Muslims deeply influenced the language, architecture, and philosophy of Spain and Portugal through centuries of forgotten exchanges, shaping the Iberian identity and challenging long-standing historical narratives that frame Christian-Muslim relations solely through the lens of conflict
Oxala, the Portuguese word, is the same as the Arabic inshallah, meaning God willing. The two languages have hundreds of common words. In 2013, writer Adalberto Alves published a dictionary of over 19,000 Portuguese words and expressions with Arabic origins after a decade-long project to bust the myth of permanent Christian-Muslim antagonism. Alves started the project to emphasise a shared heritage and to highlight the long-neglected Muslim contributions to the Portuguese identity and history.
Alves sought to demonstrate that the Muslim ‘other’ was not really so and to emphasise their cultural and intellectual legacy, which has been written out of European history. For over 30 years, Alves has documented Muslim influences on Portuguese poetry, language, music, food, and architecture to address the historic erasure. In 2008, UNESCO awarded him the Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in recognition of his efforts to strengthen global awareness of Arab culture and for promoting intercultural dialogue and understanding.
The Arab navigational sciences played a key role in the expansion of the Portuguese Empire. A Muslim pilot is believed to have helped Vasco da Gama, celebrated in Portugal for his epic voyage, to reach India. Arabic influences in Portugal date back centuries. Arabic-speaking Muslims from North Africa, known as Moors, took control of al-Andalus, what is now Portugal and Spain, in the 8th century, making the region part of the Umayyad Empire.
The Rise of Al-Andalus and Jewish-Christian-Muslim Coexistence
Many of the local population converted to Islam. By the 10th century, half the Iberian Peninsula population is believed to have been Muslim. Centuries of trade and economic relations helped Islam spread across the region. Muslims took over most of Iberia a few years after Tariq ibn Ziyad led an Arab and Amazigh army across the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa and controlled the peninsula’s southern part in 711. There were mostly peaceful capitulations rather than violent battles, thanks to easier surrender terms.
Foreign Christian kings and armies from northern Europe had conquered the territory before and after the Moors. For centuries, the Iberian Peninsula kept being conquered. Germanic Visigoths ruled it between 418 and 711 before Muslim arrived. The Muslim rule followed an extraordinary prosperity and an era of acceptance among Muslims, Jews, and Christians known as the Iberian convivencia. It ushered in ‘the Golden Age of the Jews‘ between the 10th and 12th centuries.
Al-Andalus produced scholars and thinkers such as rabbi-philosopher Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides. Mishneh Torah was one of his greatest accomplishments. It codified Jewish law in Hebrew across 14 volumes, covering ethical conduct, laws of prayer, and observance of the Sabbath. Christians and Jews lived under their own laws.
The Reconquista and Jewish and Muslim Expulsions
Intercultural harmony and coexistence in Al-Andalus produced unparalleled social, intellectual, and cultural achievements. Jews, Christians, and Muslims thrived together and contributed to progress in science, medicine, art, architecture, and philosophy. The long period of coexistence is believed to be the reason the region prospered as a hub for culture and science.
In 1492, the Iberian convivencia ended when the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in western Christendom. They issued the Edict of Expulsion, giving the Jews the choice of converting or leaving. Seven years after Jewish ethnic cleansing, the Spanish state gave Muslims the same choice in 1499.
Most Muslims there were killed, forced to convert to Christianity, or left when Portugal’s King Afonso III captured Faro, the last Muslim stronghold in Algarve, in 1249. A small non-Christian minority was allowed to stay in segregated neighbourhoods before King Manuel I decided to expel all Jews, believed to be between 20,000 and 100,000, and a smaller number of Muslims in 1496. Most Muslims fled to North Africa and assimilated into local populations to escape the choice of converting to Christianity, leaving, or facing death. Synagogues and mosques were either destroyed or handed over to the Catholic Church to remove signs of the region’s multi-religious past.
Portugal’s Jewish Expulsion and the Legacy of the Reconquista
A majority of Jews were later prevented from leaving when King Manuel turned the expulsion edict into one of forced conversion. Christian families adopted some Jewish children after they were taken from their parents. The remaining Jews were baptised and converted. The ‘New Christians’ were allowed to leave Portugal after between 1,000 and 4,000 of them were killed in Lisbon in 1506. Many ‘New Christians’ were burned at the stake.
The remaining ‘New Christians’ fled to the Ottoman Empire and reestablished themselves as vibrant Jewish communities. The ones who stayed back faced the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536. Five centuries later, Portugal acknowledged the Jewish expulsion and offered public apologies. In 2015, it enacted a law to offer citizenship to descendants of expelled Jews. The descendants of Muslims expelled by the same 1496 edict were kept out of the purview of the law.
The Christianisation of Al-Andalus came after nearly 800 years (711-1492) of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. It marked the culmination of campaigns, or the Reconquista, to recapture the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors. The Nasrid kingdom’s downfall became a cornerstone of Spain’s national identity and the Catholic Monarchs’ cultural and religious homogeneity.
Jewish Ottoman Refuge and the Erasure of Iberian Muslim Heritage
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella unified Spain as a nation-state. They created centralized means of violence against internal and external enemies amid the European Renaissance and the emergence of political modernity. Spain became primarily Christian on a continent that thought of the nation in terms of culture and race. An estimated 70,000 Jews who converted to Christianity to remain in Spain would soon be accused of insincerity and tortured during the Spanish Inquisition.
The Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and Spanish colonies, including Mexico, targeted ‘conversos’, the Jews who secretly continued Jewish religious practices after being compelled to renounce Judaism and convert to Catholicism. Tens of thousands of Jews expelled from Spain found refuge in Muslim lands, where they gained important court positions under Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566). The Ottoman Empire welcomed an estimated 50,000 of the 130,000 Jews in 1492 as they fled to its North African and Balkan provinces.
The legacy has largely been forgotten. Narratives built on a Catholic identity gloss over centuries of coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Iberia. The Muslim rule is taught briefly in Portuguese schools, and textbooks emphasize the Reconquista. The Portuguese identity revolves around opposition to the Moors, who have been depicted as enemies historically. History textbooks focus on Christian battles against Muslims. They talk about the Islamic conquest but not the Roman and the Visigothic conquests
Portugal’s Forgotten Muslim Heritage and the Rise of Far-Right Islamophobia
Muslims were not outsiders, contrary to dominant present-day versions of history and myths repackaged with the rise of the anti-Muslim far-right and Islamophobia across Europe, including in Portugal. In 2019, André Ventura-led newly formed far-right party Chega, which won a seat in Portugal’s parliament for the first time since 1968, proposed excluding ‘the teaching of Islam’ from public schools. It calls for combating ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and defending Europe’s borders from an ‘invasion’ from North Africa.
Today, just a fraction, or less than 0.5% of the Portuguese population of 11 million, is Muslim. Barely anyone knows that Muslims were once a larger proportion of the region’s population. Muslim heritage is all but forgotten. Portuguese school students read Luís Vaz de Camões’s 16th-century poem The Lusiads, which celebrates the glory of Portugal’s kings and explorers during the imperial expansion and depicts Muslims as sly and treacherous. Anti-Muslim tropes depicting Muslims as inferior, subservient, and in need of saving were deployed to justify Western colonialism and imperialism.
Camões, regarded as one of Portugal’s greatest poets, is commemorated annually on June 10 on Portugal Day, or the ‘Day of the Portuguese Race’. António de Oliveira Salazar, the ultraconservative dictator (1932 to 1968), invoked national cultural symbols and Camões to legitimize his regime’s vision of Portuguese identity and empire. He depicted Muslims as invaders and enemies of the Christian nation.
The Lusiads, Portuguese Colonialism and the Construction of the Muslim ‘Other’
The Lusiads was a product of its time. It reflected the ideological construction of European identity in opposition to Muslims, when a crusading mentality depicted Christian-Muslim relations in terms of conflict. The poem was written when the Ottoman Empire threatened the hegemony of Europe’s Christian rulers as they expanded into North Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries and established military bases until their 1578 defeat in the Moroccan town of Ksar el-Kebir ended Portugal’s expansionist ambitions in the region.
The Lusiads tell the story of Vasco da Gama’s sea voyage to India and his encounters with Muslims. Vasco da Gama is a Portuguese national hero. He opened the sea route to India to seize control of the spice trade from Arabs. In 1502, da Gama captured a ship with 200 Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca and set it alight during his second voyage to India. It was one of many such massacres as the Portuguese came to be known as Islam’s ‘fanatical’ enemies.
In 1511, Portuguese general Afonso de Albuquerque led a force that attacked and captured Malacca to destroy the Malacca Sultanate as a trading power and a centre for Islamic study and propagation, and take control of the spice trade from Muslims and undermine the economies of Cairo and Mecca. The occupation of Malaya also meant control of the shortest sea route between India and China—the Strait of Malacca—and one of the world’s busiest shipping channels.
Portugal’s European identity was shaped in opposition to Islam. The Moor would become the other. The term traditionally referred to Arabic-speaking Muslims in North Africa, but the label would be used to broadly refer to Muslims. It reduced the diversity among Muslims to overarching otherness.
