Ceuta, Al-Andalus, Mughals: Why the Past Keeps Returning to Modern Politics
A video footage shows a large number of the people crossing into Ceuta of Spain from Morocco. (Image X.com)
By SAHASRANSHU DASH
The Ceuta migration crisis has revived Spain’s debate over al-Andalus and the Reconquista, echoing India’s own arguments over the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. The deeper issue is how democracies remember empire without turning history into inherited political identity.
Sheffield (United Kingdom), August 10, 2026 — When tens of thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the 30th and 31st of July 2026, overwhelming local authorities and reopening Europe’s debate on immigration and sovereignty, an apparently contemporary crisis almost instantly acquired the language of the past.
The immediate story needed no mediaeval gloss. Madrid’s mass regularisation programme, approved in April after being announced in January, had received 1,174,978 applications by the time applications closed on the 30th of June. It was already being criticised by twenty-two EU governments, which argued that Spain’s policy could create a “pull factor” for further irregular migration.
Spanish officials blamed traffickers and online misinformation for exploiting a Supreme Court ruling of 8 July concerning migrant returns. The ruling confirmed that migrants intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla could not simply be subjected to the same summary border rejection procedure applicable to those crossing the physical border fence.
Unproven theories circulated that Rabat had let the crisis unfold as leverage over Spain’s stance on Gaza. None of it required a single reference to al-Andalus, yet politicians and social media reached at once for the Reconquista, convivencia and the Umayyad Caliphate. Is Ceuta a colonial relic, a Spanish city like any other, or a revelation of the long shadow of al-Andalus?
The scale of the episode made the argument unusually immediate. Beginning on 30 July and continuing through 31 July, the crossings eventually involved roughly 70,000 people, according to estimates reported in the aftermath, while dozens of migrants died attempting to make the crossing. Most subsequently returned to Morocco, but thousands remained in Ceuta, including more than 1,300 unaccompanied minors registered by early August.
By 7 August, the Spanish government was preparing to transfer minors to mainland Spain because Ceuta’s reception facilities were severely overcrowded. The episode also produced a wider European political dispute, with Italy imposing temporary checks on travellers arriving from Spain and criticising Madrid’s migration policy.
That readiness to invoke the Middle Ages reveals something more important than the crisis itself: modern democracies rarely argue only about territory. They argue about memory. Cities, monuments and borders become surfaces onto which societies project unresolved questions of identity and belonging. The dispute pits not only Spain against Morocco, but different ways of remembering vanished empires.
Spain is not exceptional here. India has spent more than a decade arguing, in an almost identical pattern, over the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. The names change, Babur instead of Abd al-Rahman III, Aurangzeb instead of Almanzor, but the mechanism repeats. The Islamic past is reduced to two equally inadequate mythologies. One remembers only conquest and foreign domination. The other, driven by the legitimate wish to counter Islamophobia, dissolves empire into architecture, poetry and cuisine.
The Alhambra or the Taj Mahal serve as proof of tolerance, as though marble could substitute for taxation, conscription or conquest. The result is not a more balanced history but one myth replacing another, confusing culture with power and empire with identity. The real challenge, for Spain and India alike, is not choosing between nostalgia and resentment, but reaching historical maturity: admiring a legacy without absolving the power that produced it, and acknowledging conquest without turning that acknowledgement into prejudice against people living centuries later.
The empire before the myth
Contemporary memory tends to begin with the Alhambra. Mediaeval reality began with the army. Before it was architectural splendour or convivencia, al-Andalus was an imperial state imposing authority over a recently conquered and extraordinarily diverse territory. Like any great empire, it rested on its capacity to monopolise violence, collect taxes and defend borders. War did not interrupt Andalusi civilisation. It was one of the institutions that made it possible.
After the conquest of 711 and the rapid expansion that followed, the real challenge was governance. In 756, Abd al-Rahman I founded an independent emirate in Córdoba, and from then on Andalusi rulers faced a double military problem. They had to contain the Christian kingdoms of the north, but above all they had to fight within their own borders.
Against the romantic image of permanent confrontation between Islam and Christendom, Córdoba’s chief concern in the eighth and ninth centuries was its own civil wars, rebellious frontiers, Arab-Berber tension and discontent among the muwallads. The great fitna of the late ninth century, led by Umar ibn Hafsun from Bobastro, showed that the state’s cohesion depended on the constant capacity to project military force, not merely on a shared religious identity.
Abd al-Rahman III’s reign was, above all, a military reconstruction of the state. Nearly twenty years of campaigns to reincorporate rebellious regions culminated in the conquest of Bobastro in 928 and the proclamation of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 929, turning military success into the basis of political legitimacy. Under Almanzor, war and legitimacy reached their fullest fusion.
The famous summer aceifas against Barcelona, León or Santiago answered less to religious fervour than fiscal logic, yielding plunder and tribute that fed the treasury and the caudillo’s personal power. But the same machinery that sustained the caliphate weakened it. Replacing Arab aristocracies with Berber mercenaries loyal to pay rather than dynasty upset the balance holding the state together. After his death in 1002, the edifice cracked, and the caliphate disappeared in 1031, fragmenting into the taifa kingdoms.
The machinery of war
Fragmentation did not reduce the importance of war. It made it more decisive. The militarily weak taifas paid tribute, the parias, to survive. El Cid served Muslim and Christian princes alike, proof that the mediaeval frontier was far from a straightforward religious confrontation. The Almoravids and Almohads briefly restored unity, but defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 reduced Andalusi presence to the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. Dynasties changed over seven centuries, but authority always depended on military capacity, sustained by immense administrative complexity.
That institutional architecture tends to vanish from idealised images. The jund, descendants of Syrian contingents, received land for armed service. Others were raised through the istinfar, and those who avoided the levy paid a specific tax. Professional troops of diverse origins, including manumitted slaves, Berbers and even Christian cavalry, served Muslim rulers. They valued discipline above confessional loyalty. Mediaeval states were far more pragmatic than the identity narratives built centuries later.
Most operations were not pitched battles but raids, sieges and economic devastation. Harvests were burned, herds were seized and infrastructure was destroyed. War functioned as an instrument of fiscal competition, and even Córdoba’s cultural brilliance, its libraries and its philosophy, can only be understood within the political framework that made it possible.
Empire is not an identity
The same error shapes today’s Indian debates over its Turco-Persian past. Political power is transformed into architecture, while conquest is dissolved into cuisine. Hindu nationalism condenses nearly eight centuries of rule into a single story of occupation and humiliation, turning mediaeval state expansion into an implicit accusation against India’s Muslims today. Much of liberal opinion reproduces the confusion in reverse, relegating conquest and imperial taxation to the background and dissolving empire into the comfortable category of “civilisation” to shield it from controversy. The result reinforces what it aims to combat. Present the Mughal Empire as constitutive of Indian Muslims’ dignity, and questioning it reads as an assault on the community.
That identification has no historical basis and is politically damaging. Indian Muslims do not owe their citizenship to Babur or Aurangzeb; any more than Indian Christians owe theirs to the British Raj. They owe their rights, like other Indians, to the post-1950 Constitution of the existing Indian republic. Separating culture from power does not diminish that legacy.
Instead, it frees culture from a burden it should never have carried in the first place. Spanish Muslims today, mostly the product of recent migration, bear no responsibility for the Umayyad conquest or Almanzor’s campaigns. Confusing these trajectories turns political history into hereditary identity, and no democracy can sustain that without turning disagreement into civic distrust. Empires are political institutions, not collective identities. They tax, raise armies, patronise culture and exercise coercion, all at once. Holding both truths is where historical maturity begins.
The same principle applies beyond the question of ‘historical guilt.’ Individuals in the here and now should not be treated as political extensions of states, empires or conflicts with which they happen to be associated. The same mistake appears in contemporary migration debates, where migrants are too easily reduced to instruments of Morocco, Spain or some wider geopolitical struggle.
Just as Indian Muslims are citizens rather than political descendants of the Mughal Empire, Moroccan migrants are individuals with their own aspirations and agency, not representatives of the Moroccan state. Democratic citizenship requires precisely this separation between collective histories and the rights, choices and responsibilities of people living today.
Historical maturity
History offers few examples where admiring an artistic legacy requires suspending judgement on the power that produced it. Rome bequeathed law and aqueducts without absolving its wars of conquest. The British Empire left institutions and railways without compensating for colonial exploitation. The same standard applies to the Mosque of Córdoba, the Alhambra or Mughal architecture. Recognising that they arose from structures built on taxation and unequal power does not diminish their beauty. It restores them to their real context.
This selective memory is not unique to Spain or India. France with Algeria, the United Kingdom with its Empire, the United States with slavery and Turkey with the Ottoman legacy all face similar dilemmas. What distinguishes mature democracies is not the absence of historiographical conflict, but preventing readings of the past from becoming moral tests for present-day citizens.
Descendants of those who lived under an empire do not automatically inherit its guilt or merits. That rupture between history and citizenship is a fundamental achievement of the democratic state.
True maturity requires distinguishing power from culture, religion from empire, the memory of vanished states from the rights of those who live today as equal citizens. A society capable of admiring the Alhambra without turning the Umayyad Caliphate into political nostalgia, or celebrating Urdu poetry without justifying the Mughal Empire, does not renounce its history. It begins to understand it better. The alternative is a sterile oscillation between resentment and idealisation, where monuments cease to be heritage and become symbolic weapons.
Neither Spain nor India is arguing only about its mediaeval past, but about how to inhabit it without remaining its prisoner. The answer lies neither in forgetting nor veneration, but in an honest memory that recognises that empires produced, at once, some of history’s most extraordinary cultural achievements and some of its most enduring forms of domination.
Accepting both is not moral equidistance. It is the condition for democratic citizenship to stop resting on imperial inheritance and be founded, at last, on a shared understanding of the past. Democracies are not strengthened by loving their history or hating it. They are strengthened by learning to know it.
(This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author’s own.)
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