“Could you explain to us again why you decided to learn such an ‘unusual’ language?” “How fascinating that you like Arabic so much—it’s so exotic!” “Be careful with people over there; they’re very different from us!” These are just a few examples of the comments I hear when I, as a Spanish person living in the Arab World, return home.
Around the dining table, these remarks only intensify, growing worse each time a dish is passed — not just for their underlyingly racist tone, but also for how misguided and absurd they are in nature. Why? Because Arabic is not an ‘exotic’ or foreign language to Spanish, and Arabs, especially North Africans, are no strangers to the Iberic Peninsula as they lived within it for centuries, being essential pillars in the building of what we understand as Spanish culture and folklore today.
Though these questions should be challenged at all times, understanding their root cause is crucial to prevent them from repeating themselves in the future. Ignorance, and the lack of education on specific moments of history, are, you’ve guessed it, once again the seeds through which these tropes grow. To tell the truth, no one had stressed how important Muslim civilizations are in the place I call home until later on in life, and thus, no one had ever explained the history of my own country to me properly.
The first time I heard of “Al-Andalus” was in high school, when I was taught about a distant past, neatly framed with a clear beginning and end. We were told how foreign Arabs had swiftly seized control of the Iberian Peninsula, until the so-called “reconquest” and the fall of Granada in 1492, a narrative that oversimplified and misrepresented the true events of that era. It wasn’t until I began exploring the history of the Middle East and North Africa during my university years that I started learning about the other side of the coin and the heritage we both share rather than the one-sided, fragmented version of history I had been force-fed since childhood.
It might be well known to native Arabic speakers that over four thousand Arabic words are present in the Spanish we speak today, including everyday vocabulary, place names, and even common surnames — a fact that many Arab friends would take pride in when Spaniards don’t often acknowledge. But these are just semantics, as the epiphany came when I realized just how influenced Spain was by this era many either decide to sweep under the rug or act as if it was insignificant.
As I kept on with my research, I started to dig more, and eventually interviewed medieval historian José Luís Corral for a paper I would later publish about the Islamophobic sentiments in Spain. In a nutshell, he explained that, while foreign historians widely recognize it, the concept is rarely discussed in Spain: there was no “re-conquest” because, quite simply, there never was a “conquest” to begin with.
As it happens, DNA tests show that the vast majority of the population living during the Al-Andalus period, from 711 to 1492, were of Hispanic origin, and not Arab. This suggests that rather than a foreign invasion, local society gradually embraced Islam, meaning that the “expulsion” of Muslims following the fall of Granada was, in fact, the expulsion of local Spaniards who had adopted Islam as part of their cultural and religious identity.
These are facts that have been deliberately overlooked, pushed aside, along with the significant legacy that Islamic civilization left on the peninsula in areas such as architecture, science, technology, and language. Figures like the philosopher Ibn Rushd, the poet Ibn Zaydun, the doctor Al-Kattani, and the aeroengineer Abbas Abu Firnas should be celebrated as icons of Spanish history, yet their contributions remain largely forgotten or marginalized in contemporary discourses. Sadly, we were never taught about these accomplishments or figures in a way that connected them to us. On the rare occasions they were mentioned, it was never framed as though this part of history was ours, though it adamantly was.
In my 20-something years of existence, I have never considered myself a ‘patriot’. The idea of embracing my Spanish identity too closely always made me uneasy, almost as if it aligned with the far-right. That is partly because of how our national folklore has often been appropriated by far-right parties with roots in the fascist dictatorship that ruled our country for forty years until 1975.
Never tapping into my own national identity and history, from the age of 17 onwards, my focus has always been on learning about this ‘other’ I never learned much of at school. That said, it was by learning more about the history of this so-called ‘far’ region and its even ‘further’ language, that I would for the first time start feeling proud of my country, and how much in common we shared with our brotherly neighbours.
Reading the verses of Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish, I would come across allusions to Granada’s Alhambra, or direct conversations with Spanish poets like Federíco García Lorca — who was one of the first voices within contemporary Spanish literature to praise Spain’s Al-Andalus in his collection of works — filling me joy each time I’d flick through their writings.
When Catholic Kings took over sovereignty in 1492, they started building the modern Spanish State as a Catholic-only nation, in direct opposition to the diverse civilization that once set its marks on the same land. Leaders, subsequently, would maintain this tradition until Spain’s inclusion into the EU, when its “Europeanness” was repeatedly questioned by Northern members who viewed Spain as an extension of the African continent.
“Who will say that water carries a fatuous fire of screams! Oh, love that went away and didn’t come! It carries orange blossom, it carries olives, Andalusia at your seas. Oh, love that went through the air!” would say Lorca in his ode to flamenco, the traditional song of the unfortunate peasant, also known as “fala7 mankub” in Arabic. These words, to me at least, echo the lovely culture and luggage we sadly have let go of through the air of times, and, that if remembered, would help us understand a part of us that carries, as Lorca says, blossoms and fruits of a beautiful era we have been disregarding until now.
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