The portuguese rediscovering their country’s Muslim past
earlier this year that “the expulsion of Muslims is more related to conquests and battles than [to] religious intolerance.” Because of the supposed background of conflict, politicians argued that the expulsion of Portugal’s Muslims could not be compared to the persecution of Jews, which was based purely on hatred and bigotry.
When religious minorities were given three stark choices - convert to Christianity, leave Portugal or face the death penalty - most Muslims fled to North Africa, where they assimilated into local populations.
The majority of the Jewish population, however, was not allowed to leave the kingdom, as King Manuel turned the initial edict of expulsion into an edict of forced conversion. Some Jewish children were taken from their parents and adopted by Christian families. The remaining Jews were forcibly baptised. Historians believe that Muslims might have been allowed to leave the kingdom unharmed because the king feared retaliation from Muslim states, while Jews had no such protection.
Those who were forcibly converted were only allowed to leave Portugal after the Lisbon massacre of 1506, when between 1,000 and 4,000 “New Christians”, as the Jewish converts were called, were killed, many of them burned at the stake.
Many fled to the Ottoman empire, establishing vibrant Jewish communities in cities like Thessaloniki, Istanbul and Dubrovnik. The New Christians who remained in Portugal continued to be persecuted after the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536.
The restitution laws of 2015 were meant as a way of acknowledging the harm done to Portugal’s Jewish community and the erasure of their legacy.
Historical reparation
Although Muslims were not granted redress in the form of citizenship rights, a growing interest in Portugal’s Islamic past is slowly clearing the way for a different kind of historical reparation.
Just like Mustafa Abdulsattar, the Portuguese writer Adalberto Alves made a list of Portuguese words derived from Arabic. What started as mere curiosity turned into a decade-long project that led to the publication in 2013 of a dictionary of more than 19,000 Portuguese words and expressions with Arabic origins.
“I wanted to overcome the ‘cliche’ of antagonism between Christians and Muslims and the oblivion about Andalusi civilisation,” Alves explains.
His goal was to emphasise common heritage and to give visibility to the long-neglected presence of Muslims and their contributions to the country’s identity and history. Alves wanted to show that the “other” was, in fact, part of the self.
Alves believes the cultural and intellectual legacy inherited from Islam is yet to be acknowledged in Europe, as Muslims have been written out of European history. To correct this historical erasure, Alves has spent the last 35 years documenting the influences of al-Andalus in Portugal - from poetry and language to music, carpet-weaving and pastries, to minaret-shaped chimneys. His efforts were acknowledged by UNESCO with the Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in 2008. The legacy left by Muslims is vaster than most imagine, Alves explains, pointing out how the Portuguese empire depended on the navigational sciences developed by Arabs. Even Vasco da Gama, whose epic voyage is so widely celebrated in Portugal, is believed to have relied on a Muslim pilot to reach India. But it was perhaps with poetry that Alves most contributed to changing the way Islamic heritage is perceived in Portugal. With his collection and translation of Arabic poetry from the Andalus period into Portuguese, poets such as al-Mu’tamid, the last Muslim ruler of Seville and one of the most celebrated Andalusian poets, are coming to be known as “local” poets. This year, an exhibition held in Lisbon at the National Library celebrates the work of both Alves and al-Mutamid.
“I dedicated a great part of my life to try to do justice to the great poet and King al-Mutamid ibn Abbad,” says Alves, “maybe because we have origins in the same city, Beja.” Close to the southern city of Beja, in a region where the influence of Islam is most evident, another pioneering project is debunking the stereotype of an Arab-Muslim invader and recovering the Islamic past as a foundational element of Portuguese identity and heritage. A shared Mediterranean
It all started with broken pieces of pottery found under a fig tree in Mertola, a small town by the banks of the Guadiana River. Archaeologist Claudio Torres first visited the whitewashed town in 1976 with the historian Antonio Borges Coelho. Then a lecturer in medieval history at the University of Lisbon, Torres had been invited to Mertola by one of his students. Torres and Coelho stumbled upon some Islamic ceramics near the town’s medieval castle.
Torres, who is now 81, decided to start digging. In 1978, he established the archaeological Field of Mertola and moved to the quiet town with his family.
“Mertola doesn’t show us the battles,” explains researcher Virgilio Lopes, who has been working at the archaeological site for the past 30 years. “It shows us how people used to live together. Underneath these rocks, there is this extraordinary idea of coexistence.”
Next to the medieval castle stands a church with horseshoe arches, a vaulted interior and a mihrab - a semicircular niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the direction of prayer - behind the church’s main altar. Archaeologists found traces of a Jewish community and discovered that the church stands on what was once a Roman temple and later a mosque.
“Different communities lived together here until the end of the 15th century,” explains Susana Martinez, a researcher at Mertola’s archaeological field and professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Evora.
“The expulsion of Jews and Muslims breaks the long period of coexistence as Christianity from the north imposes its faith on everyone,” she adds. Archaeologists in Mertola uncovered a past of coexistence that challenged the way history is told in Portugal. Torres believes that Islam spread across the region through centuries of trade and economic relations and not as a result of violent conquest.
This might explain why, after the first victory in 711 when an Arab and Amazigh army led by Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa and took control of the south of the Iberian Peninsula, Muslims managed to conquer most of th the territory with little difficulty. Generous surrender terms also meant there were more peaceful capitulations than violent battles, allowing Muslims to control most of what is now Portugal and Spain within just a few years.
“The great ruptures we are taught in school didn’t actually materialise,” explains Lopes. “Mertola is important because it shows us the continuities, the moments when religions coexist, the connections between peoples.” In a time of hardening borders and strict divisions between the north and the south of the Mediterranean, it is hard to imagine that the sea once served as a connector. But this is what archaeologists in Mertola have found. Despite the divides created by nationalism, both shores of the Mediterranean share a common culture and history. “We shouldn’t look at the south of the Mediterranean as if there was a border dividing us,” says Lopes. “Those people are also our people. Genetically and culturally, we are very close.”
The focus on continuities across the Mediterranean has helped question the dominant nationalist historiography that depicts Muslims as the “other,” but it takes time to change deeply ingrained ideas about national identity and history.
“We need to continue telling the stories of continuities,” says Martinez. “Not the story of elites and their battles, but the stories of common people and the way they interacted, the way they shared similar ways of living. These stories are a powerful way to deconstruct stereotypes and prejudice we might have about the other.”
But perhaps nothing tells the story of continuity and a shared Mediterranean as clearly as Claudio Torres’ own experience.
In the 1960s, Torres was a student and a dissident who was arrested and tortured by the authoritarian regime. When a letter of conscription to serve in Portugal’s colonial war arrived, he decided to flee.
Unable to afford the smugglers’ fee to reach France, he fled Portugal on a small motorboat to Morocco. Carrying other Portuguese fleeing colonial war and dictatorship, his boat nearly sank in a dangerous trip, not unlike Mustafa Abdulsattar’s sea crossing almost 60 years later.
“Today, every day, there are trips like that one,” says Lopes. “But we have forgotten that just decades ago we were the ones crossing.”