Intelligence

Andalusia's connection

TheStar.com - Andalusia's connection

One year after the Madrid bombings, calls for made-in-Spain imams grow stronger in a region that still reflects on its past Muslim glories

SANDRO CONTENTA
EUROPEAN BUREAU

At the Jamal Islamiya mosque in this seaside town, a Muslim lament of historic proportions is proclaimed in large letters on a framed poster: "In 1492, we lost everything."

For the mosque's leader, and much of the Muslim world, the year marks the traumatic conclusion of Islam's golden age, a time remembered like a collective wound.

It's a period when the last piece of Muslim-held territory in Spain fell to Catholic monarchs, ending almost 800 years of Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula.

Centuries when poetry, science and architecture flourished under Islamic caliphs expired with bonfires of Arabic manuscripts, mass expulsion and extermination in the Inquisition.

To the east, the Muslim empire of the Ottomans would reign for another four centuries. But many would trace its long decline to the fall of Al Andalus, the Moorish name for Andalusia.

The result is a yearning that today makes Spain, more than any other European country, a battleground in the name of Islam.

"They stole 500 years of history from us," says Omar Checa Garcia, who heads the Jamal Islamiya mosque and cultural centre. "We want it back, but we don't want revenge."

Others are not so accommodating. Osama bin Laden uses what he calls the "tragedy of Al Andalus" as a rallying cry for his deadly brand of Islamic jihad against "the crusaders and Jews."

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, bin Laden's chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, drew a parallel between the loss of the Iberian peninsula and the struggle of Palestinians.

"We will not accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus be repeated in Palestine," he said.

The taped sermons of some militant Islamic clerics admonish followers with the legend of "The Moor's Sigh."

Having surrendered Granada to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Castile and Aragon, a tearful Sultan Boabdil was scolded by his mother: "You weep like a woman for what you could not hold as a man."

On March 11, 2004, a cell of mainly Moroccan extremists, calling themselves "the brigade situated in Al Andalus," detonated 10 bombs that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.

Many Spaniards blamed their conservative government's support of the Iraq war for making them targets.

Three days after the bombings, they swept the Socialist party to power and it moved quickly to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.

But jihad fuelled by the lost glory of Al Andalus suggests that won't be enough to take Spain off the target list.

In a communiqué claiming responsibility for the March 11 bombings, the cell invoked the name of the Moorish warrior who conquered the Iberian peninsula in 711.

"We will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tarik Ben Ziyad," it said.

Says Gustavo Aristiquie, an opposition MP and terrorism expert: "Spain is considered an apostate country that must be reconquered for Islam. It's a sacred duty, and that's why the jihadis are attacking."

The bombings also focused attention on Spain's estimated 1 million Muslims, most of them North African immigrants.

Illegal immigration is rapidly increasing their numbers, making integration one of Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's biggest challenges.

Warnings that mosques are increasingly falling under the control of radical clerics are coming from anti-terrorism experts and representatives of Spanish converts to Islam, a community estimated at 20,000.

They also warn of tensions between the growing number of immigrants adhering to fundamentalist brands of Islam and right-wing groups rooted in the alliance of fascism and the Catholic Church during Franco's dictatorship, which ended in 1975.

Spanish converts are lobbying the government for funds to train homegrown imams, arguing that defusing social tensions requires clerics who preach an Islam in harmony with European values, which they insist reflects the true spirit of Al Andalus.

"If we don't do this, it's war," says Abdelkarim Carrasco, head of the Federation of Spanish Islamic Entities, one of two Islamic umbrella groups that negotiates with the government.

Carrasco, 56, is a real estate agent in Granada, where members of the March 11 cell spent time in safe houses before the attacks.

Framed by the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, Granada was the peninsula's last Moorish kingdom to fall.

Its symbolic significance is heightened by the Alhambra palace, home and seat of government of the Nasrid rulers. The only Muslim palace to survive from the Middle Ages, it stands above the city on the Assabica hills, revered by Muslims and celebrated by tourists.

"I tell my Christian friends, `You are eating from the stones left by the Moors,'" says Carrasco, referring to Granada's booming tourist industry.

On a hilltop directly across from the Alhambra, the first Granada mosque to be built in 500 years opened its doors in 2003. Before construction, the choice of the highly symbolic site met with two decades of resistance from local authorities, not least because it is squeezed between a Catholic church and a nun's convent.

"The church hierarchy is very hostile to Islam," says Abdulhasib Castineira, director of the Great Mosque, which was built largely with funds from Morocco, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.

Homegrown Spanish Muslims have joined anti-terrorism experts in warning that mosques are increasingly falling under the control of radical immigrant clerics
"I think they feel threatened, actually, because if you come to this mosque on a Friday, it's packed. The church next door is only opened for weddings."

Down the hill, hidden among the steep alleyways of the ancient Moorish quarter of Albaicin, is the Al Taqwa mosque, which is also fronted by a Spanish convert but financed by the United Arab Emirates.

"My responsibility here is to make sure that Andalusia returns to being an Islamic country," says Zakaria Maza, whose mosque has two clerics from Mauritania as imams.

Maza recently spearheaded a drive to allow Muslims to pray in part of the former mosque in Cordoba, north of Granada.

Cordoba was the seat of power when the caliphate of the Umayyad clan was at its height, commanding what was then considered Al Andalus — the whole of the Iberian peninsula except for Galicia. (Today, Andalusia refers to the southern-most of Spain's 17 autonomous regions.)

As the political and religious authority, the Cordoba caliphate rivalled other Islamic dynasties based in Damascus and Baghdad. But internal feuds saw it disintegrate into competing Islamic kingdoms in 1031.

By then, the Umayyads had built a masterpiece of Islamic art, the vast Cordoba mosque. But Catholics conquered the city in 1236, built a cathedral in the middle of the mosque and barred Muslims.

Maza, a 54-year-old native of Cordoba, points in disgust to a notice on tickets handed to tourists who visit it: "Keep in mind that you are visiting a Catholic temple."

"This is terrible," he says. "We ask that everything goes back to how it should be."

Maza argues that allowing Muslims to share the former mosque would be a "sign of tolerance to the world." But he leaves the door open to eventually taking over the whole site.

The request to share the cathedral had the backing of the government MP for the area, Juan Luis Rascon, who also sits on the parliamentary inquiry into the March 11 attacks. But the Vatican dismissed the idea, urging Muslims to "accept history."

Still, Maza says victory is only a matter of time.

"Islam's time has come again, whether people like it or not. We can predict that Andalusia will once again be Muslim."

Most Muslim immigrants in the region end up working at vegetable farms around centres like Almeria, with its white stucco buildings set between desert hills and the sea east of Granada.

Five years ago, after a Moroccan murdered a Spaniard, race riots broke out in a neighbouring town and the shacks of migrant workers were burned. Area residents regard the incident as a cautionary tale, but it hasn't stopped the migratory pull of the local economy.

In Almeria's port district, the peaceful reconquest of this originally Moorish city seems well under way. The neighbourhood teems with North Africans sipping mint tea in coffee shops and streaming into the Al Muhsinin mosque.

The mosque's Palestinian cleric, Abdallah Mhanna, says at least 80,000 Muslims live in the area, some 30,000 of them illegally. Many complain of being exploited with low wages and poor housing.

Mhanna, 41, arrived six years ago from Gaza and says he was immediately struck by Andalusia's Islamic past.

"I can see the soul of Islam here," says Mhanna, who studied at Islamic University in Gaza, where the militant Hamas group wields much influence.

"We are not looking to Andalusia as our land, no. This is the land of Spanish people. But it is part of our Islamic civilization."

Andalusia is the "land of daawa" — a place where Islam is to be spread by the word and not by the sword, he says.

He flatly rejects the methods of the March 11 bombers — "killing civilians is terrorism" — but embraces the hard-line ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which rejects secular tendencies in Islamic states.

Formed in Egypt in 1928, the brotherhood is the mother of several Islamic radical groups, including Hamas. But it also has branches that reject violent activity, and those are the ones Mhanna says he supports.

At Jamal Islamiya, Almeria's only other mosque, Garcia isn't reassured.

Having adopted Islam 20 years ago, he says many of the 7,000 Spanish converts in the Almeria area are, like him, leftists who rediscovered their true Andalusian roots.

"The real identity of Andalusia was crushed by Spain and the Catholic Church, which forced our grandparents to become Catholics," he says.

Garcia is an Andalusian nationalist. He sees the brand of Islam brought by most North African immigrants as "reactionary" and foreign.

He several times blocked bids by North African Muslims to take over his mosque, including one group that camped inside for three days before he threw them out.

Last fall, five of the nine people arrested in connection with a plot to blow up the High Court in Madrid lived in the Almeria area, including the imam of a mosque in a nearby town.

"This generation of immigrants is lost. It's under the influence of these reactionary mosques," Garcia says.

He insists social harmony depends on government backing to train Spanish imams for a homegrown Islam that embraces a multicultural and multi-faith society where women are equal, religion is a private matter and laws are secular.

Otherwise, Garcia warns, "there could be a disaster. March 11 could happen again."

Additional articles by Sandro Contenta

March 20, 2005 at 08:22 PM in Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home