At the Jamal Islamiya mosque in this seaside town, a Muslim lament of historic proportions is proclaimed in large letters on a framed poster: "In 1492, we lost everything." For the mosque's leader, and much of the Muslim world, the year marks the traumatic conclusion of Islam's golden age, a time remembered like a collective wound. It's a period when the last piece of Muslim-held territory in Spain fell to Catholic monarchs, ending almost 800 years of Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula. Centuries when poetry, science and architecture flourished under Islamic caliphs expired with bonfires of Arabic manuscripts, mass expulsion and extermination in the Inquisition. To the east, the Muslim empire of the Ottomans would reign for another four centuries. But many would trace its long decline to the fall of Al Andalus, the Moorish name for Andalusia.The result is a yearning that today makes Spain, more than any other European country, a battleground in the name of Islam. "They stole 500 years of history from us," says Omar Checa Garcia, who heads the Jamal Islamiya mosque and cultural centre. "We want it back, but we don't want revenge." Others are not so accommodating. Osama bin Laden uses what he calls the "tragedy of Al Andalus" as a rallying cry for his deadly brand of Islamic jihad against "the crusaders and Jews." After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, bin Laden's chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, drew a parallel between the loss of the Iberian peninsula and the struggle of Palestinians. "We will not accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus be repeated in Palestine," he said. The taped sermons of some militant Islamic clerics admonish followers with the legend of "The Moor's Sigh." Having surrendered Granada to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Castile and Aragon, a tearful Sultan Boabdil was scolded by his mother: "You weep like a woman for what you could not hold as a man."
On March 11, 2004, a cell of mainly Moroccan extremists, calling themselves "the brigade situated in Al Andalus," detonated 10 bombs that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains. Many Spaniards blamed their conservative government's support of the Iraq war for making them targets. Three days after the bombings, they swept the Socialist party to power and it moved quickly to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.