White Extinction Fear: The Case of the Moriscos
Beginning in the late 15th century, the Spanish Inquisition was instituted to clamp down on heresy, apostasy and other perceived threats to the established Catholic faith, viewed as integral to the national identity of a nascent Spain.
As the Reconquista come to a close, the united yet differentiated nation was still sharply divided by regional lines in terms of ethnicity, language, culture and other social insitutions, most noticeably at the macro-level between Aragon and Castile, an often overlooked fact that persists to this day in the form of the Catalan independence movement, which has had an upswing in recent years.
In this context, Spanish nation-building, which has proved to be of the more brittle sort, must be seen through a lens which includes the less pretty parts and its growth-pains. In a similar vein to Russian or American ethnogenesis, the creation of a Catholic Christian national identity in Spain was marked by ethnic tensions and deportations.
After Granada fell in 1492, the Muslims and Jews in the realm were given two options: i) convert to Catholicism or, ii) pack your bags and leave the country. Former Muslims and Jews who opted to stay were designated as “moriscos” and “reversos”, respectively.
As the Spanish Inquistion really got going over the course of the 16th century, it culminated in clerical lobbying groups pressuring Philip II to expel the Moriscos from Spain, a promise which only his successor Philip III fulfilled, as they were viewed with heavy suspicion by Spanish society. Their children were thought to contain unpure blood which germinated in them an innate Islamic faith which one couldn’t get rid of.
Some clerics even had genocidal aspirations and dichotomously conceived of Spaniards in two senses, as the “Old Christians”, pure Spaniards of original Catholic and Iberian stock going back several generations, and the “New Christians”, Christians of Muslim origin suspected of apostasy and believed to still harbour Islamic sympathies, if not outright religious belief and practice. The New Christians were also supposed to have had a higher birth rate, which constituted an existential threat to Catholic Spain — ethnic cleansing was surely in order.
Subsequently, 300,000 Moriscos were expelled in a time span of roughly five years, between 1609 and 1613. Some priests opposed this measure, as they testified to how many Christians of Islamic origin actually were devout believers of the faith. It was also a damaging blow to the Spanish economy, as the Moriscos represented 4% of the population, a demographic segment forcibly removed from the villages in the countryside where they served their lords as plantation workers.
Most tragically was the fact that the Moriscos were deracinated from the only lands and sights they and their ancestors had known for centuries. Their main language wasn’t Arabic, but Spanish. They were mainly deported to the Barbary states on the North African coast, of which they were practically foreign strangers and were treated as such. Today there are still faint traces of the Andalusian communities scattered across the Maghreb. The reason that the initially well-organised state eviction was so long-drawn over many years was due to the fact that many Moriscos boarded the first ship they came across and returned to their ancestral homelands, a justified atavism at that.
I find this virtually unheard-of historical incident to be utterly fascinating in relation to the claims that far-right proponents make, and especially striking were the concerns over the Morisco birth rate. There is also the characteristic xenophobic fear of outsiders posing a direct menace to the conception of a pure and harmonious whole.
Genocidal aspirations among some of the priesthood may flabbergast some (it did me!), but deportations aren’t anything new: in their imperialistic and expansionist fervor, the Russians expelled the Circassians from the Caucasus to Turkey, where they predominantly reside to this day. And that’s not to overlook the Trail of Tears, the horrid displacement of the Five Civilised Tribes and the establishment of Indian reservations in Oklahoma.
Currently, Muslims in modern Western European nations don’t exceed a few percentage points, and at most they make up c. 9% of the population in France, which must be taken with a pinch of salt. As long as integration and wider cultural assimilation takes place, they will effectively be absorbed by the larger public in a few generations, with some expected relapses and challenges which must be dealt with accordingly.
Some studies seem to indicate how certain second- and third-generation immigrant citizens, particularly young males, cling to their ethnic origin more than their parents did, but this unfortunate development as well as a lingering fervent religious affiliation among Muslims at large are unavoidable growth pains that eventually will give way to a more liberal and secularistic outlook. The most ominous barrier to success is to conceive of these matters as a narrow binary distinction, which down the line only serves to feed into the narrative of white displacement as well as a racially and religiously suffused ideological conception of a nation.
This is a path better avoided, with the horrors of the past century seen in retrospect.
