Recently, media attention has focused on Spain because of the public protests against its left-wing government. Widespread disapproval of the government is hardly surprising given the government’s unpopular policies regarding the economy, mass immigration, the constitution, education, and other important issues. Furthermore, with the mass influx of illegal Muslim migrants into Spain and the severe decline in Spanish birth rates, the nation finds itself at a crossroads, with its future far from certain.
A major problem that prevents many people from understanding Spain’s history with Islam is the false historiography, or even propaganda, that rewrites the history of Muslim-occupied medieval Spain and tries to portray it as a ‘bastion of peace and multiculturalism.’
After Islam’s emergence in Arabia during the 7th century, one of the first objectives of invading Arabs was the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. Parts of Spain and Portugal (which the Muslims called ‘al-Andalus’) were occupied and ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties for almost 800 years, beginning in the 8th century. With the expansion of Islam, the Muslims seized almost the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula in less than a decade, from 711 to 718. The Visigothic Christian kingdom was defeated, and its last king, Rodrigo, was slain by the invaders.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute notes:
Scholars, journalists, and politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—’al-Andalus’—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. But this widely accepted account is simply false, as Northwestern University scholar (and Modern Age editorial adviser) Darío Fernández-Morera reveals in his new book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.
Some excerpts from the book include:
Al-Kardabus and another Muslim historian, Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi, write that the Arab leader Musa Ibn Nusayr sacked, enslaved, and spent three years waging jihad—holy war—against the Spanish infidels. Along with al-Kardabus, al-Marrakushi and al-Maqqari say that Musa spent as much time ‘pillaging’ as ‘organizing’ the conquered land. These sources also mention that several members of the tabi’un (a generation of pious Muslims who were direct disciples of Muhammad’s Companions) entered Spain to direct the jihad and the conversion of the land. The presence of these members of the tabi’un underlines the fundamentally religious motivation of the invasion—a jihad.
If Christians resisted, a massacre would follow after a Muslim victory. Near Orihuela, the defeated Christians were punished with extermination.
After the Muslims took Córdoba in a furious assault, the remaining Christian defenders retreated to a church to continue fighting. According to al-Maqqari, the Muslims put the building to the torch and the Christians inside died, without surrendering; according to al-Kardabus, when the Christians surrendered, the Muslim commander had them beheaded.
The history of Muslim-occupied Spain was largely marked by a severe persecution of Christians and Jews that included several expulsions and pogroms. In 1013, for instance, Muslims expelled the Jews from Cordoba and confiscated their wealth. In 1066, Muslims massacred almost the entire Jewish population of Granada in a pogrom that destroyed the city.
Al-Andalus was a slave state that included eunuchs and the widespread sexual slavery of non-Muslim women. Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, has documented the vast extent of jihad slavery in al-Andalus, including the aptly named ‘hideous trade’ of eunuch slavery. Bostom quotes Evariste Levi-Provencal (1894-1956), who was an influential modern scholar of Muslim-occupied Spain:
The population of Caliphate Spain and other Muslim countries in the same period … included a rather large proportion of slaves, both male and female, white and black, of European or Sudanese origin, furnished from several different sources—razzias [jihadist raids] against Christian Spain, the black slave trade, maritime [jihad] piracy, and merchants specialized in the slave trade. … Men of servile condition were certainly less numerous in the cities than female slaves. But they were not rare in the countryside, where they led a painful life. … They were mainly made captive in Spain itself during [jihadist] expeditions against the Christian kingdoms, especially at the time of al-Mansur, and who could not be bought back by their relatives, either because they had lost their race or lacked the necessary resources. But it could also happen that these captives were from regions of al-Andalus pacified last, thus at the time of the revolt of Ibn Hafsun, were sold as slaves in Cordoba a significant number of people of free condition, apparently Christians. … Muslim Spain was not only a strong domestic market for this trade but also a collection and transit site to other Muslim countries in the Mediterranean basin notably for white slaves and eunuchs. … al-Muqaddasi described in detail the way in which they were castrated.
After being part of the Islamic caliphate for around 800 years, Spain finally liberated itself from its Muslim occupiers by fiercely fought wars of resistance. The Reconquista (Ibero-Romance for ‘reconquest’) or the fall of al-Andalus is a term used to describe the military campaigns that Christian kingdoms waged to free their lands from the Islamic occupiers. The beginning of the Reconquista is traditionally dated to the Battle of Covadonga in the eighth century, during which an Asturian army achieved the first Christian victory over the occupying forces of the Arab Umayyad Caliphate. But the Reconquista only culminated much later, in the fifteenth century, with the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the Catholic kings.
The people of Spain suffered for centuries under Islamic tyranny, and only after they had made great sacrifices were they able to liberate their lands and become once more a sovereign nation. Today, Spain is subjected to another phase of Islamization—this time through mass, illegal Muslim immigration—an ideological policy of the EU executive, who, with the Spanish government, has never sought the approval of the Spanish population. Gatestone Institute has for years extensively reported on the threat of Islamization faced by Spain in articles such as ”Spain: Migration Crisis Spirals Out of Control,” ”The Quiet Islamic Conquest of Spain,” “Muslims Demand ‘Right of Return’ to Spain,” ”Spain: New Gateway to Europe for Mass-Migration,” and “Spain: Jihad Continues.”
Islamist terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) and affiliated groups of Al-Qaeda often call on their supporters to reconquer al-Andalus. The media arm of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is called Al-Andalus. Terrorism experts have even cited “a Salafist drift in parts of Spain, particularly in the autonomous region of Catalonia.” Speaking to France24 in 2017, Pierre Conesa, a former senior French Defense Ministry official and author of several books on political Islam, noted that ”Barcelona is a city that has long sheltered a form of radicalization, which for a time embraced the Muslim Brotherhood, Tabligh [a movement advocating a rigorous and literal interpretation of Islam] and then the Salafists.”
Attacking Spain has symbolic weight for Islamic State sympathizers. “There’s a bunch of evidence in recent years, in the IS group and other radical Islamist propaganda, which castigated Spain by recalling that part of its territory was Muslim for several centuries,” explains Alexandre Vautravers of the University of Geneva’s Global Studies Institute. Meanwhile, birth rates in Spain are in serious decline. Researchers W. Bradford Wilcox and Tim Sprunt have written about “the collapse of the Spanish family” and ”declining fertility rates,” calling them Spain’s “depopulation bomb”:
Fertility rates have been steadily declining for decades, with the marriage rate falling more than 50% in the same period. When data from last year showed that the Spanish birth rate had plummeted to an all-time low, Vox took to Twitter to describe the situation as a ‘demographic emergency.’
In 1980, the Spanish total fertility rate (TFR) was 2.2 births per woman. Today it has fallen to a historic low of 1.2 births, one of the lowest fertility rates among European Union countries, and far below the 2.1 rate required for a population to replace itself. As a result, for the first time, over 20% of Spain’s population is above the age of 65, and this proportion is rising fast.
The ideology that promotes mass immigration seems to be ethno-nihilist in that it sees no problem with a demographic replacement that could eventually lead to the fall of entire civilizations in Europe. It is, therefore, vital to preserve Spain’s Christian cultural identity, as well as its democracy, sovereignty, and other aspects of its culture and history that make Spain the unique nation that it is. Spain and the rest of Europe urgently need a rational immigration policy that puts Europe first, as well as a truthful historiography that is devoid of political correctness and that openly addresses the crimes of Muslim-occupied Spain and the tyrannical teachings of Islamic doctrine.
