Byline: Stryker McGuire and Mike Elkin
A year ago Madrid's cavernous Atocha train station was filled with twisted steel and mangled bodies, killed by suspected Islamist terrorists. Spain is an ancient battleground between Christians and Muslims. The bombings of March 11, 2004, posed the question: would it be so again?
The answer--no--is clear from an inconspicuous memorial at Atocha. It's a postmodern wall where people can leave their handprints or pen a message. Occasionally someone will scrawl an insult: "Look at how these immigrants thank us!" But another, possibly a Muslim, will write: "Don't generalize. We feel the same pain." Those who feared a backlash have been heartened. "I was afraid," says Mohammed Chaib, a Moroccan-born Muslim congressman in the Catalonian Parliament. And who could fault him, given history? In their attempts to end nearly eight centuries of Moorish rule, the architects of the Christian reconquista banished, killed or converted vast numbers of Muslims to "purify" the Iberian Peninsula. And yet in the past year, says Chaib, "society's behavior was exemplary."
Think of it as a new reconquista, but in reverse. The anniversary of March 11 finds a Spain that has rediscovered its Islamic past--and its Muslims. During the last year, newspapers have churned out stories on the "forgotten Spaniards." Though hard statistics are impossible to come by, Muslim leaders agree that the number of small, neighborhood mosques--so-called garage mosques--is on the rise. So is the number of Roman Catholics converting to Islam. "Just last week someone asked me if he could convert at home or on the Internet," laughs Mansur Escudero, secretary-general of the Islamic Commission of Spain.
After last year's explosions, Catholic and Muslim leaders reached out to one another across religious and historical divides. The government promised to implement a stalled 1992 agreement to fund the teaching of Islam at schools where at least 10 students request it. The regional government in Catalonia offered extracurricular Arabic-language and culture classes for the first time. Madrid set out to improve relations across the Strait of Gibraltar with Morocco, homeland to many Muslim immigrants; in January, Spain's King Juan Carlos addressed the Moroccan Parliament.
The record of reconciliation is by no means unblemished, of course. Despite the fact that the Islamic Commission estimates that 74,000 students have requested special religion classes, the government has been slow to come up with the money and the teachers. After 3/11 the regional government of Aragon proposed removing from its heraldic shield an ancient motif that depicts the decapitated heads of four Moors. That issue remains unresolved. Muslim immigrants still face discrimination in finding a job or place to live. And 3/11 occasioned instances of abuse: insults on the street, racist graffiti, suspicious looks on the Metro.
Still, Muslim leaders say they were surprised by the absence of any serious recrimination or retribution. There was virtually no violence. For their part, Muslim organizations and representatives from 400-odd mosques around the country quickly expressed solidarity. "We absolutely condemn this," declared the Islamic Commission in response to the attacks. In the vast expanse of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Muslim demonstrators chanted, "We're Muslims, not terrorists!" and "They're our dead, too!" Fourteen Muslims died in the train attacks, notes Escudero, adding: "The blood of 3/11 is ours, it is everybody's."
What explains the surprising harmony, so in contrast to the ugliness roiling such places as the Netherlands? Spaniards--Muslim as well as Christian--are finding that history can unite as well as divide, says Mercedes del Amo, director of the Contemporary Arabic Studies Department at the University of Granada. Its campus sits in the shadow of the Alhambra, the great citadel of the Moorish rulers of Spain. "The eight centuries of Islam in Spain are eight centuries of our own history," she says. "When we visit the Alhambra, we stand before a vestige of our own culture, of our forebears, independent of religion." Remember, too, she says, that Morocco is just a few kilometers from Spain. "Our relationship with Islam is not one of fascination; it is normal, everyday life."
More modern factors undergird Spain's post-3/11 tolerance, as well. Wearied from decades of Basque violence, and mindful of how quickly the country's previous government wrongly blamed ETA terrorists for the atrocity at Atocha, Spaniards are careful not to equate terrorists with whole communities they may spring from. "We know the difference between ETA and a Basque person," says Chaib, drawing the distinction between ordinary Muslims and Islamist extremists. Spain is also fortunate to have no openly racist or fascist political parties, in contrast to France, the United Kingdom or Holland. Finally, it's worth noting that Spain's Muslim population is relatively small. Despite substantial immigration from North Africa, especially, only 800,000 to 1 million Muslims live in Spain--roughly 2 percent of the country's 40 million people. That compares to 7 percent for France and 6 percent for the Netherlands. Even Denmark and Sweden (with about 3 percent) have larger Muslim shares of the population.
That said, Spain's Muslim population is growing fast. To keep pace with its rapid economic growth, the country needs an annual influx of about 1 million immigrants, many if not most of whom will be Muslim. As it is, the government recently offered amnesty to as many as 1 million immigrants in the country illegally, most of them North African. This alone puts Spain in the vanguard of Europe's efforts to cope with its growing Muslim population and the tensions arising from it. If the reconquista that culminated in 1492 represented one response to a cultural challenge, Spain's equanimity and far-sightedness in responding to 3/11 represents another. That enlightened tolerance will be tested in the years to come, no doubt, but it could hardly be more encouraging--for Spain or the slowly melding Muslim-European world.
CAPTION(S): Then and now: Since the bombing (above), the number of mosques and converts has risen
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