Spain’s Erasure of Its Muslim Past Is at the Root of Tormented History with Morocco

For all the reported and actual significance of the traditional disputes that have put Morocco and Spain at odds in recent months and years, relations between these two neighboring countries have been particularly shaped by the image and representation that Spaniards have formed of Moroccans over the thirteen centuries of their shared history. To understand the deeper reasons why relations between the two nations have long been marked by a considerable degree of mistrust that has hindered genuine bilateral rapprochement and prevented the two neighbors from overcoming the traumas of both recent and distant history, it is necessary to go back to the end of the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula. An analysis of these historical roots makes it possible to understand how Spaniards gradually constructed a negative and demeaning image of Muslims in general, and of Moroccans in particular.

From the immediate aftermath of the fall of Granada, Spanish identity and collective memory were constructed around the rejection of anything that was, directly or indirectly, associated with Muslims. Spanish strategists and officials of the time were guided—and blinded—by a firm determination to undertake a process of “purification and decontamination” of their historical identity, to distance themselves from their Arab-Muslim past, and to eradicate from the geographical space of their country anything that had remote or direct connection with Arab-Muslim civilization.

While this feeling of rejection and intolerance initially focused on the last representatives of Islam in Christian Spain, namely the Moriscos, it was soon redirected toward Moroccans. Because of geographical proximity, Moroccans came to serve as a natural scapegoat for Spaniards and as representatives of everything they detested. As such, they were subjected to the full force of the disparaging attacks and defamatory propaganda of Spanish theologians, chroniclers, and travelers.

These architects of the “new Spanish identity” threw themselves wholeheartedly into a process of denigrating. And so no aspect of Moroccan religion, social life, or political organization was left untouched by these founding fathers of Spanish identity in their propaganda campaign to deny any Muslim contribution to the greatness of Spain’s history. Ultimately, they sought to demonstrate that a “horde of savages,” guided by an “immoral and false” religion, could in no way have exerted a positive influence on the country’s historical development. This sense of rejection and superiority went hand in hand with fear of Moroccans, which was born of the attacks and harassment to which inhabitants of the Spanish coasts had been subjected by Moroccan corsairs.

The damage caused by these attacks, together with the reported brutality with which the pirates treated their victims, proved deeply traumatic for the Spanish collective unconscious and left behind bitter memories of Moroccans, who from that point onward became a source of fear and terror for generations of Spaniards. These repeated attacks by Moroccan corsairs created serious difficulties for the authorities of the young Spanish state and weighed heavily on the security of Spanish coastal towns located near Moroccan territory.

It was precisely in order to put an end to these attacks and guard against a possible Muslim return to the Iberian Peninsula that the founding fathers of Spanish identity launched a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing all sectors of Spanish society that their country had to intervene in Morocco to prevent a centuries-old enemy from threatening Spain’s territorial integrity and its religious, political, and economic stability.

The double instrumentalization of the ‘Cruelty of Moroccans’

This Spanish intervention in Morocco would for centuries become the source of repeated military confrontations between Moroccans and Spaniards, thus giving Spaniards no reason to rethink or change their negative image of Moroccans. Indeed, this feeling of rejection and fear toward Moroccans became even more deeply rooted in Spanish collective memory as Spaniards increasingly found themselves confronting their southern neighbors militarily. For example, Spain’s prevailing image of Moroccans in the aftermath of the 1859 War of Tetouan emphasized above all their supposedly primitive character. Yet from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, as Spain became increasingly bogged down in Morocco, the image of the supposedly primitive Moroccan gradually gave way to that of the bloodthirsty and savage Moroccan.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, Spanish officials spared no effort to consolidate and entrench in Spain’s collective memory the image of the Moroccan as “treacherous, savage, cowardly, and bloodthirsty.” This profoundly negative image of Moroccans became a double-edged weapon in the hands of political actors of every persuasion, be it supporters or opponents of military intervention in Morocco.

For supporters of intervention, represented above all by military officers who sought by every possible means to lend a degree of legitimacy to their military operations in Morocco, it was necessary to exaggerate and emphasize the supposedly bloodthirsty character of Moroccans in order to awaken patriotic sentiment and mobilize greater numbers of young recruits. Meanwhile, their opponents – mostly made up of trade unionists and socialists – warned against the dangers of war in and on Morocco by emphasizing the same allegations and highlighting the supposed brutality and savagery of Moroccans.

In time, this deliberate instrumentalization of “Moroccan cruelty” permanently entrenched fear of Moroccans in Spanish collective memory. This fear became even more firmly embedded in the Spanish collective imagination following the outbreak of the Rif War in 1921 and the Battle of Annual in July of that same year, during which nearly 14,000 Spanish soldiers lost their lives. The trauma caused by this war among Spanish public opinion once again reinforced the belief that the country’s soldiers were confronting a “horde of savage and bloodthirsty primitives.”

Moreover, this was the image conveyed by all the means of communication of the time, whose principal objective was to denounce the supposed savagery of Moroccans and encourage Spaniards to seek revenge. It was also the awareness among Spanish military officers stationed in Morocco of the fear Moroccans inspired among Spaniards that led them, more than a decade later, to use Moroccans as a psychological weapon to terrorize their own fellow citizens and seize power illegitimately.

The massive participation of Moroccans in the Spanish Civil War had an extremely damaging impact on their collective image. Moroccans were unjustly accused of being the principal tormentors of the Spanish population. What’s more, in most of the writings that appeared in Spain in the aftermath of this fratricidal war, the prevailing tendency was to emphasize the harm and trauma caused by Moroccan participation while minimizing the role played by Italians and Germans in tipping the balance of the war in favor of Franco’s forces. At the same time, little or nothing was said about the fact that these denigrated and demonized Moroccans had themselves been the first victims of Spain’s ill-conceived occupation of Morocco. That they had paid with their lives for the ambitions of a handful of unscrupulous military officers whose principal objective was to seize power at any cost.

From that point onward, all sectors of Spanish society harbored such resentment toward Moroccans that any attempt to rehabilitate their image was inexorably doomed to failure. And this, in a way, explains why Franco’s circumstantial policy of benevolence toward his Moroccan “protégés” in the aftermath of the Civil War did not lead in any meaningful way to the rehabilitation of their image.

Such an outcome was all the less conceivable because, in the collective memory of the Spanish people—already shaped by centuries of confrontation and rivalry with Moroccans—the painful memories of the Melilla War of 1893, the Barranco del Lobo War, and the Rif War remained vivid. And the emotion these conflicts generated among Spaniards had led to sudden discovery that their soldiers were confronting a “horde of primitives” who mercilessly attacked their enemies.

Thus, despite all the efforts undertaken by the Franco regime during the early years of its rule to rehabilitate the image of Moroccans and portray them as friends of Spaniards, it was difficult to erase overnight from the Spanish collective imagination the deeply repellent image they associated with Moroccanness. As Professor, even though censorship resulted in a relative decline in satirical magazines and caricatural representations of Moroccans, comic strips—which were comparatively less constrained by such restrictions—continued to revive the old stereotypes long associated with Moroccans in Spain.

“Despite all the changes undergone by the image of Moroccans within the camp of the victors of the Civil War, it is clear that these changes could not effectively counteract the stereotypes and clichés that had circulated about Muslims and North Africans since the beginning of the Reconquista,” Corrales explained. “It is therefore hardly surprising that, here and there, opinions and illustrations continued to appear in which Moroccans were depicted in the same negative terms in which they had always been portrayed. In a certain sense, this was unavoidable.”

A history of mutually reinforcing memories

Spain’s insurmountable historical paradox is that any attempt to erase its Muslim past will never fully succeed because that past remains an integral part of the country’s sense of historical identity and grandeur. Al-Andalus was one of the principal political and cultural spaces of the medieval Mediterranean for nearly eight centuries. Its cities, institutions, intellectual traditions, agricultural techniques, architecture, and languages were part and parcel of the historical glory and prestige of the Iberian Peninsula.

Yet the consolidation of Spain’s Christian identity gradually transformed this complex history into a binary narrative in which the Muslim presence was remembered principally as an intrusion at best and a cancer to be eradicated at worst.  Indeed, a key element in this suppression of Muslim identity and political power was the subsequent political decision to determine which elements of the past deserved to be remembered as authentically Spanish and which had to be relegated to the status of an alien inheritance.

This process acquired a particularly powerful political dimension after the conquest of Granada in 1492 and the subsequent expulsion and forced conversion of Muslims and Jews. The emerging Spanish monarchy increasingly associated religious unity with political unity, making Catholicism one of the principal foundations of the state’s legitimacy. This is how the Moriscos, who remained in Spain after the formal end of Muslim rule, became the uncomfortable embodiment of a past that the new order wished to declare finished. Their eventual expulsion between 1609 and 1614 therefore represented an attempt to resolve a problem of identity and historical memory.

As a result, Morocco acquired a particular importance in this construction since geography made it impossible to separate the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim world across the Strait of Gibraltar. Morocco being the Muslim kingdom or civilization immediately beyond Spain’s southern frontier, this geographical proximity gave old memories a new political salience. So much so that, at moments of domestic uncertainty, military weakness, or imperial decline, successive generations of Spanish governments simply turned to presenting Morocco as an existential foe.

The relationship thus became trapped in an asymmetrical historical imagination that consisted of rationalizing Spanish intervention in Morocco on the grounds of security, civilization, or imperial necessity, while dismissing Moroccan resistance as irrational hostility. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave this inherited antagonism a modern imperial form. Weakened by the loss of most of its overseas empire in 1898, Spain sought in North Africa a means of preserving both strategic influence and a diminished sense of great-power status. The establishment of the Spanish Protectorate in northern Morocco in 1912 consequently spoke volumes about Spain’s own crisis of national confidence.

In such a tense context, Abd el-Krim’s defeat of Spanish forces at Annual in 1921 became a profound trauma in Spain and a political crisis for the Spanish state. Yet the same event is seen from Rabat as a major anti-colonial victory. There is, finally, a direct line between Morocco’s colonial history and the political formation of modern Spain. The Moroccan campaigns helped produce the generation of military officers known as the Africanistas, among them Francisco Franco, whose experience in the colonial war profoundly shaped the military culture that later intervened in Spanish politics.

Franco himself launched the 1936 uprising from Spain’s North African territories, relying heavily on Moroccan troops in the opening stages of the Civil War. This is part of the deep-rooted historical reasons why the historical relationship between Morocco and Spain cannot be reduced to a succession of bilateral disputes. It is also a history of mutually reinforcing memories. Spanish perceptions of Morocco were shaped by colonial warfare while Moroccan perceptions of Spain were shaped by occupation, resistance, and the unresolved violence of the colonial period.

The dark image of Islam in Spanish school textbooks

Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that Moroccans are still the group that inspires the least sympathy among the great majority of Spaniards, particularly when one considers that Spanish school textbooks continue to perpetuate a negative image of Muslims in Spain.

It is regrettable, in this regard, to observe the manner in which the Muslim religion, its Prophet, its followers, and their political and social history are presented in deeply offensive and insulting terms. As emerges from the collective study devoted to the image of Muslims in Spanish school textbooks, El Islam en las aulas, the authors and designers of these textbooks are guided by a desire to distance themselves from Spain’s Arab-Muslim past and to refuse to acknowledge it as an integral part of the country’s history and cultural heritage. Far from being guided by any serious concern for objectivity, the authors of these textbooks seek above all to revive the same falsehoods that have been propagated since the end of the Muslim presence in Spain by anti-Muslim authors such as Diego de Haedo, Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Jaime Bleda, and many others.

The profusion of prejudices and falsehoods presented by these authors extends to every aspect of the Muslim religion and the political and social history of its followers. Every effort is made by the designers of these school textbooks to perpetuate the negative image of Muslims—and, more specifically, of Moroccans—and to continue presenting them as Spain’s sworn enemies. This historically entrenched biased representation of Islam has continued to give rise among generations of Spaniards to a phobia of everything associated with Muslims, leading them to view the followers of this religion through an almost invariably negative lens.

As a Moroccan citizen who wishes to see relations between his country and Spain undergo a qualitative leap and a significant improvement that would see the two nations finally overcome all the traumas of their long shared history, I can only regret that our Spanish neighbors continue to look upon Moroccans with condescension, rejection, and contempt. It is precisely this sense of condescension that characterizes the way Spaniards view Morocco and that, to this day, continues to prevent genuine rapprochement between the two neighboring countries.

Indeed, this historically constructed perception of Moroccans constitutes the primary obstacle preventing the two countries from finding common ground on the disputes that continue to divide them and from bringing their strategic interests closer together. This is all the more true because, although there is a significant segment of Spanish public opinion, Spanish intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians who advocate genuine rapprochement with Morocco, there remains a larger category that conceives of these relations only through the prism of confrontation and antagonism. For them, Morocco is an incontrovertible enemy of Spain’s interests and security.

Spanish officials should recognize the obvious fact that improving their country’s political, diplomatic, and economic relations with Morocco cannot be separated from rehabilitating the image of Moroccans in Spain and from the adoption by Spaniards of a new perspective of respect and consideration toward their Moroccan neighbors. As long as Spanish political leaders and media figures fail to recognize this fundamental factor, it would be illusory to believe that Morocco and Spain could one day build solid bridges of dialogue and mutual understanding, or that their relations could be insulated against any future crisis or temporary friction.

Samir Bennis is the co-founder and publisher of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.