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Transregional Tensions in Spain’s “Muslim City”: Competing Memories of al-Andalus and the Production of Unequal Multiculturalism
Abstract
This paper explores emergent relationships between and among European Muslim converts, Muslim immigrants, and non-Muslim Spaniards in Andalusia (southern Spain). Andalusian identities have long been shaped by ideas about the region’s historical entanglements with North Africa and the “Muslim legacy” of al-Andalus, codified in politics, Muslim-themed tourism, and myriad cultural institutions. Today, Spain’s growing Muslim minority must contend with a context of widespread ambivalence about the place of Islam in Spain, as competing historical narratives alternately celebrate and rue the region’s Moorish past. Some Andalusians herald the supposedly peaceful coexistence of medieval Muslims, Jews, and Christians as an enduring model for multicultural tolerance in today’s plural Europe. Others downplay historical ties with North Africa and argue that a renewed Muslim presence threatens Spain’s newly formed democratic modernity and secular European status. This ambivalence conditions the social and political possibilities for new Muslim residents in the region. Based on ethnographic field research in the city of Granada, this paper asks how relationships between various Muslim communities map onto prevalent historical narratives that presuppose or deny linkages between Spain and North Africa. It argues that convert and immigrant Muslims are not positioned equally within any of the competing Spanish imaginaries of Islam: they are differently able to access, sustain, or benefit from celebratory narratives of Spain’s Muslim history, they are differently interpelated by anti-Muslim sectors as racial and religious outsiders, and they have unequal resources with which to confront discrimination. These inequalities produce tensions and debates among Muslims who disagree about local Muslim history, religious authenticity, and representational authority. By examining how structural inequalities between convert and immigrant Muslims are exacerbated by their different placement within historical discourses about Andalusia as a semi-European, semi-North African space, the paper demonstrates the importance of a transregional approach to scholarship on Muslim minorities in southern Europe.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Spain
Sub Area
None