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Where the Moors Held Sway, Allah Is Praised Again
EFL, rego requiredGRANADA, Spain â Muslims are back in this ancient Moorish stronghold, the last bastion of Islam in Spain before the 15th-century emir Boabdil kissed King Ferdinandâs hand and relinquished the city with a legendary sigh. But the row of men kneeling in prayer at the cityâs new mosque, the first built here in more than 500 years, are not modern-day Moors; they are well-educated European converts. While immigration is gradually spreading Islam across Europe, a homegrown movement is giving it added momentum in Spain, where a generation of post-Franco intellectuals are reassessing the countryâs Moorish past and recasting Spanish identity to include Islamic influences rejected as heretical centuries ago. Hugo Chavez and other Latin Americans have used the same argument to explain why they should be allied to radical Muslim regimes, and that sympathy is why Hezbollah has been able to operate unhindered there for years. The movement has its roots, not in the austere Islamic fundamentalism that dominates popular Western imagination these days, but in the Beat Generation and the hippies who pursued spiritual quests to Morocco when it was a counterculturalist Mecca of sun, sand and cheap hashish. There, a young patrician Scot, Ian Dallas, converted to Islam. He eventually changed his name to Sheik Abdalqadir al-Murabit and returned to Britain, where he began gathering Western converts, who became known as the Murabitun. The movement is marked by his proselytizing vision, which strives ultimately to found an Islamic caliphate with an economy based on gold dinars. A handful of Spaniards accepted Islam under his tutelage on the eve of Francoâs death and returned to Córdoba to start an Islamic community there. The new Muslims attracted leftist intellectuals looking for spiritual alternatives to the strict Catholicism that dominated life under Franco. Spainâs Muslim converts now number in the tens of thousands, though many of the new Muslims no longer follow Sheik Abdalqadir. Iâve noticed that, in Europe especially, Islam seems to be particularly attractive to leftists who in the past would have been followers of Mao and Che. Many neo-Nazis, like Ahmed Huber, also seem to be attracted to Islam, and they seem to agree with the leftists on so many issues apart from race. Perhaps this is the seeds of a European "Third position", underwhich Europeans radicals are able to come together under a shared ideology and with shared hatreds. Given the demographics in Western Europe, perhaps EUrabia isnât so far away? Granada has about 15,000 Muslims today, mostly Moroccan and Syrian immigrants and North African students who worship at three nondescript Muslim prayer rooms in different parts of town. But the townâs 1,000 or so converts are very significant, Mr. Ruiz said, because they give Islam a voice that cannot be ignored. Granadaâs Islamic Council, for example, has been lobbying to stop annual celebrations of the fall of Granada into Christian hands. Across Europe, plans to build mosques have met resistance in traditionally Christian communities, where people worry that the growth of Islam is changing the character of their towns. But nowhere, perhaps, has a mosque stirred as much emotion as in Granada, where the location, across a ravine from the reddish-brown ramparts of Islamâs last stand, carries unmistakable symbolism. Posted by: Paul Moloney 2003-10-21 |
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