Rhetorical Conflicts: Civilizational Discourse and the Contested Patrimonies of Spain's Festivals of Moors and Christians

The title of this essay identifies a series of verbal scufflesor rhetorical conflictsthat developed in the fall of 2006 within Spain's larger culture wars. The political skirmishes coalesced around an announcement by the Popular Party (PP) to champion a class of regional festivals for U.N. designation as indispensible elements of human patrimony. The war of words stemmed from the PP's politicization of cultural designations, but the celebrations in questionthe fiestas of Moors and Christians common in the south of Valencia regionalready generated controversy since they display rhetorical conflicts of a different sort: In potentially offensive fashion, the festivals present carnivalesque re-enactments of battles in the medieval Reconquest of Iberia by Christian armies over Islamic Moors. The essay situates these entangled controversies in the broader context of waves of immigration that have accompanied, or even fueled, a trans-Atlantic discourse centered on notions of a geopolitical clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. Accordingly, the debates about the Moors and Christians festivalslike the celebrations themselvesreveal deep ambivalence about the role of Islam and of Muslims in Spain's past and present.