The Barxiluna project turned 80 years of al-Andalus into Barcelona's eternal debt to Islam
Muslim activists at the City Council accused museums, historians and schools of hiding the contribution of Islam to Barcelona. From archaeology they moved on to demanding Islamic cemeteries, halal menus, revision of textbooks and religious adaptations for today's Muslims.
Customised fences for a Barxiluna event
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The Barxiluna programme began in 2022 with the aim of putting Barcelona's “Islamic past and present” at its centre. Under the guise of historical research, the project concealed a far more ambitious operation: to change the historical narrative in museums, in textbooks, in the school curriculum and in public memory. Barxiluna was conceived as a factory of historical legitimacy based on a brief Islamic presence. The little more than eighty years during which Barcelona was part of the Islamic state of al-Andalus extend to the present day. and become proof of an alleged Islamic continuity silenced by “racist historiography.”.
According to the new intercultural, decolonial and anti-racist perspective, the Islamic past is no longer only useful for explaining medieval Barcelona. The new utility is To provide ideological cover for current religious demands., from the menus halal up to the adapted cemeteries. Barxiluna transforms a brief historical presence into a kind of debt. permanent city-wide presence of Islam.
Barxiluna is one of the most ideological products of the Barcelona Interculturality Plan 2021-2030 promoted during Ada Colau's administration. This plan was not limited to managing Barcelona's diversity: it aimed to turn it into a tool for the city's political, cultural and symbolic transformation. Barxiluna is a practical application of this plan: the idea is to make it seem that Islam has been part of Barcelona since time immemorial, to present this past as a erased memory and turn everything into a historical debt to present-day Muslims.
“Building the future we want”
The Muslim activists behind the project did not hide their intentions. Already The first activity of Barxiluna, Fátima Charkaoui said that “It is necessary to create narratives to build the future we want for Barcelona.”Suddenly, Barxiluna was no longer talking about historical research. He was talking about the “hegemonic narrative”, ’Islamophobia« or »structural racism« that permeates Catalan institutions. The Islamic past ceases to be an object of study and becomes a tool for accusing the school, the museums and Catalan society. current and past.
The Foundational manifesto of Barxiluna It reveals the operation without much disguise. It begins by talking about some Islamic tombs found in the Born and ends up talking about colonialism., CIEs, borders, housing, school, racism and Islamophobia. He even goes so far as to say that they want “Rethinking the Western imaginary of the city from religious plurality and anti-racism.”.
The most explicit admission that they are making politics comes to The session on museums has been uploaded online as a podcast.. Mustafa Shaimi, Associate Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Girona, said it bluntly: “We are at a political event of the highest order., It is not history for history's sake.”.
The language is calculated to never speak of religion in direct terms, although Behind the Barxiluna project is the Office of Religious Affairs.. This pattern coincides with that of university Islamism in the orbit of the Muslim BrotherhoodInstead of calling for Islamisation, it cloaks it in hidden history, anti-racism or social justice. Finally, They demand redress of grievances as a lever to Islamise museums, schools and public memory..
From the Islamic Barçeluna to the Barcelona sacked by Al-Mansur
The name Barxiluna does not appear out of nowhere. It is the Arabic form attributed to Barcelona during the period when the city was part of al-Andalus. This period lasted just over eighty years, from 718 to 801. The Carolingian army commanded by Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, conquered the city and incorporated it into the Christian orbit for ever. This rupture is decisive and turns Barcelona into a key city on the western Christian frontier. in permanent contact and conflict with the Muslims of al-Andalus from the other side of the Llobregat.
The historians of Barxiluna take the real history of 80 years of Islamic Barcelona and They conclude that since then Islam has been part of Barcelona's landscape and is a central and constituent element of it. Although the 801 Barcelona converted to Christianity, they They see a permanent Islamic presence, silenced and awaiting repair. The idea of Barxiluna is that the 801 was merely a simple administrative change.
What Barxiluna deliberately omits and seeks to change is the narrative that shaped generations of Barcelonians for centuries: Barcelona suffered war, raids, sackings, captivity and fear because of the proximity of the Muslims. In 985, with the sack of Al-Mansur, this reality was etched into the city's memory for centuries. The fear of the «Moor» and the negative image of the Muslim in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia, as reflected in historiography, do not arise from nothing, but from the historical experience of being a frontier. For Barxiluna, this reality is «structural racism» that turns Islam into a victim.
A the «History and Heritage» session, the historian-activist Abdennur Prado He considers all Catalan and Spanish historiography to be racist.. According to the new theory of Barxiluna, If historians portrayed Muslims as violent and troublesome conquerors, it was because they needed to create an enemy.. That the emergence of Catalonia was explained by its role as a western frontier against the Muslims was so uncomfortable for them that They decided to turn Muslims into a community unjustly singled out by racist historiography..
The perversion of the Barxiluna activists reaches to turn history classes in secondary schools into an assault on Muslim pupils. Yousra Touri El Mansouri, social educator invited to the activity on the “hidden curriculum”, stated that He found it hard to unlearn the “symbolic violence” he had experienced at school, and this had consequences for his self-esteem, mental health and life.“. If books explained the frontier, the raids, the conflict with al-Andalus or the negative image of the Muslim in Catalan memory, it would no longer be history: it would be symbolic violence. This is how guilt is manufactured: Catalonia would be harming the mental health of today's Muslims by claiming that it defeated medieval Islam..
El Born was supposed to demonstrate an Islamic continuity… and it went badly.
Barxiluna's intention was to demonstrate that Islam had had continuity in Barcelona from the eighth century to the present day. The great proof that was to substantiate The existence of an Islamic community, silenced by all historians, was what was dubbed the «Islamic cemetery» of Barcelona.. If there really was a cemetery, the project could present it as the missing piece. But as Dolors Bramon told them, visibly angry, «Twenty-one graves are not the Islamic cemetery of Barcelona, far from it.».
The Islamic burials were discovered in 1991 beneath the Commercial Square., in the area around the Born. But they were practically shelved until, in 2021, Barxiluna recovered them and presented them as a key find to claim that they should form part of the Born complex. That some Islamic tombs discovered in 1991 were not explained to the general public within the archaeological site fitted perfectly with their narrative: Barcelona was silencing its Islamic past, and archaeologists, museums, historians and schools were complicit and guilty..
The problem for Barxiluna is that Barcelona's “Islamic cemetery” ended up proving the opposite of what they intended. According to the data presented in 2021, approximately 19–21 bodies buried according to Islamic rites around the 11th century. What the tombs demonstrate is that there were Muslims in Christian Barcelona in the 11th century. And that is nothing extraordinary. It was already known that some Muslims, whether free or subjugated, could live under Christian rule.
And the worst for the project: The profile of those buried does not fit with the image of an established and normalised Muslim community.. The remains point to young men and adults bearing signs of a hard life. And the worst for Barxiluna: one of the individuals wore shackles on his ankles. This fact is devastating. If the Born was meant to sell a silenced Islamic Barcelona, the shackles return a much more uncomfortable image: of Muslim captives or slaves in medieval Christian Barcelona.
This is the reading the project did not want to find. El Born does not point to a hidden Islamic Barcelona, but rather to a medieval Christian Barcelona where there were enslaved Muslims with signs of having been victims of violence.
Despite the evidence, activists attack Catalan historiography, museums and the school without mercy. What archaeology or the historical documents of the capitulations say does not matter.
Barxiluna is trying to turn museums into spaces for Islamic repair.
After calling into question Catalan historiography, Barxiluna went to look for the museums.. The Museum of the History of Catalonia, the Maritime Museum, the MNAC and the Born itself. They appear as spaces that need to be reviewed because they do not tell the story according to the new anti-racist and decolonial narrative..
The session dedicated to the Museum of the History of Catalonia It proposed “reconstructing this history” with “new inclusive narratives”. The proposal was no longer to add a single piece of information about the Islamic past. What they propose is “to think of the museum as a receptacle for the history of structural racism in Catalonia”According to activists Abdel Aziz El Mountassir and Salma Amazian, the Museum of History of Catalonia already It was not meant to be a space to explain the country's historical formation, but rather a place to exhibit Catalonia's supposed racist guilt.. The museum ceased to be an institution of national memory and became a space for ideological repair.
The Maritime Museum of Barcelona also came under the spotlight. Under the title “The Maritime Art of Domination”, The museum's narrative was accused of romanticising maritime dominance, invisibilising “absences” and displaying “distorted representations”.” of enslaved Black people and Muslims. It was even considered to remove images from the museum. The logic was the same: if a piece, a display case or a text did not fit with the anti-racist, decolonial narrative, it was no longer heritage to be interpreted, but rather symbolic violence to correct.
They started with archaeology and ended up demanding Islamic cemeteries.
The end of the Barxiluna cycle confirms the project's authentic nature. They began by talking about archaeology, heritage and Islamic memory in the Born district., but they ended up formulating specific religious demands such as halal menus or adapted cemeteries. The same Office of Religious Affairs page it presents them as “proposals for change”: to make the Islamic necropolis visible, to incorporate Islamic history into MUHBA and the Born, to review educational materials, Adapting cemeteries to the needs of Muslims and to support places of worship, community spaces, languages and religious festivals.
Barxiluna's real function was not archaeology or historical knowledge. It was to turn that past into a tool of political and social pressure. First they presented Islam as a erased memory. Then They accused historiography, museums and the school of structural racism. And finally they turned this guilt into concrete demands: Islamic cemeteries, places of worship, community spaces, religious festivals, halal menus and a review of educational materials.
This is university Islamism in the orbit of the Muslim BrotherhoodIt does not enter institutions talking about Sharia or religion, but about memory, anti-racism, reparation and social justice. The move is to turn any limit on the public presence of Islam into discrimination. And any religious demand as a moral obligation of the city for having erased the Islamic contribution.
Barxiluna It began with some tombs in the Born and ended by demanding that Barcelona adapt its museums., their schools, their cemeteries and their public memory to the needs of contemporary Islam. They did not want to explain the past better. They wanted to use the past to Islamise the present with the seal of the City Council.
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