ABSTRACT
As part of Europe’s southern frontier, Spain’s geographic proximity to North Africa and historical engagements with Islam have played a formative role in its national development. The deep ambivalence and multivocality characteristic of Spain’s relationship with its Moorish heritage make it an illuminating site for studying how complex and variegated historical entanglements with Islam in Europe may influence contemporary dynamics surrounding Muslim incorporation. This chapter examines the legal and spatio-material recognition of Islam as part of Spanish cultural heritage in the aftermath of Spain’s democratic transition. During the 1980s and 1990s, political elites, urban planners, and business entrepreneurs strategically exploited Spain’s rich Islamic patrimony to further projects of national redefinition, tourist promotion and urban revitalisation. The absence of significant political and social concerns regarding Spain’s then modest Muslim population enabled the ‘Muslim question’ to be treated as a purely symbolic matter, divorced from problems of integration that were beginning to materialise in other European countries. Nevertheless, since the various forms of legal and spatio-material recognition granted to Muslims during the post-transition period were primarily the result of top-down initiatives rather than grassroots struggle, they did little to protect emergent Muslim communities from discrimination and were limited as to their efficacy for promoting generalised reflexivity regarding Spain’s approach to dealing with its Islamic past or its increasingly multicultural present.
