Muslim Women in Southern Spain between Discrimination and Empowerment

In the last two decades, Spain has experienced a remarkable increase in its immigrant population (Cornelius, 2004), of which North Africans make up a significant percentage. Concurrent and concomitant to this increase, since the end of the Franco regime, a strong tendency for conversion to the Islamic religion has been observable in Andalusian cities like Granada and Cordoba. In the face of these two phenomena, anti-Islamic and anti- “Moorish” attitudes reflecting the combination of ethnical, religious, and nationalist dimensions of discrimination now prevail amongst large segments of the Spanish public. These attitudes are deeply-rooted and can be interpreted in one sense as historically transmitted stigmatizations of “the other”. As Stallaert (1998) explains in detail, since 1492, when the process of the so-called reconquista resulted in the “Christian reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula from the various Muslim ruling dynasties beginning with the final fall of Granada after a lengthy siege by the “Catholic kings”, the Spanish nation-state mission has been founded on a mixture of ethnically-based “arabophobia” and religiously motivated “islamophobia” (Runnymede Trust, 1997). The construction and imposition of a common Spanish-Castilian hegemonic identity has always relied on measures of religious persecution — such as the institution of the Santa Inquisición, originated in Spain — as well as “ethnic cleansing”, implemented since 1492 through “laws of blood purity”, which constantly blur supposedly biological, ethnical, and religious terminology