Madrid is the only European capital of Islamic origin, though this claim has been the subject of great controversy up to today, showing to what extent Spain’s national imaginary has not yet fully come to terms with the legacy of Al-Andalus. For 250 years, the “madina” of Madrid formed part of the defensive system at the northern border of Al-Andalus, until it was conquered and taken over by the Kingdom of Castile in the ninth century. Nevertheless, the Muslim presence in Madrid continued on for the next five hundred years, through a Mudéjar and later Morisco minority. The final disappearance of Islam in Madrid, long after the beginning of the Modern Era, coincided with efforts to invent a past for Madrid that was more in line with its recently acquired status as the capital of the greatest of all Catholic empires, thereby accelerating the destruction of the material and symbolic heritage of its past as part of Al-Andalus while creating a relationship of conflict with memory that still exists in the modern day. The parts of Madrid’s Islamic legacy which we can still enjoy today are quite modest and raise many questions. However, they provide enough information to venture into becoming familiar with the landscapes of that “small, prosperous city,” as medieval geographer al-Idrisi described it nearly a millennium ago, and to reflect on the way in which historical memory is handled.

Daniel Gil-Benumeya (Rabat, 1970)
Gil-Benumeya is an Arabist, editor and researcher of Islam and Islamophobia in Europe. He was an assistant to the Educational Planning and Publications Area at Casa Árabe from 2007 to 2012, a period during which he coordinated the collective work From Maŷrit to Madrid: Madrid y los árabes del siglo IX al siglo XXI (From Maŷrit to Madrid: Madrid and the Arabs from the Ninth to Twenty-first Centuries, Lunwerg/Casa Árabe, 2012 and 2015), the seed for his later work Madrid islámico (“Islamic Madrid,” La Librería, 2015), in addition to others. At present, he is a member of the Euro Mediterranean University Institute (EMUI) at the Universidad Complutense and is completing his doctorate in Religion Sciences at the same university.