The Umayyad Caliphate was the second of the four major Islamic dynasties that spread both West and East, taking control of North Africa and West Asia. The Umayyads stormed the straits of Gibraltar and conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711 CE with staggering efficiency and pushed the existing Christian Visigoth Kingdom into the arid north.

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The Reconquista encompasses the following 800 year period of off-and-on warfare and primarily alludes to the Christian effort to reclaim the Peninsula. Christians would tell the story of the reconquest of Spain through a David and Goliath frame and use specific language in their historical texts to portray Muslims as savage, cruel, and oppressive. By the late 15th century, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella, the rulers of Catholic Spain, had conquered nearly all of modern-day Spain. The Fall of Granada and the loss of Alhambra marked the defeat of the Moors and the end of the Reconquista.

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 Once the Christians had control of Spain, mounting tensions between religious groups manifested themselves into the Spanish Inquisition. Following the Fall of Granada, Ferdinand issued the Alhambra Decree in 1492 which forced Jews to either convert to Catholicism, leave Spain, or die. Muslims faced similar oppression and persecution and converts from each religion that chose to stay in Spain would be called “Marranos” and “Moriscos” respectively. A series of decrees in Spain placed restrictions on Moorish culture including banning Arab names, writing, and traditional clothing, as written about in Mercedes García-Arenal’s “Religious Dissent and Minorities: The Morisco Age.”

  

Catholic Spain became obsessed with the notion of religious purity and conflated this conception with ideas of heredity, genetic descent, and biology. This led to a issuances of blood purity certificates and a social hierarchy based on phenotype and heritage. Junaid Rana, a sociocultural anthropologist, traces the modern race concept of Muslims to this early development of regarding Islam as “cultural” and Muslims as the Christian “other”. In “The Story of Islamophobia,” he writes, “where physiognomy was not enough of a determining factor, culture was a stand in for racial difference.”

   

Examining the methods of oppression during the Spanish Inquisition yields many parallels to the modern racialization of Islam. Aspects of Muslim culture, like clothes, bathhouses, henna, and “Moorish” music, were stigmatized in society. Today, society has updated the trope of “the Muslim” to coincide with the modern “war on terror” and many aspects of Muslim culture act as symbols for some secret infiltration of Western countries by dangerous terrorists. For example, a U.S. Military white paper published in 2011, titled Countering Violent Extremism: Scientific Methods & Strategies, remarked that the “hijab contribute[s] to the idea of passive terrorism.” Another stunningly tragic parallel between the two times has been the use of recently developed, at their respective times, torture techniques on Muslims. During the Inquisition, it was under the veil of religious fanaticism while now it is under the veil of counter-terrorism.

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The Reconquista was one of the first times the question of whether Muslims could be allowed to integrate into Western Civilization was answered, and Catholic Spain offered a resounding “no” as they expelled all Muslims and convert descendants in 1611. The question arises again today in the United States as we observe the methods, some brand new and others descended from another time, of resistance to Muslim inclusion.

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Sources

“Reconquista” by Mark Cartwright

 

García‐Arenal, Mercedes. “Religious Dissent and Minorities: The Morisco Age.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 81, no. 4, 2009, pp. 888–920. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605489.

 

“The Story of Islamophobia" by Junaid Rana

 

https://www.ducksters.com/history/islam/umayyad_caliphate.php 

 

“U.S. Military white paper describes wearing hijab as ‘passive terrorism’” by Murtaza Hussain