La Fiesta de la Toma stirs controversy over Spain’s Islamic heritage by Emilio Alzueta GRANADA History can easily become a matter of names and definitions. The great Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire pointed out the relationship between naming and power: the winners of history, the powerful, coin the language that creates a vision of the world which will benefit their interests. Admittedly, there is always room for legitimate differences of opinion; yet, a classical epistemology -also upheld by the Islamic tradition- predicates the possibility of knowing reality as it is, of distinguishing truth from falsehood. Striving towards an adequate and truthful understanding of history, within its inevitable limitations, is a necessity which cannot be discarded by the allurement of ideological interests, nor by invoking a kind of exaggerated postmodernist perspectivism. In 1492, the last Nasrid king of Granada -the only remaining territory of the great civilization of Al-Andalus- surrendered the city to Ferdinand and Isabel, the Catholic Kings who had unified the Christian kingdoms of the north into a single state. For them, as for so many others afterwards, this was the culmination of the ‘Reconquest’, a term that implies conquering back what had once existed, before being taken away. This notion has always underpinned a certain line of Spanish historiography which considers that the Romans and the Visigoths had formed an entity that could already be considered Spain, on the foundations of Roman law and Catholic Christianity -an entity which was then invaded and conquered by the Muslims, and which, notwithstanding the glory of their civilization, was understandably taken back and unified as a Christian country, pure in the true faith and in the eradication of unorthodoxy. The great Spanish historian Américo Castro -and those that follow his seminal work- disagree, however, with this assessment. According to them, there was
La Fiesta de la Toma stirs controversy over Spain’s Islamic heritage by Emilio Alzueta GRANADA History can easily become a matter of names and definitions. The great Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire pointed out the relationship between naming and power: the winners of history, the powerful, coin the language that creates a vision of the world
