Spanish village festivals reenacted the destruction of Muhammad’s idol into the twentieth century
Evidence
The idols of Mahomet live on into the twentieth century in the festivals of small towns in Spain, many of which involve annual ritual reenactments of the reconquest of the town from the Muslims. In a number of these fiestas of “Moors and Christians,” a squadron of local inhabitants dressed up as Moros take over a mock citadel and set up a “Mahoma”—a dressedup effigy meant to represent Muhammad—on the walls. In the mock siege that follows, the Christian troops take over the citadel and destroy the Mahoma. In some of the fiestas, the Mahoma, filled with fireworks, explodes in a spectacular (and somewhat dangerous) pyrotechnic finale. In the second half of the twentieth century, many of the towns, in a post-Vatican-II spirit of ecumenism, banished Mahoma from these festivities as an embarrassing travesty of Islam. Yet eight centuries after the Chanson de Roland describes the Saracens of Saragossa toppling the idol Mahomet into a ditch, eight centuries after Raoul de Caen imagines Tancred destroying a gilded idol of Muhammad in the temple of Solomon, Valencian villagers reenact this imaginary idol-destruction as a central part of their dramatization of the reconquista. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 724
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- QUESTION: Are there contemporary film or field studies of these ‘Mahoma’ fiestas documenting the exact ritual sequence and recent ecumenical removals?
- SHARE: Send to anyone specializing in Spanish religious festivals or Islamic-Christian cultural relations.
- CANDY: Folk festivals in Spain blew up explosive Muhammad effigies until the late twentieth century — vivid and immediately tweetable.