Islam's Claim on Spain
In Granada, once the center of a rich Muslim culture,
adherents are trying to reassert their historic role
amid a climate of suspicion.
By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer
January 18, 2005

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-granada18jan18,0,4557979.sto\
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GRANADA, Spain — Across a valley of fragrant cedars
and orange trees, worshipers at the pristine Great
Mosque of Granada look out at the Alhambra, the
700-year-old citadel and monument to the heyday of
Islamic glory.

Granada's Muslims chose the hilltop location precisely
with the view, and its unmistakable symbolism, in
mind.

It took them more than 20 years to build the mosque,
the first erected here in half a millennium, after
they conquered the objections of city leaders and
agreed, ultimately, to keep the minaret shorter than
the steeple on the Catholic Iglesia de San Nicolas
next door.

Cloistered nuns on the other side of the mosque added
a few feet to the wall enclosing their convent, as if
to say they wanted neither to be seen nor to see.

Many of Spain's Muslims long for an Islamic revival to
reclaim their legendary history, and inaugurating the
Great Mosque last year was the most visible gesture.
But horrific bombings by Muslim extremists that killed
nearly 200 people in Madrid on March 11 have forced
Spain's Muslims and non-Muslims to reassess their
relationship, and turned historical assumptions on
their head.

"We are a people trying to return to our roots," said
Anwar Gonzalez, 34, a Granada native who converted to
Islam 17 years ago. "But it's a bad time to be a
Muslim."

Spain has a long, rich and complex history interwoven
with the Muslim and Arab world, from its position as
the center of Islamic Europe in the last millennium to
today's confrontation with a vast influx of Muslim
immigrants.

For more than seven centuries of Moorish rule, "Al
Andalus," or Andalusia, was governed by Muslim caliphs
who oversaw a splendid flourishing of art,
architecture and learning that ended when Granada fell
to Christian monarchs Queen Isabella and King
Ferdinand in 1492.

Muslims were expelled or exterminated in the
Inquisition that followed, but the legacy of the Moors
is seen throughout Andalusia, Spain's southern tier,
in its language, palaces like the Alhambra, and food.

Unfortunately for Spain's Muslims, the militants who
swear loyalty to Osama bin Laden are history buffs
too. In claiming responsibility for the March
bombings, they cited the loss of "Al Andalus" as
motivation.

"We will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the
land of Tarik Ben Ziyad," they said in a communique
issued after the massacre, alluding to the Moorish
warrior and original Islamic conqueror of the Iberian
peninsula.

Spain today, like most of Europe, is struggling with
ways to accommodate its fast-growing Muslim community
while keeping tabs on those who might turn to radical
violence.

Converts like Gonzalez are a small percentage of the
nearly 1 million Muslims believed to be living in
Spain — a number that has probably doubled in the last
decade. The vast majority of the Muslims are
immigrants — mostly from Morocco, frequently on the
margins of society and often at odds with native-born
Muslims. Most of the suspects arrested in the March
attacks that tore apart commuter trains in the morning
rush hour were Moroccan.

A relatively homogenous society ever since the 15th
century expulsions, Spain has far fewer Muslims than
France or Germany. Yet only in Spain is the debate
fraught with such mythology and deep-rooted cultural
echoes.

Spaniards sometimes refer to Arabs, derogatorily, as
Moors. And it doesn't help that the late dictator
Francisco Franco rose to power on the back of Moroccan
troops whom he used to launch the Spanish Civil War in
the 1930s.

In Granada, the old Moorish hamlet of Albaicin, now a
gentrified neighborhood of red-tile roofs and
white-washed villas, spills down the hill from the
Great Mosque. It could almost pass for a town on the
West Bank or in Morocco, if perhaps a little more
picturesque.

The narrow, winding streets are full of teashops,
butchers and bakeries selling baklava and kenafa, a
fresh soft cheese. Locals greet each other with
"As-Salaam Alaikum," and, in October, signs in stores
wished a "Feliz Ramadan" to passersby.

At the University of Granada, it is not uncommon to
see a woman in a hijab, the Muslim head scarf. In the
pharmacology school, about 40% of the 2,100-member
student body is from Arab or Muslim countries,
according to the student association.

Moroccan student Amal Benyaich, a 20-year-old
sophomore, said she generally feels at home in Granada
but has occasionally endured insults shouted in
public, especially after the bombings.

"How can your people do this?" someone demanded of
her.

"Am I a terrorist?" she responded.

"I want them to understand what Islam is," said
Benyaich, wearing a white hijab, long skirt and
velvety red sweatshirt. "Terrorism is not a specific
religion."

Spain is confronting the fact that a growing number of
Muslim immigrants, who once entered the country only
to move on, or came to work and then returned to their
home country, have now become a permanent fixture.
Spain's low birth rate has widened the need for
immigrant labor, and an underground network has made
it easier for foreign workers to stay.

"Before, Muslims were guests who would leave. Today
Islam is among us," said Riay Tatari Bakri, the
Syrian-born imam at Madrid's Abu Bakr mosque, one of
the places of worship attended by the bombing
suspects.

For the Socialist government of Prime Minister Jose
Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the challenge is how to
integrate these residents.

Elected three days after the bombings, the government
has cast itself in the role of reconciling the West
with Islam, and Zapatero, in a major speech to the
United Nations, advocated an "alliance of
civilizations" to prevent escalating conflict.

The prime minister's government is negotiating with
two major Spanish Islamic organizations in an attempt
to integrate Muslims into mainstream society as a way
to prevent radicalization and reduce the alienation
that feeds extremism and violence.

"Marginalization is a very dangerous thing," Luis
Lopez Guerra, the senior Justice Ministry official in
charge of religious affairs, said in an interview in
Madrid.

"If you have people poor and without work, you run the
risk of them feeling alone and discriminated against,
alienated from the values of the rest of society,"
Lopez Guerra said. "Police measures alone can't solve
this."

And so, in a country where the Roman Catholic Church
wields enormous power, the government has established
a $4-million fund for three "minority" religions —
Islam, Judaism and Protestantism — and scrapped a
previous administration's plans to make the Catholic
curriculum mandatory in public schools.

Among other, controversial recommendations, the
government wants to require all mosques to register
with the state. Also under discussion is a plan to
license imams, supported by several Muslim groups who
complain that too many clerics are foreigners who are
unable to speak Spanish, and that Saudi Arabia wields
excessive influence over Spain's mosques.

The tension between Spain's non-Muslims and Muslims,
both immigrant and native-born, remains raw. Although
incidents of overt retaliation against Muslims are
rare, many Muslims feel they are, in the words of
Gonzalez, the convert, in the eye of the hurricane.

Like the society around them, Muslims in Spain are
torn over questions of assimilation versus cultural
identity. The community is, moreover, fractured along
generational and ideological lines. Then there are the
differences between immigrants and native-born
Muslims, most of whom are converts.

In Granada, the onetime seat of Moorish rule, where
many Muslims identify themselves as Andalusians first,
then as Spaniards, a number of native-born Muslims say
they feel a duty to present what they describe as the
moderate face of their religion and to promote a form
of "European Islam" that is tolerant and democratic.

"That's our struggle: to achieve a moderate balance
against those extremists who are incapable of living
in this society as Muslims," said Abdelkarim Carrasco,
a real estate broker and president of the Federation
of Spanish Islamic Entities, one of two major Spanish
Islamic organizations negotiating with the Zapatero
government.

Carrasco, 56, converted to Islam when he was 30 and
moved to Granada from Seville two years later.

The Andalusian cities of Granada, Seville and Cordoba
saw a wave of Islamic conversions in the 1960s and
'70s spearheaded by the Sufi Murabitun sect led by Ian
Dallas, a controversial Scotsman, and joined by
hippies in search of spiritual meaning. A later
conversion movement evolved, independent of the
influence of the Murabitun, which has been attacked as
anti-Semitic.

Carrasco, whose passport retains his given name of
Antonio, not Abdelkarim, said Spain's Islamic past has
made it more difficult, not easier, for contemporary
Spain to accept Muslim citizens.

"It is easier to be a Muslim in Munich than in
Granada," he said. "In Germany it's still something
colder, new and distant. Here it is too close. You
scratch the surface of a Spaniard, and the other
[identity] comes out."

At the Great Mosque, built with money from the
governments of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates,
exquisite cobalt blue and teal green tiles, patterned
after those found in the Alhambra, frame the ablution
fountains. Silk carpets and teak doors decorate the
compact house of worship, which is already attracting
tourists.

Mosque member Mohammed Jairudin, 64, a silver-haired
actor who converted to Islam 21 years ago, told of the
legal hurdles and neighborhood resistance overcome to
finally erect the mosque. Muslims, he said, have to
live within the existing order because it is God's
will.

"You are part of the system, or you leave," he said,
seated in the mosque's garden of rosebushes and
jasmine, overlooking that breathtaking view that
sweeps northward to the Sierra Nevada. "I pay my
taxes. I go to the mosque. No one bothers me. I do
things my way, but respecting where I am."

It is not clear, however, that the group behind the
mosque, followers of the Murabitun movement, shares
that moderate sentiment. The president of the mosque
foundation, Malik Ruiz, calls himself the Emir of
Spain and has said Granada will return to its "natural
origin" — Islam — after a 500-year interruption.

Mosque supporters say they are not attempting to
launch the reconquest of Al Andalus but want to show
that Islam is not an alien faith.

"This country," Jairudin said, "has a debt to its
Muslims: to recognize history."




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