Al-Andalus revisited

Back in the 1990s, 13-year-old Cyrine Sanchou traveled to Spain with her family from their home in Tunisia. Arriving by boat in Cadiz, they were taken aback to be greeted by a large sign in Spanish that read: “Welcome to Sancho’s house.”

“I remember crying a lot,” she recalled. “It was just a billboard for a hotel called Sancho’s House, but for us the symbolism was enormous.”

For the Sanchou family, who claim descendancy not only from the Muslims driven out of Spain more than 400 years ago but also from the original Arab occupiers of Iberia in the eighth century, the billboard seemed to celebrate a long-overdue homecoming.

“According to a former Spanish cultural official who was a friend of my grandfather, the only Muslim descendants with the name Sancho are the descendants of Abd Al-Rahman Sanchuelo,” said Sanchou, now 44, whose brand The Red Bee promotes Tunisian craftsmanship.

Historians recorded that Sanchuelo, who died in Cordoba in 1009, was the son of Mohammed ibn Abi Amr Al-Mansur, who served as the chancellor of the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba in the 10th century and organized numerous attacks on the expanding Christian kingdoms to the north.

Sanchou and her family, like those in many communities across North Africa, are in no doubt that they are among the last of the Andalusians, part of the great Muslim diaspora scattered to the winds in the centuries after the fall of Al-Andalus in 1492.

Her family has carried out years of research, inspired by the work of the renowned Tunisian historian Abdeljelil Tamimi, a specialist in historic documentation related to the Maghreb and author of the 2011 book “Tragedy of the Moorish Expulsion.” As a result, the family has built up a convincing picture of its journey through time.

Sanchou said her forebears arrived in Tunisia by boat after fleeing Spain in April 1609 and were given accommodation in a district already populated by refugees from Al-Andalus. This, she believes, “proves that their profession in Spain was probably in an intellectual or artisanal field because otherwise they would have been assigned to other towns or villages in Tunisia.”

Although now a partial ruin, the house still belongs to her family, which has a copy of the original bill of sale. 

Sanchou’s research has led her to the conclusion that her family’s roots can even be traced back to Yemen, to “the family of Abd El Malek Banu Ma'afir, who fought alongside Tariq ibn Ziyad for the conquest (of Iberia) in 711.”

In Tunisia, said Sanchou, “we are surrounded by families from the Moriscos. My family until my grandfather were all blond, very white-skinned and blue-eyed. It is only for two generations that we have more of the features of North Africa because for centuries the Moors of Tunisia married their children to descendants of the Moors to preserve the genes.”

Although for some today the word “Moor” (or “Moro” in Spanish) has acquired a derogatory tone, others claim it for themselves with pride or apply it to others with respect. The term was derived originally from the Greek word “Mavro,” meaning black, which was then adapted by the Romans as “Mauri” in reference to the peoples of North Africa and which formed the basis of the name of the Roman province Mauretania. In time, the word became anglicized as “Moor,” a term applied to Berbers and Arabs alike.

With the distance of great time and the fog of uncertainty created by the determination of the reconquista’s architects to erase the records of Spain’s rich Muslim past, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction in the poignant legends that have risen among the many communities in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, said to have been founded by Muslim refugees from Al-Andalus.

Such legends are evident, for example, in the keys that hang on the walls of homes in Rabat, Morocco, where many Andalusians settled after being driven out of Spain in the 17th century — a tradition echoed in more recent times by Palestinian families driven into exile in 1948.

An academic paper in 1995 quoted a man in his eighties who spoke of old people who stood on the Moroccan shore and “nostalgically look to Spain for a sign that they can return.” The keys they kept in their homes, he said, were the keys to the properties their families once owned in Al-Andalus. They still hoped “to one day return and open the old doors.”

Other stories speak of mysterious remote villages in Spain where generations of Muslim families have lived for centuries, practicing their religion in secret for fear of reprisal and even now, long after the threat of persecution has passed, living clandestine lives of faith cut off from the outside world.

True or not, such tales speak at the very least of the survival of a great yearning for, and a strong sense of connection with, the lost Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus.

In a University of Pennsylvania PhD dissertation published in 1995, anthropologist Beebe Bahrami investigated “how an historical identity persists within a community in Rabat, Morocco, that traces its ancestry to Spain.”  

Bahrami carried out ethnographic and historical archival research among Rabati Andalusian families whose forebears “came to Morocco as Muslim refugees from a violent Cordoba (early 11th century), as Muslim refugees from a Granada (re-)conquered by Christians in 1492, or as baptized crypto-Muslims or true Christians from the 1609 expulsions.”

She found that much Spanish had been spoken in the Rabati dialect “well into the 1800s,” and that “even today there are a few words, perhaps 150, pointing to Spanish origins.”

The oral histories of the Andalusians of Rabat that she explored “consistently pointed to the fact that cultural differences maintained within the Andalusian families” had “kept [them] separate from the rest of society,” and that “the Moroccan Andalusian identity never waned.”

This was partly because, over the centuries, the descendants of the original Andalusians had practiced endogamy, the custom of marrying only within a specific cultural group. 

This cultural isolation, Bahrami concluded, was likely tolerated “because other Moroccans valued the Andalusian traditions and also sought to adopt many of them for themselves.”

For Sanchou, and for many thousands of others like her, “my dream, one day, is to return to the land of my ancestors and buy a piece of land or a house there to appease the fire of the suffering and humiliation felt by my ancestors who were tortured, dispossessed…and driven out like rubbish from a country that had been theirs for eight centuries.”

In 2003, one house was opened in Granada that seemed to offer hope that such dreams might one day come true — a house of God.

On Thursday, July 10, 2003, a muezzin called the faithful to prayer for the first time at the Grand Mosque of Granada, the first to be built in the city since the fall of Al-Andalus. 

At the time, a spokesman told the media that the mosque was “a symbol of a return to Islam among the Spanish people and among indigenous Europeans that will break with the malicious concept of Islam as a foreign and immigrant religion in Europe.”

The beautiful mosque, built with funding from Morocco and the UAE, would “act as a focal point for the Islamic revival in Europe.”

Overlooking the Alhambra, abandoned by Mohammed III in 1492, it also served as a reminder of the eight centuries of Muslim rule in Al-Andalus.

Not everyone welcomed the construction of the Grand Mosque, which was not quite as grand as it might have been. During the two-decade struggle to persuade city authorities to approve its construction, its designers were obliged to reduce the height of the minaret so it did not stand taller than the tower of the nearby Catholic Church of Saint Nicholas.

Modern Spain, said Antonio Manuel Rodriguez Ramos, a professor of civil law at the University of Cordoba, is a nation “that oscillates between two notions: those of us who defend diversity as the true essence of its history, and those who intend to build their identity by rejecting it.”

For the latter, he said, “everything ends with the Castilian and Catholic conquest. It is true that they tried to impose a single religion, with only one skin color, and that is why they persecuted Jews and Muslims, gypsies and blacks, and it is true that many fled to save themselves from this human and cultural extermination.

“But it is also true that a large part of the population remained, sometimes doing what their predecessors did until they forgot why. Hundreds of words and customs are Andalusian. These Moorish and Andalusian footprints have shaped the identity of Andalusia and demonstrate on their own that the expulsion has failed, that the attempt at cultural homogenization has failed, and that the Spanish identity forged on the extermination of the different has failed.”

Ramos is the author of two books that, he said, are “a mirror of the soul”: “The Moorish Footprint — The Andalus We Carry Inside,” and “Flamenco: Archaeology of the Jondo,” the jondo being a flamenco vocal style rooted in Al-Andalus. 

The books, he said, ask us “to recognize ourselves within and discover this hidden truth in the words, in the way we pronounce them, in our way of feeling, singing, dancing, eating or living.

“Those who read them immediately recognize themselves in them. They discover why their parents washed as Muslims before going to eat, without knowing it; that their mothers cleaned their houses on the Sabbath so as not to look Jewish; that the tapas were of pork and wine so they wouldn’t be accused of being heretics; that the solea is the call to prayer or the martinete (a type of flamenco song) the iqama that they did hidden inside their houses, their huts or their caves.”

If the ruling demanding that the minaret of the Grand Mosque of Granada should not overshadow the nearby church reflected a lingering ambivalence toward Spain’s Muslim heritage, then a unanimous decision by the Spanish parliament in 2015 to invite the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain to apply for citizenship — but not Muslims — appeared to be a slap in the face of history.

After centuries of “estrangement,” Spain was now inviting Sephardic Jews — the descendants of the Jews driven out of the country in the 15th century — “to re-encounter their origins, opening forever the doors of their homeland of old.”

Applicants had to offer documentary proof of Sephardic status, such as a certificate issued by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, a birth or marriage certificate proving celebration in the Castilian Jewish tradition or a report “produced by the appropriate entity that proves the applicant’s membership of the family names to the Sephardic lineage of Spanish origin.”

The window for applications closed on Oct. 1 last year. According to a spokesman for the Spanish Office for Diplomatic Information, “up to 132,000 persons of Sephardic origin have demanded the Spanish nationality through the specific law approved for the purpose.” 

But what of the descendants of Spain’s forcibly converted or exiled Muslims?

“With regards to people who might claim to be descendants of the Muslim populations living in Spain at the time of Al-Andalus,” added the spokesman, “so far there has been no initiative in Parliament to award them Spanish nationality.”

For her part, Sanchou said: “I have not asked Spain to account for all the suffering my ancestors suffered, but I do find it unacceptable that they apologized to the Jews and not to the Muslims.”

She is not alone.

Amal Correon, from Rabat, is one of a group of people from several parts of Morocco, including Tetouan and Chefchaouen, who claim descendancy from Andalusians and “who are fighting for at least the recognition of the first genocide in history. We want to receive the same treatment and recognition by Spain as the Sephardic Jews. Maybe we will get there or maybe our children will, but we will continue to seek justice.”

Every year, Correon takes his children on a “pilgrimage” to Hornachos, a small town in the Spanish province of Badajoz, to reinforce the sense of belonging to the place where their ancestors lived and worked for hundreds of years. Overlooking the town are the remains of a castle built by Arabs in the 11th century to mark the boundary between the Muslim taifas of Badajoz and Toledo.

Following the order by Philip III in 1609 to expel the Muslims from Spain, the entire population of Hornachos was evicted. “They had time only to sell what they could sell cheaply and take what they could take with them,” said Correon. His ancestors were among 3,000 or more Muslims who were taken to the port of Seville and put on ships bound for the Moroccan coast.

According to research carried out by the late Mohammed Bargach, president of the Rabat Hornachos friendship organization and the Moroccan Genealogy Association, said Correon, “my ancestor Garcia Correon took in charge 500 widows and children for life, until their marriage.”

Like many of the refugees, who in Spain had been forced to convert to Christianity, the Hornacheros faced a mixed reception in the ancient land of their ancestors: “Arriving in Tetouan, they were badly received because of their lifestyle, because they were considered too Christian and hardly spoke any Arabic.”

Ever since, said Correon, the Hornacheros have not stopped looking back over their shoulders. “The feeling of belonging to this village is something that only Andalusians know,” he added, being trapped “between the pride of belonging to a category of people who know their origins, proud to bear a name full of history, but also to be a people misunderstood by the ‘natives,’ who considered them as haughty and forming a separate caste, when it was only an instinct of survival, the preservation of identity.”

For some, rediscovery not only of their roots in Al-Andalus but also of their forebears’ faith, has come to them almost as an echo in the soul. Abd Samad Romero, president of the Azzagra Cultural Foundation in the Puebla de Don Fadrique, Granada, was born into a Catholic family in Granada and converted to Islam in January 1980. Over the years, he studied Islam extensively, but it was while on a trip to Morocco that he “found people who were reciting the Qur’an in Rabat,” an experience that profoundly moved him.

Pieces of his family history then began to fall into place. One day, he was teaching his brother how to perform ablution and the movement of salat while his Christian mother watched from a distance. Later that night, “she started to cry, saying that she had seen the same thing when she was little when she used to stay with her grandmother.” It made her realize what an important part of their lives Islam was and how they had to keep it hidden.

His mother “never asked her grandmother what she was doing, and her grandmother never explained it to her or to her mother. She thought it was a danger for her granddaughter to know these things and that with time, when she was older, she would know. And indeed, when she was older, she saw it clearly with us and that’s how she accepted Islam.”

In 1985, at the invitation of Dr. Mohammed Abdo Yamani, then the Saudi minister of Information and Culture, Romero performed Hajj and then moved with his family to Makkah to study at the Umm Al-Qura University. They remained in Saudi Arabia for 12 years before returning to Granada. He began to study his family history and found that they had originated from a Yemeni tribe called the Banu Qasem, who had migrated to Al-Andalus via Madinah.

In Spain, the Junta Islamica (Islamic Board) has spent years lobbying the government to offer naturalization to the descendants of Muslims evicted from the country after the fall of Al-Andalus. When the offer was made to Jews in 2015, L’Association pour la Mémoire des Andalous in Morocco welcomed it but said the Spanish government should “grant the same rights to all those who were expelled, otherwise the decision is selective, not to mention racist.”

At the time, the association, based in Rabat, claimed that as many as 600 families in Morocco alone today could trace their origins to Al-Andalus.

Mohammed Escudero Uribe, a member of the Islamic Board in Cordoba, said that for years various groups representing the descendants of the estimated 300,000 Muslims driven into exile “have been trying to promote initiatives aimed at recovering, developing and consolidating the historical memory of the Moors,” as well as seeking from the Spanish state “a historical apology and moral reparation in the name of their ancestors.”

There is, he said, no reason why members of the Muslim diaspora from Spain should not be able to demonstrate their entitlement to Spanish citizenship in the same way that Jews have done.

“These families and groups,” he said, “have been the object of study in universities and research centers aimed at the investigation, analysis and reinterpretation of Moorish history in order to identify and establish genealogical ties and civilizational links.”

The main way to document and demonstrate Moorish origin, he said, “is through genealogical study” — the study of family lineages —  “and archival documents, in which you can find textual, legal and historical references that demonstrate the genealogical link of an individual or family today with Andalusian families.”

The descendants who are in Morocco “have also brought their culture, their music, their gastronomy, their way of life,” said Ali Raissouni, a historian in the Moroccan city of Chefchaouen, and “documents signed by judges and notaries, written centuries ago (can be) found in the General Archive of Tetouan or the Royal Library of Rabat, and also in private archives.”

Nisba, adjectival family names indicating a place of origin and often handed down over centuries, can also offer clues, and such names can be found in Rabat — including Al-Andalusi, Al-Ghranati, Al-Cortobi — that indicate a historical link with Al-Andalus. 

The Andalusian heritage of Moors who once lived in the Iberian Peninsula and who subsequently migrated, throughout the Middle Ages and up to the 17th century, to North Africa, can also be demonstrated by the study of customs that have been handed down over generations.

Other tools, said Uribe, include “modern genetic studies, which can also help to demonstrate the ancestry and genealogical link of a Moroccan or Tunisian with their Moorish ancestors.”

Both Jews and Muslims have left their mark on the genetic composition of the modern-day Spanish population.

In a study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2008, researchers from Spain, France and Israel analyzed the genetic makeup of 1,140 males from Spain and the Balearic Islands and discovered a high average proportion of 10.6 percent ancestry from North African and 19.8 percent from Sephardic Jewish sources.

These findings, they concluded in the paper “The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance,” “attest to a high level of religious conversion (whether voluntary or enforced) driven by historical episodes of religious intolerance, which ultimately led to the integration of descendants.”

Andalusians, said Daniel Valdivieso Ramos of Cordoba, find themselves to a certain extent lost between two cultures. “The Christian conquest carried with it a deep transformation that for five centuries blurred Hispanic-Arab culture, taking it as its own in some cases or simply marginalizing it.

“And I would venture to say that the Arab world tends to view the Umayyad period of Al-Andalus as a strange reality separate from its own culture, perhaps because of the geographical distance and the divergent course of Eastern and Western history.”

In some ways, he said, “Al-Andalus seems to have become a kind of historical myth for both cultures, attractive and appealing, but also apparently unrelated to their own heritage.”

Nevertheless, Jose Miguel Puerta Vilchez, author, Arabist and professor of Islamic art and Andalusian history at the University of Granada, believes that awareness of, and pride in, the achievements and impact of Al-Andalus is growing ever stronger in Spain.

“Since the end of the 20th century, studies on all aspects of the history and culture of Al-Andalus have experienced a period of splendor in Spanish universities, and today there are several generations of first-rate Arabists,” he said.

Spanish Arabism, he added, “has never before had such a large number of scholars and such a large number of published works and cultural activities related to Al-Andalus.”

The next step toward recovering the full complexity of Spain’s true identity should be that “this enormous contribution reaches more layers of society and enters schools, institutes and the media in a more comprehensive and systematic way.

“I am one of those who think that the Arabic language should be offered as an optional second language in Spanish schools in many regions, both to better understand our past and to establish better ties with current Arab countries.”

For Dr. Antonio de Diego, professor of political philosophy at the University of Pablo de Olavide, Seville, and a vice-president of the Spanish Islamic Board, “the Andalusian influence in Granada can be appreciated in a large number of aspects.” 

“You cannot really understand Spain without the Islamic substrate,” he said.

But Spanish historian Manzano is less optimistic.

“Today’s Spaniards are unfortunately very ignorant of the Andalusian past,” he said. “Notwithstanding the fact that lots of public resources have been devoted to the study of the legacy of Al-Andalus in the past 30 years, we have not been able to convey to the general public the richness and importance of this period.

“Many misunderstandings, myths and manipulations still prevail, as witnessed by the extension of extreme-right misconceptions about the medieval period.

“This is unfortunate for those of us who consider that serious knowledge of Al-Andalus might contribute to the mutual understanding, respect and appreciation of cultures that nowadays is more necessary than ever.”