The Arab, Muslim influence on the Spanish speaking world

The song for this post is Inta Omri by Shakira

The original Enta Omri is by the incredibly talented Umm Kalthoum. Shakira’s name itself is Arabic and related to the Hindi/Urdu thank you. Her father is the child of Lebanese immigrants.

But the Spanish-Arabic cultural exchange goes back way before Shakira - to the time of the Moors, when Spain’s name was Al-Andalus. There was even a dialect of Spanish written in Arabic script.

Mexico’s Lebanese immigrants contributed not just the wealthiest man but also Al Pastor tacos from Lebanese shawarma.

I see pieces of Arab naming custom in the Spanish naming customs. The Spanish language carries articles that sound very much like they’re from Arabic - el vs. al - but this is a mislead! In fact the influence of Arabic language on Spanish is much deeper than that - donating lots of vocabulary, including perhaps ‘¡Olé!’ from wa’allah.

Pork is kind of interesting in this context - the Arab Muslim rulers and Jewish administrators of the Moorish empire didn’t eat pork. After the Reconquista, a wave of forced conversions followed, with Christians forcing their dietary habits on Jews and Muslims. In order to prove that you were not a Jew or a Moor, you were to hang a medallion of pork outside of your door. This emphasis on ham in Spain as a part of religious identity to separate Spanish culture from the Moorish and Jewish culture is detailed further in Lesser Beasts - a history of pigs. The Spanish and greater Latin American love of pork continues to this day!

The guitar, similarly, is an African instrument, introduced to Spain during the Moorish conquests and forms a very important part of Spanish music, but no one today would recognize it as an African or Moorish instrument.

These examples illustrate something to me - we are often shaped by our rejection of other cultures as much as our acceptance of them (ham). We absorb foreign influences and internalize it so thoroughl that we forget that we absorbed (guitar). We continue absorbing for centuries even after there’s been a lot of exchange (al pastor). The resulting projects are all kind of cool and interesting.

I even once toyed with an alternate history story where the Moors send their own version of Christopher Columbus to find another route to India since the Ottomans blocked their regular route. The Moors discover the New World and make contact with the natives. The absence of pigs in the crop basket they bring over might mean that a far greater number of natives survive in North America. Turns out, someone else already wrote a similar story, but I cannot find it now.