The portuguese rediscovering their country’s Muslim past

Historians and archaeologists are showing just how integral Islam is to the country’s identity.

LBy Marta Vidal 10 Jun 2020 isbon, Portugal - After fleeing war in his native Iraq, 33-year-old Mustafa Abdulsattar risked his life on a perilous boat trip from Turkey to Greece. Once in Greece, he was offered resettlement in Portugal, a country he knew very little about. But he was able to find some familiar features.

“I found many common words,” he explains before beginning to list them. Some relate to food, others to cities or regions. Then there is the expression “oxala” (pronounced oshallah), a direct descendent of the Arabic “inshallah”. Both mean “God willing”.

No more foreign

It should not be too surprising that Arabic influences can still be found in the Portuguese language. For centuries, the region was ruled by Arabic-speaking Muslims known as Moors.

In the 8th century, Muslims sailed from North Africa and took control of what is now Portugal and Spain. Known in Arabic as al-Andalus, the region joined the expanding Umayyad Empire and prospered under Muslim rule. But that legacy has been largely forgotten in the predominantly Catholic country. In Portuguese schools, the five centuries of Muslim rule are studied only briefly. Textbooks place more emphasis on a triumphant “reconquest” of the territory by Christian rulers, aided by crusaders, that ended in the 13th century.

Since then, Portuguese identity has been constructed in opposition to the Moors, historically depicted as enemies. But not everyone agrees with this version of history. “A great part of the population converted to Islam,” explains Filomena Barros, a professor of Medieval History at the University of Evora. Research has suggested that by the 10th century, half the population of the Iberian peninsula was Muslim.

For Barros, Muslims who sailed from North Africa were no more foreign than the Christian kings and armies from northern Europe who conquered the territory before and after them. “The Iberian Peninsula kept being conquered,” she says. “It’s interesting we don’t talk about the Roman conquest, or the Visigothic conquest, but we always talk about the Islamic conquest.”

Before Muslim armies arrived, the region was ruled by Visigoths, a Germanic people who ruled between 418 and 711. History textbooks emphasise the battles fought by Christian rulers against Muslim ones, but the defeat of Muslim armies did not mean an end to the Muslim presence in Portugal.

“The Christian reconquest doesn’t mean Muslims go back to their land, because this land was theirs as well,” says the historian. Today, however, less than 0.5 percent of the population of 11 million is Muslim, and few are aware that Muslims once made up a much larger proportion of the population. “What is taught in school is always taught from the perspective of the [winners],” says 30-year-old Noor-ayn Sacoor. Born in Portugal to parents of Indian and Arab origins, Sacoor is a member of Lisbon’s Muslim community.

She would have liked the school curricula to better cover the long period of coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews, often believed to be the reason the region prospered as a hub for culture and science. “I wish there was more focus on the heritage left by Muslim rule, it’s not very well-known in Portugal,” she reflects. Constructing a European identity All students who attend Portuguese schools are required to read The Lusiads, an epic 16th-century poem by Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camoes that celebrates the glory of Portugal’s kings and explorers at a time of imperial expansion.

The poem tells the story of the navigator Vasco da Gama’s first sea voyage to India and his encounters with Muslims, who are portrayed as sly and treacherous. Celebrated as a national hero for opening the sea route to India that gave Portugal access to the spice trade, which had been controlled by Arab merchants until then, da Gama has also been accused of carrying out a campaign of terror against Muslims in the struggle for control of the sea trade. In retaliation for attacks against the Portuguese, da Gama captured a ship with 200 Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca and set it alight, killing hundreds on board. But such massacres are not mentioned in The Lusiads, nor in Portuguese school textbooks, where Muslims are blamed for most attacks. Widely regarded as one of Portugal’s greatest poets, Camoes is commemorated on June 10 in a national holiday called Portugal Day. The holiday used to be known as the “Day of the Portuguese Race,” and was promoted by conservative nationalist Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, dictator between 1933 and 1968, as a nationalist celebration. This continued until the end of the authoritarian regime he established, the “Estado Novo”, in 1974. With Catholicism at the core of nationalist narratives, the ultraconservative dictatorship depicted Muslims as invaders and “enemies of the Christian nation”. “Camoes is not responsible for the appropriations of his work by nationalism,” says Barros. “He’s still one of the greatest Portuguese poets.” But, the historian adds, The Lusiads was a product of the period’s ideological construction of European identity in opposition to Muslims, and a crusading mentality that depicted Christian-Muslim relations in conflictive terms.

According to Barros, when the poem was written, the Ottoman Empire posed a threat to the hegemony of Europe’s Christian rulers.

Throughout the 15th and 16th century, Portuguese kings continued to expand into North Africa, where they established military bases and engaged in warfare. This continued until a disastrous 1578 defeat in the Moroccan town of Ksar el-Kebir (known in Portuguese as Alcacer Quibir) that put an end to Portugal’s expansionist ambitions in North Africa.

The Moor became Portugal’s stereotypical “other” as European identity was being shaped in opposition to Islam. Although the term “Moor” traditionally referred to

Arabic-speaking Muslims in North Africa, the label was often used to broadly refer to Muslims, reducing their diversity to a mass of otherness.

But nationalist narratives built on a Catholic identity gloss over centuries of coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians in what is now Portugal and Spain. Barros explains that, contrary to dominant versions of history and long-standing myths, Muslims were not outsiders.

“It’s dangerous to appropriate this for nationalist propaganda,” adds the historian, especially in light of the rise of the far-right across Europe.

Portugal’s Estado Novo was overthrown by the Carnation Revolution of 1974, but some of the old narratives still linger on.

In 2019, a newly formed far-right party won a seat in Portugal’s parliament for the first time since the end of Salazar’s rule. The party has proposed excluding “the teaching of Islam” from public schools, and emphasises the need to combat “Islamic fundamentalism” and defend Europe’s borders from an “invasion” from the south of the Mediterranean. Erasing Portugal’s Muslim and Jewish history

In 1249, King Afonso III of Portugal captured Faro, the last Muslim stronghold in Algarve. Most Muslims there were killed, fled to territory controlled by Muslims or converted to Christianity, but a small minority were allowed to stay in segregated neighbourhoods.

In 1496, King Manuel I decided to expel all Jews and Muslims, turning the kingdom exclusively Christian.

There are no exact records, but estimates place the number of Jews at the time between 20,000 and 100,000, and the Muslim community is thought to have been considerably smaller. After they were expelled, synagogues and mosques were either destroyed, given to the Catholic church or turned into private dwellings, in an attempt to efface the region’s diverse past and centuries of Jewish and Muslim presence.

The expulsion of the Jewish minority has been acknowledged by the Portuguese government with public apologies and a 2015 law that offers Portuguese citizenship to descendants of Jews who were expelled. Yet Muslims who were expelled by the same 1496 edict were not granted the same courtesies. Jose Ribeiro e Castro, a conservative politician who drafted the restitution law, said