africans who risk their lives to cross the treacherous waters of the straits to find a better life on Spanish farms and further beyond, in the glittery spaces of Europe, Mexicans and other Hispanics undergo perilous journeys to enter the United States. To watch culturally and spiritually rich humans risking their lives and enduring horrible travails to make economic ends meet not only saddens me deeply but also reminds me of the murderous parochialisms that still regulate our lives and limit our visions. The question of immigration is not marginal, although it seems to take place on the fringes of our lives, on the borderlines of our consciousness; quite the contrary, it is central to our sense of identity. The way we deal with or, better yet, see immigrants and all those who do not fit into our conception of the prototypical citizen will probably determine the future of our civilization. If progressive thinkers don’t make an effort to educate their fellow citizens about the perils of imagined identities in the age of globalization, national purists, in the name of cultural or racial ideologies, could conceivably push us into further strife, if they don’t reproduce outright the climate that led to the horrors visited upon defenseless minorities in the not-so-distant past.

But to understand how we got here, we need to start from the beginning; we have to trek our way back to the old battles of Christians and Muslims, the ones that gave shape to the modern world we live in. For our current notions of sovereignty, national identity, and minorities in the West are the outcome of the Christian crusading mind-set that was sharpened in endless wars against Islam. Like the Jews yesterday, African Americans, Hispanics, and other strangers who inhabit hostile nations precariously are, in the final analysis, reincarnations of the Moor. This, I hope, will be made clear in the pages that follow.