Michael Portillo's 'Stepping Stones of Islamic Spain'

This afternoon Radio 4 broadcast the first instalment of a two-part documentary by Michael Portillo entitled 'Stepping Stones of Islamic Spain', in which the former MP sought to examine the role of Islam both in Spain's past and present. As in any programme of this nature, the agenda of the media personality as presenter soon became apparent: in this case, to reinforce the current dominant narrative that Al-Andulus was a positive period in Iberian history, whereas what he termed the "so-called Reconquista" was alluded to in the darkest of colours. For some reason, the aggressive military fact of the Arab invasion and subsequent conquest of Visigothic Spain in 711 did not seem to register as such with Portillo, just as today's Islamic mass demographic incursion into his paternal homeland did not appear to be a matter of concern for him.

When he was a child, recollected Portillo, Spain was "absolutely mono-ethnic", whereas now, that is no longer the case, with the greatest inflow of outsiders having occurred during the past decade with a surge in immigration not only from North Africa and the Middle East, but also from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Unlike in the UK however, there is a notable absence of mosques in Spain, despite its large and rapidly growing Muslim population. As in France and Moscow, Muslims have taken to praying in the streets, which is a phenomenon that many Spaniards understandably find objectionable. Although as in Britain Spain has its champions of multiculturalism who function as facilitators of Islamisation, many Spanish politicians, particularly it seems at the municipal level, are unwilling to offer the sorts of incentives in terms of planning permission and financial aid for the construction of mosques found in countries such as the UK, Germany and many other European states. Portillo found this hard to understand, and was astonished that Spain only possesses two purpose-built mosques, both of which are in Madrid: one built in 1988 and another in 1992. The second of these is also the largest, and like many mosques in the UK, has been built using Saudi money, which suggests that the Islamic dogma peddled inside the building is of the Salafi literalist variety.

Portillo suggested that the Spanish approach was more likely to drive Muslims into the hands of "extremists" than that pursued in Britain, which, given that we have an estimated 3,000 potentially violent jihadi militants under surveillance, seems questionable.

Although Portillo interviewed people possessing a range of different perspectives relating to Islam and Spain, his sympathetic treatment of Islam and Muslim immigrants, together with his sanitised romanticisation of Al-Andulus, revealed his prejudices, and suggest that the conclusion we will hear him deliver at the end of the next programme will include calls for the Spanish to embrace their Islamic past and to welcome Muslim immigrants. There seems to be little doubt that any Spaniard with rational objections to this process of settlement will be branded a "xenophobe" and an "extremist". However, what Portillo and other advocates of the idealisation of Al-Andulus fail to highlight is that all of the good things that flowed into Mediaeval Europe from Muslim-governed Spain originated not from within the teachings and example of Mohammed, but either from older texts - such as those of Aristotle - that had formed the bedrock of the philosophy of Classical Antiquity but been destroyed elsewhere by the anti-rational fathers of the early Church, or from the eclectic discoveries of Indian mathematicians, Zoroastrian Persia and those men of a rational bent who found themselves living in Islamically-governed countries (e.g. Averroes, Ibn Khaldun and Avicenna) whom Muslims claim, erroneously, as being exclusively "Islamic". Only an ignoramus would claim that the wealth of mathematical, philosophical, astronomical and other proto-scientific insights yielded by such men were without value, for these have indeed added hugely to the store of human knowledge, and without the application of these findings, later scientific and technological advances would not have been possible. To reject such contributions would be as absurd as the oft-quoted question "What have the Romans ever done for us?" from The Life of Brian.

However, we no longer live in the Mediaeval world, and whereas it is justifiable to enumerate and to welcome the contributions to knowledge listed above, they cannot in any sense be described as Islamic, as none of them originate in the Quran or the Hadith, but rather, from the human quest for knowledge. Today's Muslim immigrants to Spain do not bring the Spanish people lost knowledge from our shared Classical past, or revolutionary rational insights into the workings of the Universe and the foundations of the scientific method, but demands for the construction of mosques, halal slaughter and lesser rights for women. Portillo is therefore falling into a basic category error by equating the emergent rationalism that found a place within Islamically-governed Mediaeval societies, with the religious dogma of Islam itself. Surely, as an educated man, he cannot be so foolish as to be unable to distinguish the sophisticated philosophy of a polymath such as Averroes, from the wilfully ignorant dogma professed by a mass of Muslim immigrants to Spain today?

Visigothic Spain in 700 before the Islamic Invasion