Barcelona City Council spends 44,000 euros to "learn about the Muslim practices we carry within"«
The Gatzara Conferences of the Muslim Foundation Bayt al-Thaqafa spread a story that turns any historical Muslim influence into an essential root of Catalan identity..
Simplistic propaganda of the Gatzara Days
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The Barcelona City Council has just announced a new €7,000 grant to the Bayt al-Thaqafa Foundation to organise the Gatzara Days. With these 7,000 euros, The Gatzara Days have already received €44,000 from Barcelona City Council over five years.. The concession appears in the resolution. Published on 29 July 2026 and finances some activities that the organisation presents as a space for«To know and share the Muslim-rooted practices we carry within us.».
The figure may seem modest, but it does not reflect the full public cost of the days: The direct grant must be supplemented by the provision of municipal spaces., the involvement of council staff and the public resources allocated to the dissemination of the activities.
Bayt al-Thaqafa is no ordinary entity within the municipal ecosystem. This subsidised body also runs the Barcelona Office for Religious Affairs (OAR), a service unique in the Spanish state that all too often functions as an institutional platform for the normalisation and dissemination of Islam. One example It is the pressure that the religious office exerted on schools during Ramadan 2026 to remove music. during Ramadan out of religious respect. In Sant Andreu, this policy reached to convert the district headquarters itself into a Muslim place of worship with a specific Ramadan programme that included a collective prayer preceded by the call to prayer in a municipal facility. Parallel to this, the OAR He provided training so that healthcare professionals could adapt the diet., the hydration and medication schedules of patients in relation to the requirements of religious fasting, even in cases of pregnancy. The result is that The OAR mobilises public resources and services so that Catalan society adapts its functioning to Islamic practices..
The Gatzara Days complete this operation on the emotional and identity terrain. To justify adapting public services to Islam, It is necessary to convince Catalans that Islam is not an external or superimposed reality., but rather a root of our own that we have always carried within.
Without Islam, the Catalans wouldn't know how to count to ten.
The municipal marketing operation to promote Islam is summed up in one of the most eye-catching posters of the Gatzara Days:«If you find counting to ten useful, thank Arab science.»The phrase is intended to make an immediate impact with a calculated exaggeration: it takes a real scientific transmission, elevates it to an indispensable condition of European civilisation and suggests that, without the Arab-Muslim world, Catalans wouldn't even know how to count.
The exaggeration is not accidental. Theo Loinaz, professor at the University of Barcelona and the day's keynote speaker, He admitted that the debate was not really about science, but about identity.It was about presenting the legacy produced in Islamised contexts as a constitutive part of Europe and bringing it closer to contemporary Muslims.
This operation, however, is not confined within the four walls of a single session. The Office of Religious Affairs, controlled by Bayt al-Thaqafa, circulates it through the municipal intercultural network, such as the Avinyó Space, the Intercultural Action Programme or anti-racism resources. This is how the narrative of the scientific debt to Islam appears in school activities, teacher training, pedagogical guides and guidelines for public service professionals. An example It is the Barxiluna project of the Office of Religious Affairs. to review museums or textbooks. In one of the sessions It was even denounced that failing to recognise the Islamic scientific heritage as part of Catalan heritage generates «symbolic violence» and has consequences for students' self-esteem, mental health and lives.. The same idea reappears in materials. like the City Council's anti-racist guide, which asks teachers to talk about the «Arab origin» of mathematics or to explain that Spanish has words of Arabic origin. What Gatzara turns into a slogan and Barxiluna into a psychological wound. Enter the classroom as a method to combat racism..
The journey always ends up in the same place: The historical debt becomes a present obligation and the citizen is forced to accept as reparation what they would previously have been able to dispute.. Accepting segregated cemeteries, halal menus, the hijab or prayer rooms would be the natural consequence if we accept that Catalonia is Islamic.
Debt can be repaid with a prayer room.
The current situation has not appeared out of nowhere. As early as 2016, A report by Ada Colau's Muslim activists presented the lack of prayer rooms in companies and universities as a sign of Islamophobia.. Five years later, the Gatzara Days finalised the recipe: Reserve a room within the company and orient it towards Mecca..
The formulation was made by halal sector entrepreneur Javier Albarracín during the first edition of the Gatzara Days, dedicated to multiculturalism and business management. According to Albarracín, Adapting the company to the (Muslim) religion not only promotes inclusion., but rather improves relations with Muslim workers, clients and distributors.
The journey was complete. First, the Muslim community is presented as a constitutive part of Catalan society and identity; then The timetables, menus and spaces are adapted to their practices «because without them you couldn't even count to ten».». And one must be grateful.
The Catalans who insult themselves
The Executive President of the IEMED, Senén Florensa, pulled off a grand identity somersault during the presentation of the 2021 Gatzara days. According to him, we live immersed in words, traditions and references of Arabo-Muslim origin without being aware of it. And the conclusion is that we must explain to society that there are words in Catalan of Arabic origin or that torró or the mona have Muslim origins. Doing so is the recipe for citizens to find a shared heritage and to understand that without Islam, Catalonia could not be understood. And this is how he hopes that those who have «strange fads» against Islam «may the veil fall on them" eyes.» He sees so clearly the participation of Islam in Catalan identity that he asserts that Catalans who reject Islam «are insulting themselves».
The move is perfect: it starts from historical truths about linguistic and cultural influences and It ultimately presents rejection of contemporary Islamisation as a form of self-hatred.. You no longer disagree about the present; you're mistaken about who you are.
The activist on the CIDOB payroll, Moussa Bourekba, completed the argument in the paper dedicated to «deconstructing Islamophobia.» He explained that rejection of Islam grows with the visibility of Islamic practices such as «wearing the hijab, having halal food, requesting the construction of prayer rooms.» According to him, the underlying message from the West is that «the good Muslim is the invisible Muslim.».
In this scheme, however, there is no room for a Muslim to freely choose to live their faith in the private sphere. If he does not demand menus, prayer rooms or adaptations, and does not turn religion into a public identity, he simply disappears from the narrative. He is of no use in denouncing Western hostility, nor in justifying new ’inclusion« policies, nor does he need activists to speak on his behalf.
The trap is now closed: If Islam becomes visible, it must be accepted; if it does not become visible, it is because the West has forced it to hide.. The discreet Muslim can't even be considered, because he dismantles the argument: he shows that you can have faith without demanding that the whole of society adapt to it.
The 21 tombs that prove a civilisation
Khalid Ghali, then Commissioner for Intercultural Dialogue and Religious Pluralism at Barcelona City Council, atwith a gross annual salary of €68,612, pulled out of the hat at the 2022 Gatzara Days the great archaeological argument of the Barxiluna project created by the religious environment of the Town Hall: the supposed 11th-century Muslim cemetery of the Born. According to him, it was «huge» and it demonstrated that there had been an «important community» of Muslims in Barcelona. Huge: nineteen or twenty-one tombs. By this criterion, any family mausoleum attests to an entire civilisation and allows the history of the Mediterranean to be rewritten. Ghali does not provide figures, does not explain the profile of those buried, nor does he clarify what the discovery actually allows one to conclude.
What Ghali omits is the unpleasant surprise they had when they presented the discovery. Dolors Bramon had to cut the account short and remind them, visibly annoyed, that 21 graves «are not the Islamic cemetery of Barcelona, far from it». What lay in the alleged cemetery were young or adult men with signs of a hard life, and one of the individuals wore shackles on his ankles. Far from demonstrating a well-established and normalised Muslim community, the site could point to the presence of Muslim captives or slaves in a Christian Barcelona. That is to say, they once again invoked a cemetery as the great proof, precisely the one that disproved the narrative they were trying to construct.
Ghali does not stop at exaggerating the site. He also turns his own municipal work into a mission of historical re-educationIt speaks of «historical void», of «denial» and of the need to create spaces that break the supposed «struggle of ignorances». That is to say, the City Council had not only to manage religious pluralism, but also to decide which past the people of Barcelona should embrace and which narrative needed correcting. Ghali also explains what the Town Council means by «recognition of diversity» with a school anecdote. A teacher says that a newly arrived pupil «doesn't speak a word» and he replies that she speaks Amazigh, Arabic, Darija and has some knowledge of French. The lesson is that «Others are also bearers of knowledge, of know-how, of cultures.»It seems like an obvious point elevated to public policy: no one denies that a pupil can speak four languages; the practical problem is that she still doesn't speak the school's languages. But Ghali transforms an elemental learning need into a scene of institutional contempt towards a little girl. By €68,612 per year, A public official rebukes the school for saying that a newcomer does not speak the medium of instruction, as this implies not recognising her «knowledge».
Millions of euros so that we learn to be Catalan.
The The €7,000 from the 2026 Gatzara Days brings the total municipal funding for the project to at least €44,000 since its first edition.. But this amount is only the tip of the iceberg of the public network used to spread Islam and promote the arrival of more Muslim immigrants.
According to its own website, Bayt al-Thaqafa has received around €23 million in public funds between 2020 and 2025 in grants, contracts and services to the administration.The foundation presents itself as a non-governmental organisation, but approximately 70 per cent of its income comes from public grants and 23 per cent from the provision of services and contracts such as that of the OAR. A large part of these resources finance the reception and orientation of immigrants, legal advice and support to access housing, healthcare or employment.
The message the Muslim immigrant receives from Bayt al-Thaqafa is easy to conclude: he has arrived in a place that publicly validates his religious identity and adapts institutions to his spiritual needs. And it is not out of politeness, it is because a part of Catalonia already belongs to him culturally. In Gatzara's account, The Muslim immigrant does not arrive in a country with roots different from their own; They have arrived in a country that had forgotten them.
The largest allocation of public funds at Bayt al-Thaqafa corresponds to the Management of the Office of Religious Affairs of Barcelona where it does not compete with anyone in the tender. The two contracts awarded by the Town Council in 2018 and 2022 amount to almost €968,000.. It is from this office that advice, training and mediation on religious matters are offered to schools, public services and municipal facilities. It is, ultimately, the transmission belt that It turns many of the ideas that Gatzara prepares beforehand in the cultural and identity sphere into administrative directives..
To this stable relationship are added occasional commissions from other administrations: workshops for teachers in Morocco, training on racism in Parliament, interreligious dialogue, diversity or participation. On paper, Everything falls within ’interculturality«; in practice, Islam reappears time and time again. What is never found is the same interest in Japanese, Filipino, Italian, Peruvian or Romanian culture. Municipal diversity seems to have a preferred gateway that ends up making the intercultural become the Islamic, but under a friendlier name.
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