Preface

In November 2005, I gave a talk at the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, titled “Moors Redux.” The talk was a variation on my chapter “Other Worlds, New Muslims” in Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age (2004), but the enthusiastic response from the audience, including from New Mexico’s luminaries Tomás Atencio, E. A. “Tony” Mares, and Enrique Lamadrid, that Sunday evening, together with the eloquent comments of Carlos Vásquez, the cultural director of the center, encouraged me to think about a book-length project. An invitation from the medievalist Ibtissam Bouachrine to share my views on the “post-Andalusian condition” at Smith College and the generous feedback of Roberto Márquez of Mount Holyoke College further convinced me that this book is worth writing. Other friends and colleagues along the way kept the flame of interest burning. A special note of thanks must, however, be reserved, yet again, to my friend Michael Morris for arranging the NHCC event, including a moving performance by the musical group Crisol Luz, led by Tomás Lozano. Tomás, a talented musician and historian, was born near Barcelona to a family from Granada, and his study of New Mexico’s musical traditions has been quite enlightening and helpful. Not only did Tomás and his band honor me with “A la una,” a haunting medieval Sephardic song from my native city of Tangier, but also, during the question-and-answer session, he stood up and proudly declared that he, too, is a Moor when he is in northern Spain. By suggesting that even a Spaniard in the wrong part of Spain could be treated as a Moor (as a Muslim was, and still is, commonly known in that country), Tomás provided the strongest and most ironic confirmation of this book’s thesis—that since the defeat of Islam in medieval Spain, minorities in the West have become, in some ways, reincarnations of the Moor, an enduring threat to Western civilization.

With such encouragement (and much thanks), I sallied forth, expanding on the Moorish connection to Africans and Hispanics in America, Jews in Europe, and nonwhite immigrants on both continents. I owe my interest in the shared destiny of Jews and Muslims almost entirely to Gil Anidjar, whose article for the magazine Tikkun (based on his extensive body of scholarship) on the semantic, to say the least, conflation of both religions in Nazi Germany I came across some years ago. That small article set me on a path of what was to me uncharted terrain, which turned into a totally engrossing voyage of discovery. Coming across Tom Reiss’s book The Orientalist was also a delightful surprise, one that brought to life a long-vanished world of Jews and Muslims that existed for me only in the hazy fables of childhood.

In September 2008, inspired by Max Harris’s sure-to-be-classic study of the popular festivals of mock battles between Moors and Christians, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain, and supported by a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New England, I attended the fiesta of moros y cristianos in Villena, a small town in the region of Alicante, Spain. There, armed with a press pass and camera, I was able to capture not only what seem to me the cultural origins of the long conflict between the West and Islam but also, as I shall indicate in the Conclusion, the possibility for living together in our troubled world. (A full discussion of the fiesta, which I attended after this book had gone into production, would simply take too long to discuss here.) For that successful trip, which included a quick visit to Santa Fe and Granada, I need to thank, first and foremost, my brother Rami, who worked scrupulously to arrange for my stay and work in Villena. I got all the help I needed from Antonio Martínez and Manolo Muñoz Hernandez, public relations manager and president, respectively, of the Junta Central de Fiestas de Moros y Cristianos; José Fernando Domene Verdú, probably the foremost historian and local expert on the fiesta of Villena; Francisco (Paco) Domenech Ferriz, a long-standing member of the Moros Realistas and now a good friend; and, finally, the gracious Rachida, known locally as Racha, who opened her home to me and my wife and allowed us to stay for a few days. A few festeros from one of the Christian companies, the Students, were equally gracious by sharing drinks, history, and memorabilia. Although this book deals only briefly with Villena, its title is, in some ways, a tribute to that town. When Max Harris attended the fiesta in 1992, it was one of his friends from Villena who told him, “We are all Moors.”

My trip to Spain was made richer by the help of my childhood friends from Tangier—Abdellatif (Tifo) Bouziane, of Málaga, and Mustafa Akalay, of Granada. Mustafa, who secured us entrance to the fabled Alhambra Palace at the last minute; hosted us at his restaurant, Tragaluz, deemed, by one account, the best Moorish restaurant in the city; and gave us a brief intellectual tour of the challenges and promises of coexistence in Spain, was quite generous with his time. It was also good to see that the diplomatic representation of my native Morocco in Spain was in the able hands of a very old friend from Tangier, Farid Aoulouhaj. Finally, the hospitality and love of my Spanish nephews Omar and Ismael, as well as those of Rosa and the whole Rodríguez family, reminded me of what we all have in common.

When I returned to Spain the following month for more explorations, my suspicion that Spain offers the way out for the hardened positions on both sides of the conflict between Islam and the West was further confirmed by my discussions with prominent Moroccan and Spanish scholars and activists in Granada, all introduced to me by my friend Mustafa. Professor Manuel Barrios Aquilera was kind enough to tell me about his scholarship on the Moriscos of Granada, whose plight is wonderfully captured in the title of one of his many books, La convivencia negada (Coexistence denied). Even more gratifying was my encounter with the Socialist Party’s representative in Catalonia’s parliament, Mohammed Chaib Akhdim, the first Muslim ever elected to high public office in Spain in modern memory. The Tangier native is a new Morisco, a proud Catalan and Spaniard who also cherishes his Moroccan Islamic heritage. If there is any promise of a new positive convivencia and productive assimilation, no one represents it better than this politician. By the time I left Barcelona, a glimpse of promise was in the air, not least because DNA studies continue to reveal the presence of indelible Jewish and Moorish traits in the Spanish body.

Part of the reason I wrote this book is to commemorate the quadricentennial of the royal decree to expel all Moriscos (forcibly baptized Muslims or Spaniards of Muslim descent) from the self-proclaimed Catholic nation. So significant was this tragic event that one Spanish commentator, Rafael Torres, declared 2009 “el año morisco” or “the Morisco year.” The approaching anniversary of this dark episode in our history had been constantly on my mind as I read and wrote. The encouragement of Nabil Matar, the indefatigable scholar of British–Muslim relations in the early modern period, strengthened my conviction that this was indeed a timely project. The long, critical comments I received from several readers and from members of the University of Minnesota Press’s faculty board, together with Tammy Zambo’s careful reading and excellent editorial skills, not only provided further affirmation but also helped turn my manuscript into a much better book. In the end, I remain mostly indebted to my editor Jason Weidemann for his critical engagement. Jason and his colleagues at the Press have made my intellectual pursuits so rewarding in the past few years. For an author to work with such a group of talented professionals is no small blessing. To them, and all the people mentioned here, I humbly extend my gratitude.

When I started working on this project at least three years ago, I suspected that part of the anxiety surrounding the issue of Muslim and Hispanic immigraton in Europe and America had something to do with the impending end of the age of Euro-American dominance in global affairs. Since then, a number of publications have emerged to confirm this assumption. In November 2008, soon after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued a report forecasting the decline of the United States in an increasingly multipolar world. In his book On Empire (2008), the veteran historian Eric Hobsbawm simply noted that, with the end of the classical age of empire, “we shall have to find another way of organizing the globalized world of the twenty-first century.” I hope this book helps us think further along that path.

I should note that my references to Samuel Huntington, whose work I discuss at some length in the book, are in the present tense. The world-renowned political scientist passed away on Christmas Eve, 2008. His ideas are very much alive and will continue to stimulate debate and discussion across disciplines, ideologies, languages, and even nations. I wonder how Huntington, who warned against the Hispanic menace and credited the Anglo-Saxon genius for the making of the United States, might have responded to the increasingly precarious economic and political situation of the United States today. What, for instance, do Hispanics have to do with the collapse of the U.S. and global financial structure in 2008? However much I disagree with his views, I have always read his work with much interest and, more importantly, engagement. Huntington’s death is a loss to all of us.

One last thought that I probably ought to share with readers familiar with my work, particularly my last book, A Call for Heresy, on the vital necessity of cultivating dissent in Islam and America: If that book was quite critical of Islamic thought and traditions, this book looks at the ways in which the West has been unable to overcome its old animosities toward Islam. When I tried to understand what drove me to work on seemingly unrelated projects, I realized that I am ultimately interested in liberalizing thought and politics, not in substituting new systems for old ones. This is, I think, the thread that runs through my whole work. All political and cultural traditions, however liberating at first, eventually turn into closed systems if there are no strong countermeasures to avoid this grim outcome. We do need generous heretics to help keep our vistas broad and our hearts capacious. Religions, cultures, and nationalities are boundaries of our own making. If we can’t undo them, we can at least enlarge their scope. By alienating those who are different, we end up alienating ourselves and diminishing our own lives. Heresies of the right kind may, in fact, set us free.