Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  Most purveyors of these nightmare scenarios tend to be more temperate than Fallaci, who suggests that Muslims who “breed too much” are doing so as a form of “conquest” and “reverse crusade.”14 But even mainstream academics sometimes support such ideas: the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told the German newspaper Die Welt in July 2004 that “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the twenty-first century at the latest”—a prospect that he predicted would transform Europe into “part of the Arab west—the Maghreb.”15 Other commentators have similarly described a dire future, in which Europe is engulfed and finally overwhelmed by a Muslim population whose numbers are inexorably growing to the point where they are able to impose sharia law on all Europe. Some commentators attribute this demographic transformation to low birth rates among an aging European population. Others, like Fallaci, have claimed that European Muslims are deliberately increasing their numbers in order to take over Europe as a form of jihad—a lunatic notion that Jaime Bleda and Marcos de Guadalajara would have subscribed to.

  There is abundant evidence to demonstrate that these demographic projections are unreliable at best and inflated or fantastic at worst. According to the respected U.S.-based Population Reference Bureau, Muslim fertility rates have fallen continuously, not only in Europe, but also in North Africa.16 In an August 2007 article, the Financial Times disputed Eurabian predictions of a demographic decline and noted a “rebound in fertility” in northern Europe in recent years. Citing figures from the United Nations and the CIA World Factbook that show little difference between the birthrates of Algerian women in France and French women overall, the article concluded that “Islamicisation—let alone shar’ia law—is not a demographic prospect for Europe.”17

  Even though statistical evidence is far more readily available than it was in the sixteenth century, bigotry and fantasies of cultural decline can generate their own logic, leading to assumptions and beliefs that are uncritically accepted and acted upon. As in the sixteenth century, these demographic scenarios generally assume that all Muslims are part of a monolithic bloc whose members transmit their immutable cultural and religious values from one generation to the next. Once again, such assumptions are not restricted to the political margins, and respected establishment historians, such as Martin Gilbert and Niall Ferguson, have subscribed to the Eurabia thesis and the demographic nightmare that sustains it.

  The fantasy world of Eurabia is one element in a rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment throughout Europe that has taken various forms, from relentlessly negative and often blatantly dishonest media coverage of Muslims to physical attacks, campaigns against the construction of mosques, acts of vandalism against Islamic buildings, and grotesque episodes like the “pig parade” in Bologna, where local residents carried pigs’ heads and sausages to the site of a proposed mosque in an attempt to “contaminate” it.

  European politicians generally avoid the language used by Giancarlo Gentilini, the deputy mayor of Treviso, who once described Muslims as “a cancer which must be eradicated before they start to spread.”18 Respectable English political discourse tends to be more reserved than Winston Churchill’s grandson, who has warned that the “takeover” of British mosques by the Deobandi sect is creating a “viper’s nest in our midst.”19 But many European politicians and media commentators share Churchill’s belief that “unlike most other categories of migrant, the Muslims are reluctant to assimilate and, all too often, wish to pursue their own agenda.” In September 2000, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, the archbishop of Bologna, called for a limitation on Muslim immigration into Europe, on the grounds that “In the vast majority of cases, Muslims come here with the resolve to remain strangers to our brand of individual or social ‘humanity’ in everything that is most essential, most precious,”20 Biffi’s arguments echoed those of European far-right parties, such as the Vlaams Belang party in Belgium, whose leader once told the New York Times, “We must stop the Islamic invasion. I think it’s, in fact, impossible to assimilate in our country if you are of Islamic belief.”21

  Similar accusations were once leveled at the Jews of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Such assumptions tend to ignore the existence of discrimination and prejudice emanating from within the “host” country itself, and attribute the absence of integration to a residual hostility or incompatibility on the part of hermetically sealed and introspective immigrant “guests.” In response to this perceived problem, a growing number of European governments have opted for an authoritarian model of assimilation, in which integration and “social cohesion” is demanded rather than negotiated, and enforced by stringent citizenship requirements, civic integration tests, and an increasingly McCarthyite culture that demands that European immigrants prove their “moderation” in order to justify their continued presence.

  The Muslim presence has been a key factor in recent legislation, introduced in a number of European countries, which aims to weed out “incompatible” immigrants through citizenship and integration tests that supposedly measure their ability to interact with European notions of tolerance and secularism. In 2005 the interior ministry of the German state of Baden-Württemberg introduced a two-hour exam aimed primarily at Muslims applying for German citizenship, in which applicants are asked questions on their attitudes to homosexuality, freedom of expression, and arranged marriages. Similar tests have subsequently been introduced in other European countries. In March 2006, the Dutch government introduced a civic integration test in which prospective migrants wishing to become Dutch citizens are shown a DVD entitled To the Netherlands, which shows gays kissing on a beach and a topless woman emerging from the sea.

  The Dutch test is not aimed specifically at Muslims but at relatives of migrants “from non-Western countries” wanting to join their families and at non-Dutch residents of Holland, but it was introduced after years in which the Muslim presence was routinely cited by mainstream politicians and right-wing populists, such as Pim Fortyn, as the predominant cultural threat to Dutch liberal tolerance. A similar pattern has unfolded in other parts of Europe. In another development that hearkens back to Hapsburg Spain, this assimilationist drive has been given a new urgency by security fears, in which Muslim cultural and religious difference is too easily conflated with political radicalization and terrorist violence. These perceptions are increasingly leading to a dangerous tendency to see assimilation—in the sense of obligatory conformity to the perceived values of the majority—as an essential corollary of national security.

  In the sixteenth century, Spanish officials also regarded the residual Moorish characteristics of the Moriscos as evidence of hostility, political disloyalty, and sedition—an association that often made them even more determined to eliminate such differences by coercion. But if the history of the Moriscos has even one lesson to offer the present, it is that forced assimilation is not an effective means of allaying security fears, nor does such a process facilitate integration. From the moment Spain’s Catholic majority set out to impose its own culture and values on its former Muslims by coercion, it became trapped by its own suspicions and unrealistic expectations. Instead of promoting integration, coercion bred resentment, defiance, and alienation among the Moriscos themselves, which further confirmed them as a suspect and dangerous population in the eyes of Spain’s rulers.

  Is Europe in danger of succumbing to the same process in its treatment of its Muslim minorities? These similarities need not be overstated. There is no Inquisition to police the cultural and religious behavior of Europe’s Muslims. Citizenship and integration tests do not equate with the Inquisitorial dungeon and the auto-da-fé. Nevertheless, Europe is moving increasingly further away from former British home secretary Roy Jenkins’s famous description of integration as “not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.”22 Instead, a growing number of countries are subscribing to the either/or logic articulated by the former British
prime minister Tony Blair in 2006, who insisted that tolerance was “what makes Britain” and that all citizens were expected to “conform to it or don’t come here.”23 These parameters tend to take the superiority of these dominant values for granted, even as they assume that all British citizens automatically share the same commitment to them. In their strident insistence on a homogeneous identity to which this imagined majority belongs, such declarations demand conformity as a price of admittance to the national territory—demands that are easily focused on particular religious, cultural, or ethnic groups that are already perceived as alien and extraneous.

  In these circumstances, the defense of tolerance and national identity can easily become a justification for self-righteous intolerance and an authoritarian “tyranny of the majority” that stigmatizes minorities who are depicted as unwilling or unable to be tolerant. Already a number of European governments are moving beyond the incarceration and deportation of unwanted “economic migrants” and “bogus” asylum seekers and using integration tests as a justification for expelling supposedly incompatible immigrants. In France, as interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy proposed to expel entire families where “a wife is kept hostage at home without learning French.” In Holland, migrants who fail the new integration tests or do not present themselves to have their progress monitored after six months can be fined. In Switzerland, the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartie, or SVP) has called for the penal code to be changed so that all foreigners who commit crimes can be deported once they have finished their jail sentences. In March 2006, interior ministers of the six largest countries in the European Union considered a proposal that would require immigrants to learn the language of their adopted country and adapt to its social norms or risk expulsion.

  In Norway, the right-wing Progress Party has proposed that immigrants whose children do not learn Norwegian should lose their social security and child benefits in order to ensure their future adherence to “Norwegian values.” In Spain, the regional government of Valencia drafted a new law obliging all immigrants to sign a social contract pledging “to respect the laws, the principles, and the customs of Spain and Valencia.” Though not specifically aimed at Muslims, these assimilationist tendencies—and the attack on multiculturalism that often accompanies them—have been given new impetus by the perceived threat of Muslim immigration to Europe’s “core” values.

  Some commentators have argued that such measures may not be enough to preserve Europe’s heritage from the Islamic hordes. Both liberal and conservative commentators have proposed a halt to Muslim immigration in order to prevent Europe’s cultural Islamization. There are also those who argue that more drastic solutions may be required. The American literary critic Bruce Bawer has written that “European officials have a clear route out of this nightmare. They have armies. They have police. They have prisons. They’re in a position to deport planeloads of people every day. They could start rescuing Europe tomorrow.”24

  A Christian homosexual living in Scandinavia and a contributor to the New Yorker and other mainstream publications, Bawer is the author of a key Eurabian text, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, which was controversially nominated for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle award. Once the province of the far right, Bawer’s “clear route” is moving closer to mainstream respectability. In 2006 the novelist Martin Amis told an interviewer, “There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”25

  Amis later claimed that he was engaging in a “thought experiment” rather than a practical proposal, but neither he nor many of those who so glibly recommended deportation in recent years appear to be concerned about the human consequences—nor do they seem to be aware of their historical precedents. If the solution to Spain’s “Muslim problem” is a distant and barely remembered episode in European history, the Nazi solution to Europe’s “Jewish problem” provides a more recent example of where such thinking can lead. It is often forgotten that the Nazis originally saw the forced emigration and deportation of German Jewry as the solution. As the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist has shown, the line between physical expulsion and extermination is often easily crossed.26

  In the aftermath of the Holocaust, “scientific” or “biological” racism and theories of racial supremacy were largely discredited—a process that was also hastened by decolonization and the rejection of race as a rationale for imperial domination. But bigotry and hatred can always find new channels of expression, new ways of appearing legitimate. Today, both far-right politicians and liberal defenders of tolerance who warn of the Islamic threat to Europe are more likely to talk of incompatible cultures and religions and civilizational clashes rather than race or biology, but such narratives often share the same function—and they are perfectly capable of producing equally dire consequences.

  The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has warned of the dangerous tendency to establish “belligerent identities” based on supposedly antithetical civilizations and the potential for violence and demagoguery that such categories contain.27 Sen rejects the notion of fixed divisions between cultures and civilizations and argues that human beings are the sum of their “plural” or “diverse” identities and affiliations that spread across civilizations and between them. In these dangerous and turbulent times, we need to hold on to this idea and find ways to put it into practice, both in Europe and beyond. For the spores of hatred and prejudice are latent in every society, and humanity can go backward as well as forward. Four hundred years later, the destruction of the Moriscos is an example of what can happen when a society succumbs to its worst instincts and its worst fears in an attempt to cast out its imaginary devils.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Danvila y Collado, La expulsión, p. 320.

  2 Janer, Condición social, p. 123.

  3 Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, p. 340.

  4 Fuller, Decisive Battles, vol. 1, p. 545.

  5 Bertrand and Petrie, History of Spain, p. 228.

  6 Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, “España y el Islam,” Revista de Occidente 7 (1929), p. 27, cited in López-Baralt, Huellas del Islam, p. 32.

  7 José Maria Aznar, “Seven Theses on Today’s Terrorism” (lecture, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, September 21, 2004), cited in Aidi, “Interference of al-Andalus,” pp. 67–87.

  Prologue: “The End of Spain’s Calamities”

  1 Chronicle of 754, cited in Tolan, Saracens, p. 81.

  2 Bulliet, Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, p. 31. As Bulliet also observes, this contribution has often been ignored or overlooked in Europe, though it remains a source of pride to many Muslims.

  3 Fernando de Pulgar, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos por su secretatio Fernando de Pulgar, cited in Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 270–71.

  4 “Morisco Appeal to the Ottoman Sultan,” trans. from Arabic by James T. Monroe, in Constable, Medieval Iberia, p. 365.

  5 Bernáldez, Memorias del Reinado, p. 232.

  6 Cited in Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, p. 393.

  Chapter 1. The Iberian Exception

  1 Cited in Fletcher, Moorish Spain, p. 135.

  2 Cirot was referring primarily to the romanticized Muslim heroes in Spanish “Moorish” literature of the late sixteenth century, but such romanticism was already in evidence long before this period, and it has continued to survive, not only in Spain. For discussions of Maurophilia and Cirot’s ideas, see Harvey, Muslims in Spain, pp. 198–201. Márquez Villanueva also considers Cirot’s work in El problema morisco.

  3 These festivals are still a regular part of the summer
neighborhood festivals in many Spanish villages, though their content has often been toned down in recent years, so that effigies of Muhammad are not generally burned or dunked in wells.

  4 Cited in Aziz al-Azmeh, “Mortal Enemies, Invisible Neighbours: Northerners in Andalusi Eyes,” in Khadra Jayyusi and Marín, Legacy of Muslim Spain, p. 268.

  5 See Richard Fletcher, “The Early Middle Ages,” in Carr, Spain, pp. 63–90.

  6 Primera Crónica General de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1955), p. 313, cited in Tolan, Saracens, p. 188.

  7 The Treaty of Tudmir (713), trans. from Arabic by Constable, Medieval Iberia, p.37.

  8 Paulus Alvarus, Indiculus luminosus, Corpus scriptorum muzarabicorum 35: 314–15, trans. Richard Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), cited in Tolan, Saracens, p. 86.

  9 Eulogius, Memoriale sanctorum, Corpus scriptorum muzarabicorum 2.1.1: 397–98, trans. Edward Colbert, The Martyrs of Córdoba, 850–859: A Study of the Sources (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1962), cited in Tolan, Saracens, p. 86.

  10 Cited in Harvey, Islamic Spain, p. 66.

  11 Ibid., p. 125.

  12 Muslims, Christians, and Jews appear to have been exceptionally well-integrated in Teruel, and such coexistence was still evident in the sixteenth century. See Halavais, Like Wheat to the Miller.

  13 Cited in Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia, p. 45.

  14 From James T. Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 320.

  15 “Viaje de León Rosmithal,” in García Mercadal, Viajes de extranjeros, vol. 1, p. 298.