Something to keep in mind as we contemplate the right-wing violence of the past few months.
The quest for purity—and the resulting hatred of anything different, odd, or unfamiliar—is one of modern conservatism’s more noxious traits. Scholar and author Anour Majid reminds us that the birth of the modern nation state depended on such a quest. That history has lessons to teach us.
Anour Majid via Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment:
This year, a few scholars are commemorating the 400th anniversary of one of the darkest episodes in history, an event that should be widely known and discussed, but which, alas, has remained buried in the archives of memory. In April 1609, King Philip III of Spain and his royal council made the fateful decision to expel all Spaniards of Muslim descent (known, pejoratively, as Moriscos, or little Moors) from his domains. This royal decree, not proclaimed publicly until months later, was, in essence, a final declaration of war on Islam. […]
A purity-of-blood edict, eventually upheld by the Inquisition, turned Catholicism into a racial matter, thereby making it impossible for Muslims and Jews to claim full membership in the emerging nation. So, in 1609, when Spain was entering a period of decline and diminished glory, Catholic purists prevailed on their monarch to deport all the Moriscos—at least 300,000 people, or about five percent of the country’s population—and cleanse their nation of Muslim impurities. […]
The birth of modern nations around common ideologies, faiths, or races spelled disaster to those who didn’t fit the mold. Simultaneously condemned and needed, such hapless groups have remained in limbo, neither fully included nor fully discarded. The undesirables of the centuries that followed the expulsion of Moors and Moriscos from Spain—such as Jews, Africans, and immigrants—were indelibly associated with inferior traits. Spain’s medieval purity-of-blood statute would later turn into an iron scientific law justifying genocidal policies. The Holocaust of Nazi Germany would become the ultimate expression of this long, painful history of intolerance.
We need to remember this sordid legacy as we talk about immigrants and implying that by somehow keeping them out we will keep our nations safe. These vague yearnings for national wholeness are dangerous fantasies. Despite all the bloodshed, Spain fell from power and has never achieved national unity. Moreover, as the tornadoes of economic globalization have uprooted any pretense to cultural stability or permanence, myths of purity as the basis of national unity have become dangerously outdated.
The medieval clash of Christianity and Islam gave birth to a new world order founded on the fictions of unsullied national identities that depend on relentless crusades against strangers and immigrants. We can no longer afford to follow this treacherous path. We need to make peace with our strangers; we must heal ourselves.
Much of the modern conservative agenda, when it isn’t protecting corporate profits, is devoted to implementing mythologies of purification. If that agenda should ever gain the upper hand in the United States, it will be the end of the American dream.
Tags: Anour Majid, birth of the nation state, conservatism and national identity, Dangerous Impurities, Moriscos
