Spanish village festivals reenacted the fictional Mahomet idol until 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

• XREF: Grounding evidence for the vault’s Islam-West genealogical thesis — shows the invented idol image persisting as living ritual far longer than scholarship might assume. Relates to Anidjar on how medieval inventions of Islam became embedded in secular European culture.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how a fictional slander (Muhammad as idol) persisted as festive ritual across 800 years and only died out in living memory under ecumenical pressure — the stubborn social life of a fabricated genealogy.
• CANDY: Fun fact for conversation: Spanish town festivals featured a fireworks-stuffed Muhammad effigy that literally exploded until Vatican II.