Latifa Safoui
Ibn Zohr University, Agadir,
Morocco
Abstract
The Spanish Inquisition that took over following the collapse
of the Islamic rule in Spain in the 15th century is, commonly,
associated with the persecution of heresy in its strict religious sense. However, a deep probing into the history of
the Spanish Inquisition, and more particularly, into its dealing with the Arab
Muslims of the epoch, belies other facets to its notorious heresiological
discourse. The Arab Muslims, known
historically as Moriscos, who stayed in the Iberian Peninsula after being
forcibly converted to Christianity, were, nonetheless, subjected to other forms
of abuse that had nothing to do with religion.
I hold in this paper that the Spanish church-state rule-- another name
applied to the Spanish Inquisition-- exhibited features of a modern nation-state
in the making that sought to consolidate its political hegemony, mainly by
using what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic power. Symbolic power is the accumulation of all
capitals in the hands of the modern state, a privileged status that grants the
latter an unlimited scope of power, enabling it to enforce its will and
establish its hegemony. The forcible
conversions of the Andalusi Arab Muslims to Christianity did not spare them the
Spanish violence, and the Spanish authorities sought doggedly to strip them of
all power. The Arab Muslim culture was
exterminated, and the Spanish state worked on divesting this, hitherto, Iberian
minority of its political, social, and economic capitals in order to establish
a modern nation-state as early as the 15th century.
Keywords: Spanish Inquisition,
symbolic power, heresy, Pierre Bourdieu, hegemony, capital
No comments:
Post a Comment