Once upon a time, many years ago, the kingdom of Spain suffered a terrible invasion by hordes of barbaric adherents to the nascent Islamic religion. These infidels, swarming up from North Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar, managed to penetrate and subdue the land as far north as the Pyrenees, stopped only by the heroic efforts of a small group of brave-hearted Christians. With their courage, the reconquista was born, that sacred and patriotic struggle to wrest the Spanish realm back from the heathen Muslims, fully realized with the defeat of Granada in 1492 at the hands of the good Catholic rulers, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
So goes – more or less – a powerful origin myth of the country of Spain. My research here in Morocco examines the evocation of this myth during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, specifically its reference by the Spanish Nationalists, led by Generalísimo Francisco Franco, and its complication by this group’s relationship with Muslim Moroccans in what was then the Spanish protectorate in northern Morocco. I additionally plan to analyze the portrayal of this rhetoric within an as-yet undefined, selection of either historical or literary works, both Spanish and Moroccan, in the years since the war.
Given that I have only just begun these investigations, the aims of the present paper are foundational: to set the scene in which the reconquista rhetoric took place and to outline the questions that will drive my research, as well as the methodology I will use to pursue them and the final form that I intend for my conclusions to take.
Now, we left off with the end of the so-called “reconquest” of Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. Flashing forward through the centuries, we see that interactions between the Iberian Peninsula and northern Africa were fairly limited. An important demographic point to bear in mind, however, is the continued presence of Andalusians in the Moroccan population; these expelled Muslims and Jews in fact often became a part of the elite urban classes, prominent in religious as well as economic spheres (Burke 4). One question I have, then, is: did a person’s Andalusian heritage affect his perspective on relations between Morocco and Spain?
The question becomes more pertinent in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the European powers were developing an active interest in their neighbors across the Mediterranean. Contact between Morocco and Spain initially took a predominantly commercial form but turned military at times, as it did with the Tetouan War in 1859 – the result of border disputes over the Spanish enclave of Ceuta – and with a skirmish over the border with Melilla in 1892.
Then, in 1898, Spain gave up most of her colonial holdings in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and, anxious to regain lost territory and reassert her power, the military in part reacted by launching a campaign to subdue northern Morocco in 1909. As British historian Sebastian Balfour points out: “Morocco had a mythical resonance for the army and conservative sections of Spanish society. The medieval Reconquest against the Moorish infidel had spread across the Straits of Gibraltar into northern Africa by the end of the fifteenth century. The Papal Bull of 1457 had given the Church’s blessing for the conquest of Islamic territories by Spain, while Isabel the Catholic’s will enjoined her successors to carry on the struggle against the infidel" (10-11).
This campaign was significant for two main reasons. First, it served as the catalyst for the creation of the “Army of Africa,” or a Spanish military force comprised of indigenous Moroccan troops. Recognizing the difficulties of guerrilla warfare in the harsh environment of the Rif Mountains, Spanish commanders established the Regulares, a division of local Moroccan soldiers meant to curb the resistance of various Rifian tribes. Second, it was during the 1909 invasion that a unique psychology began to take hold amongst certain factions of the Spanish colonial officers. Balfour sums it up as “characterized by elitism, a scorn for the softness of civilian life, and, by extension, of garrison life and an increasing disdain for civilian government” (27). Notably, this burgeoning identity did not include any great sympathy for the conservative clerical establishment, rejecting religion as a motive for Spain’s colonial incursions into North Africa (29). Another question that I would like to pursue is, what was the specific shape of military attitudes toward religion, both Catholicism and Islam? Did officials merely ignore it or were they downright disdainful? The answer to this question will be important for understanding the later Nationalist assumption of a highly religious rhetoric.
Established in 1912, the Spanish Protectorate was a fertile soil for the flourishing of an elitist military mindset, run as it was by a dominantly military personnel. Of course, not all of the officers were of the same opinion, but among a sizable group of them, there continued to grow not only a marked contempt for the civilian sphere but also a belief in their own transcendental, almost mythical role as the conquerors of Spain’s historic enemy. This self-perception was generally at odds, however, with mainland Spanish sentiment, which viewed the colonial presence indifferently or skeptically at best and as a pointless waste of resources at its most critical.
A period of limited support did occur after the Battle of Annual in 1921. Meant as a campaign to subdue rabblerousing tribes, the several weeks of fighting resulted instead in a massive loss of Spanish lives and the capturing of many Spanish prisoners. Furthermore, mid-battle at Annual, the Moroccan troops fighting under the Spanish flag defected, joining forces with their Moroccan brethren. Some Spanish factions viewed this defeat as fresh evidence of the incompetence of the military, but others responded with horror and outrage. Revenge superseded commercial or civilizing interests as the driving motivation for subjugation of the region. Certain media sources in Spain lashed out with a wave of racism; Balfour describes how colonial officers leapt astride it with a rhetoric of their own, dubbing the forthcoming counter-offensive a new reconquista and thus “linking it with one of the most enduring myths of Spanish history” (85). He does not cite the specific instances in which this rhetoric appeared, however, and I have yet to find reference to it in other works. Thus, another component of my research will involve pinpointing the early formulations of a Morocco-directed reconquista.
Eventually the lust for revenge cooled, and the increasingly brutal tactics of the colonial army reassumed a mantle of unpopularity among most of mainland Spain. Indeed, under the leadership of General Primo de Rivera – come to power in a coup in 1923 – the government even made motions toward a major retreat within the region. And so the divide between the self-important militant Africanists (as the Spanish colonial officers were called) and the rest of Spanish government and society continued to widen, with the former seeing the latter as decadent and in need of saving.
This belief found further affirmation in the election of the Spanish Republic in 1931, especially once it became clear that the military would no longer enjoy the prestige and privilege to which they were accustomed. Smarting with under-appreciation, the Africanists entered into more serious discussions of the already proposed idea of a military coup. Their stated aim was not to impose a dictatorship but rather to establish a truly republican system; the current Republic, according to them, had not lived up to its ideals. It was up to a messianic military to set matters right.
Thus, we see that the object of “reconquest” transferred from Morocco to mainland Spain. Some of the specifics of this shift could be seen already in 1934, when the Republic summoned the Army of Africa to the northern Spanish region of Asturias in order to put down an uprising of miners taking place there. First, the enemy of the new reconquista was not the Muslims but rather the Soviet Union – the communists, the atheists, the reds whose dangerous ideals had seeped into Spain. Second, Franco – the colonial advisor for the operation – referred to the confrontation as a frontier war, justifying the use of Moroccan troops by implicitly rendering the troublesome miners as the outsiders and the Army of Africa as an integral part of the Spanish nation. Balfour has called the operation a sort of dress rehearsal for later rhetoric, as well as for the presence of Moroccan soldiers on Spanish land. His perspective is echoed by the son of a Moroccan soldier who fought for Spain. Now the doorman at the Veterans’ Association in Tetouan, he considers 1934 the true beginning of the Spanish Civil War, saying, “De allí se creó la guerra, se creó la revolución de España. De allí se preparó” (Mohamed Slihan).
In fact, the leaders of the 1936 coup did not display such foresight; they initially assigned very little prominence to the Army of Africa in their planning. It was only when it became clear that the coup was not going to end as quickly as anticipated that the North African forces stepped to the fore, with Franco at their head. Notwithstanding this early reluctance to involve the protectorate, its role is typically deemed indispensible by historians: Balfour calls the Army of Africa “the only truly professional troops in the Spanish army,” for example; by the end of the ensuing Civil War, nearly 80,000 Moroccan soldiers were deployed to fight on the Nationalist side (Balfour 271).
How and why were Moroccans enlisting for military service under a foreign banner? Recruitment was generally voluntary, although there were instances – especially as manpower ran low later in the war – of compulsion or trickery. As for motivation, Balfour identifies the fundamental reason for joining the army as economic. Especially in a time of drought, the wages offered by the Nationalists were too significant for the average Moroccan to pass up (273).
Two Moroccans I have met in Tetouan paint contrasting pictures of recruitment. Mohamed Abderahman, who voluntarily enlisted at the age of fourteen, describes Spanish-Moroccan relations in the pre-Civil War years as strong, even fraternal. For him, the military was a site of cooperation. On the other hand, Dandi Mohamed Slihan (the doorman), sees the Spanish occupation as domineering: “Aquí España mandaba… España hacía lo que quería.” Who dictated recruitment? “Jefes. Habían jefes que les mandaban… Fue forzoso. Les cogían con fuerza.” He additionally recounts the conscription of Moroccan prisoners: “Incluso cogen las personas del cárcel. Les cogen y les ponen en el uniforme militar y les mandan a España… sin armamento, se van y llegan sin arma, así” (he raises his hands in a gesture of surrender). “Había tiros por todas partes y no tenían nada… Eso no era la guerra sino la carnicería… Se les llevan así. Y allá les dejan. Y allá se murieron" (Mohamed Slihan).
Neither of them mentioned anything about religion. However, on the elite level, Nationalist leaders faced the issue of how to frame their alliance with Moroccan Muslims, especially given their use of traditionally anti-Muslim, reconquista language. The general response was to shift the portrayal from a Christian war against the Moorish infidel to a monotheistic crusade against atheism. In this way, Catholics and Muslims became brothers, bound together by the duty to stave off the threat of godlessness. Franco organized a subsidized pilgrimage to Mecca for northern Moroccans; Nationalist officers gave speeches in which they stressed the religious commonalities between the two faiths (Balfour 281).
As an Irish officer in the Nationalist military wrote in a letter to the Irish president: “Never since the Moors were driven from Spain has there been such a Catholic army in this country as there is today… This is not a Civil War: it is a Holy War, a Crusade.” To justify the incongruity of the thousands of Moroccan Muslims soldiers in this supposedly Catholic army, the writer explains that the Nationalists were fighting “what is worse than Islam, for Islam believes in God" (quoted in Balfour 282).
Another instance of smoothing over religious relations took place in the Andalusian village of Castaño de Robledo, captured by the Nationalists early on in the war. As a celebration of their victory, the Bishop of Pamplona ordered the building of a statue dedicated to Santiago Matamoros, or Santiago the Killer of Moors. Traditionally, portrayals of Santiago show him in the midst of slaying a barbaric Moor; for this statue, however, an effigy of Lenin assumes the classical defensive position, crouching under the blows inflicted upon him by the Spanish saint (Balfour 282-3).
In an even more daring rhetorical maneuver, Franco’s right-hand man, Colonel Juan Beigbeder, attempted to ingratiate the Nationalist cause with Muslims by referring to it as a jihad (Sánchez Ruano 89).
How did Moroccan leaders respond to this campaign of religious rhetoric? Balfour would have it that, just as the traditional Spanish narrative held up North African Muslims as the long-time enemy of the Catholic Spaniard, so too did Moroccans view their northern neighbors with a certain antagonism. “Probably for the vast majority of northern Moroccans,” he explains, “the Spanish were the traditional Other, the most ferocious opponent of Islam, who had expelled their ancestors from Spain, had continued to wage a sporadic war against them, and were now invading their territory” (186). However, if Tetouani veteran Mohamed Abderahman represents any significant viewpoint, then we do well to bear in mind that for some Moroccans, the Spanish were neighbors, even friends or “brothers" (Abderahman).
Whatever may have been the personal feelings of Moroccan leaders, many in the northern protectorate understood alliance with the Nationalists to be the most self-serving – if not self-preserving – course to take. For instance, although the initial stance of Abdel-Kahlek Torres, a Tetouani leader, to the military coup was one of neutrality, a little pressure from Beigbeder prompted him to make a 180-degree turn in full support of the Nationalists (Madariaga 230). The puppet sultan’s puppet representative in the north (referred to as the caliph) faced a similarly heavy-handed persuasion. Maria Rosa de Madariaga describes his total compliance with the Nationalist authorities: “Sería prolijo relatar todos los actos en los que el jalifa intervino para expresar su más ‘incondicional adhesión’ a Franco. Fueron múltiples, siempre al lado de las autoridades españolas: discursos, proclamas, recorridos por ciudades y poblados de la zona, exaltando la hermandad entre españoles y marroquíes en aquella nueva cruzada/yihâd contra ‘los sin Dios'" (242).
Heads of religious brotherhoods likewise fell under the Nationalist sway. They affirmed that Franco himself had undertaken a pilgrimage to Mecca, and the judge Texgani issued a fatwa encouraging Muslims to align themselves with Franco (Sánchez Ruano 242).
Indeed, one historian has declared that the only statement of resistance from the Moroccans came from the sultan himself, who protested against the enlistment of Muslims in an army fighting for an un-Islamic cause (232).
As I progress in my research, my plan is to continue to gather these and other instances of such religious rhetoric and organize it in a more systematic fashion than scholars have done previously. Thus, I will be asking: who was using this rhetoric and when did they choose to draw on it? What effects did the language have? That is, did it actually affect people’s actions or was it more of a gloss for less glamorous-looking economic, political and military dynamics? What challenges did people offer to the rhetoric? When did they dispute it and to what effect? Thus far, I have been collecting these moments from already published histories on the Spanish occupation. However, as I reach the end of this process, I will need to decide if I want to search for further cases, and, if so, I will need to establish boundaries for the inquiry, limiting myself to certain newspapers, or political speeches, or interactions with religious authorities, for example.
Once I have reached a more in-depth and coherent understanding of the nature of this rhetoric, I intend to research and analyze representations of it by some as yet undetermined set of histories or novels or plays or films, etc. I hope to locate such works on both the Moroccan and Spanish side and draw them from multiple time periods: during the Civil War, during the Franco dictatorship, after the dictatorship and in the present day. Examples of the sorts of materials I might look at are novels such as Imán by Ramón José Sender Garcés and La Ruta by Arturo Barea, films like El Desastre de Annual and La Légende du Rif, or histories, ranging from ones commissioned by Franco immediately after the war to the recent, liberal texts by María Rosa Madariaga to the 1999 thesis by Mustapha El Merroun. By constraining my focus in this way, I hope to avoid floundering in the immense amount of material that are available to me and to emerge instead with specific observations about one selection of historical representations.
Ultimately, my findings should shed further light on the ways in which both Spanish and Moroccans have framed the relationship of their religions to one another in the twentieth century.
Aberahman, Mohamed. Personal interview. Tetouan, Morocco. April 8, 2010.
Balfour, Sebastian. Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Burke, Edmund III. Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Madariaga, María Rosa. Los Moros que trajo Franco… La intervención de tropas colonials en la Guerra Civil. Barcelona: Ediciones Martínez Roca, 2002.
Mohamed Slihan, Dandi. Personal interview. Tetouan, Morocco. 8 April 2010.
Sánchez Ruano, Francisco. Islam y Guerra Civil Española: Moros con Franco y con la República. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2004.
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