Andalusian Muslim Return Exposes Spain's Unresolved Colonial Amnesia and EU Border Regime
Original framing: “The Muslims finding belonging in southern Spain” — Al Jazeera
The 1609-1614 Morisco expulsion established the template for modern European denaturalization: a racialized population deemed unassimilable despite centuries of residence, expelled by royal decree under the guise of religious purity. This precedent informs Spain's 2015 'gag law' and the 2024 proposed constitutional amendment allowing citizenship revocation for 'terrorism' — disproportionately targeting Muslims. The 1492 Alhambra Decree expelling Jews and the 1609 Morisco expulsion together forged the 'limpieza de sangre' (blood purity) statutes that became the world's first racial bureaucracy, later exported to the Americas. Contemporary Muslim 'return' occurs within this unbroken legal genealogy, not outside it. The article's 'centuries after' framing severs this continuity, presenting the present as a clean break rather than a contested negotiation with an active exclusionary apparatus.
The Muslim 'return' to Andalusia is not a spiritual homecoming but a contested negotiation with a 500-year-old racial state apparatus that expelled Moriscos in 1609, built 'limpieza de sangre' into the world's first racial bureaucracy, and now deploys EU border regimes (Frontex, Ceuta fences, New Pact on Migration) to manage the Muslim labor its agribusiness depends on.
Al Jazeera's framing serves Qatari soft power by aestheticizing belonging, while erasing the acequia peasants defending water commons, the Moroccan women striking in Huelva greenhouses, the Gitano flamenco artists preserving the sonic archive, and the West African Sufi orders building transnational care networks the state refuses to fund. Climate collapse in the Guadalquivir basin will soon make this negotiation existential: the only viable belonging is one that revives Al-Andalus hydrological wisdom as climate adaptation, recognizes Morisco descendants' legal claim, and grants climate citizenship to the workers feeding Europe. The trickster Eshu stands at the Alhambra gate laughing: the monument is not the inheritance — the unpaid invoice is.