ISLAM | #Barxiluna ‘We need to create narratives to build the future we want for Barcelona’, Fátima Charkaoui
On Thursday 13 October, the round table and debate entitled ‘History and heritage’, organised by the Religious Affairs Office and the Espai Avinyó, took place at the Casa de les Altures, in the Horta-Guinardó district, as part of the programming for the Biennial of Thought 2022. This activity kicks off the new series ‘Barxiluna برشلونة | a (forgotten) Muslim past and present’.
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The round table highlighted the need to value the city of Barcelona’s Muslim past and present and to draw attention to its plural, diverse reality, not only in its material legacy, but also in terms of how Muslim people’s history has been approached in historiography, science, urban planning activity, etc. Abdennur Prado (essayist, poet, and filmmaker), Bilal Sarr (lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Granada), and Camila Opazo-Sepúlveda (archaeologist with master’s degree in Heritage Management and Museology) shed light on the little known significance of the city’s Muslim legacy for attendees, in an activity moderated by Fátima Charkaoui (educator and project coordinator at the Sobre los Márgenes Association).
The Commissioner for Intercultural Dialogue and Religious Pluralism, Khalid Ghali, pointed out that the event was ‘part of a wider strategy made up of different activities’. A strategy that seeks to reflect the plural nature of the city of Barcelona, where ‘30% of residents were born outside of Spain, there are 28 different faiths and over 500 centres of worship for 1000 religious and belief communities, and some 300 languages are spoken’. All of this means that ‘we must rethink ourselves from the perspective of this plurality and diversity’. The strategy is part of the Barcelona Interculturality Plan 2021–2030, ‘which aims to adapt to this new reality, characterised by the plurality of religions, languages, and cultural origins of the people of Barcelona’.
Fátima Charkaoui, the moderator, introduced the activity by saying, ‘All of this diversity, plurality, and baggage makes the city of Barcelona’, before adding, ‘The round table focuses especially on heritage and history, because the intention is to understand the past in order to understand the present and be able to imagine the future’. Barcelona was part of al-Andalus from 718 to 801. At that time, the city was known as برشلونة (Barshilūna or Barshaluna). We are talking about almost a century of history. Though there are few material traces of it, it is clear that this presence has had a huge influence on the city and is part of our historical heritage. ‘It is visible in names of streets, some festivals, etc., but if we look closer at its origins, we find that it is more diverse than we think’. Barcelona has made an effort to recover and reclaim the history of many groups who had been pushed to its margins, but nonetheless, ‘the memory of the Muslim past that has shaped the city’s history has not been examined closely or disseminated widely’. The intention behind this activity was to ‘debate, discuss, and centre this Muslim past’, guided by three experts who have approached the subject from different contextual and territorial perspectives. To achieve this, the round table started with a look at the wider Spanish context (Bilal Sarr), before focusing on Catalonia (Abdennur Prado), then ending up at the ‘central point that Barcelona represents, which is what we are interested in here’ (Camila Opazo-Sepúlveda).
‘Our task now is to deconstruct this process of identity building we have undertaken on the Iberian Peninsula, and that applies both to Spain and to Catalonia or Portugal’.
Bilal Sarr’s contribution focused on the southern part of Spain and emphasised the identity and legacy of al-Andalus and the space it occupies in the overall history of the peninsula. It is important to note that, with five centuries of Islamic presence in the north of Spain and seven in the south, the peninsula’s Muslim past has left an indelible mark on various areas, including heritage, language, toponymy, urban configurations, buildings, etc. Bilal Sarr suggested, ‘Despite all this influence on culture, scenery, and language, this impact is not reflected in many areas, especially the teaching of history in educational contexts’. In the face of this concealment of a Muslim past – in stark contrast with the hyper-visibility of Spain’s Roman history – Sarr invited us to realise that ‘we are the product of the whole, of an inherited conglomeration, and not just of the last layer that rejects the one before it’. He emphasised, ‘Despite the little space it occupies in textbooks and secondary schools, and even in university education, it is an undeniable, unforgettable past that is present among us today. The question is: why is so little space dedicated to this legacy?’. Sarr specified, ‘The idea of the ‘reconquest’ is not valid, as the people being reconquered were the same people who were already here before the Reconquista troops came along’. With this reading of history in mind, ‘our task now is to deconstruct this process of identity building we have undertaken on the Iberian Peninsula, and that applies both to Spain and to Catalonia or Portugal’.
‘The history of Catalonia should be the history of everything that has happened on these lands, and not the history of the most powerful bloodlines’
Next, Abdennur Prado presented part of his work in the book El retorn de l’islam a Catalunya [The Return of Islam to Catalonia], in which he identifies a series of narratives that demonstrate that ‘Muslims only appear in our historiography as extras in a story of power, of the vindication of the counts of Barcelona’. Prado then situated the presence of Islam and Muslims within Catalan nationalist historiography, ‘especially in the Renaixença [Catalan Renaissance], when a framework that would be repeated over the years was established’. He continued, ‘The intention is to highlight what the traditional approach to the presence of Islam and of Muslims has been, as part of the task of rethinking Catalan nationalism in the twenty-first century, within the context of an increasingly diverse society’. It was during the Renaixença that the ‘foundations were laid for a certain model of national history, which still shapes our imaginary as a people today. The intention, which is no secret, is to provide Catalans with a repertoire of images, names, and events with which they can identify’. What place do Islam and Muslims occupy within this historiography? It is clear that, in books from the time, ‘we find expressions like “Mohammed’s henchmen”, “the sectarians of the Koran”, the “enemies of Christ”, “the Mohammedan sect”, and the “Saracen yoke”’. The terms used in these documents ‘identify the role of Islam as the enemy the founding heroes of Catalonia had to face’. Prado added, ‘It is important to note that, at all times, the Muslims who lived in Catalonia are presented as foreign. This applies to those who arrived in the eighth century and those who lived here in the twelfth century’. ‘Historians repeat all the components of the purist myth of the Reconquista, meaning the idea that the conflicts that occurred in the Middle Ages were religious conflicts between two clearly defined sides’, he continued. Finally, Prado concluded, ‘The four centuries the taifas of Lleida, Balaguer, and Tortosa lasted are part of the history of Catalonia’.
‘We must not continue to talk about these legacies without the people who feel connected to or affected by them’
The last participant was Camila Opazo-Sepúlveda, who guided the debate towards the context at the heart of this round table, Barxiluna (Barcelona), by talking about the two archaeological sites in El Born. First, she discussed the 1700 site in the Born Culture and Memory Centre, ‘an essential place of memory within Catalan history and nationalism’, and explained that ample resources have been dedicated to this space. She then moved on to the eleventh-century Islamic cemetery (discovered in 1991), around which ‘there has been a systematic silence that has lasted thirty years’, meaning that the dissemination activities and studies relating to this burial site have been few and far between. Opazo-Sepúlveda declared, ‘This huge difference suggests that, once the different archaeological components of the Born site were discovered, a certain group of people decided which elements were of collective interest and which would be silenced’. The Islamic burial site is the only one of its kind in the whole urban area of Barcelona: twenty-one individuals* are buried there in accordance with Muslim rituals, and most of them are men, but there are also three adult women, a young woman and three children. They may have been among the poorest in society at the time. One of the individuals had something attached to their feet, which has been interpreted as shackles or some other restraint that limited their mobility when they were alive. It is thought that the other individuals wore the same thing, which ‘suggests that they may have been slaves, prisoners, or held captive’. Furthermore, studies have concluded that ‘the origin of the ancestors of these individuals corresponds 70% to Europe and 30% to Africa, and that the individuals were not related’. This suggests that ‘the Muslim component of the city in the eleventh century was just like it is now in the twenty-first century: diverse and numerous’. The question is, ‘why are some elements of heritage boosted – like the Barcelona 1700 site – while others are ignored, as in the Islamic cemetery case?’.
Opazo-Sepúlveda added, ‘After the Second World War, historically marginalised communities denounced their absence in the history of the countries where they lived, and their lack of participation and authority in the cultural legacies that represented them’. This led to the emergence of collaborative science, which aims to ‘satisfy both scientific needs and the needs of the parties involved in, emotionally connected to, or, possibly, affected by the themes being researched’. One of the most sensitive themes in work between scientists and communities is the ethical treatment of non-Western human remains appropriated by museums and research centres. On this subject, Opazo-Sepúlveda said, ‘Specialists in these areas have recommended that ancestral remains should be understood in a way that goes beyond Eurocentric mindsets: these remains must not be seen as archaeological artefacts to be used for research, but as human ancestors who deserve respect’. She concluded, ‘Official discourses accepting that culturally diverse groups have a common past allows us to reassess erased identities and give them a place and a sense of belonging in the society of which they are now part’, and to ‘highlight their role as active agents in their present and necessary figures in the configuration of healthy, equal societies’.
Following several comments from the audience, Fátima Charkaoui ended the round table with this conclusion: ‘These spaces are necessary in order to open up numerous research paths, and we need to create narratives to build the future we want for Barcelona’.
