Muslims in Catalonia: The Challenge of Integration and Religious Freedom
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2010
http://www.meforum.org/2699/muslims-in-catalonia
The history of the Catalans and Islam is distinctive from that of the rest of Spain. The Catalan language, which counts some 10 million speakers, is an official idiom along with Castilian, in the Spanish regions of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands.
Barcelona, the great Catalan metropolis, was taken back from Muslim conquerors in the year 801—only ninety years after the Umayyad invasion of 711—and became the capital of the Marca Hispanica, or the Spanish March, controlled by the Christian heirs of Charlemagne. Catalonia was thus never part of Al-Andalus and is one of the few regions of Spain from which a Muslim cultural legacy, in the form of architectural monuments and Arabic loan-words, is absent.
Muslim immigration became a significant recent phenomenon in Catalonia in the 1980s when the need for agricultural labor in the region's rich vineyards and other farming enterprises became acute. ...
While Seglers does not take up the point, Catalonia resembles, in some ways, the Flemish areas of Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland vis-Ã -vis the challenges presented to a native population by an influx of new Muslim residents. Muslims represent a minority in these territories (anywhere from 4-6 percent of the population according to a 2005 estimate) and are increasingly demanding special status for themselves.
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Fast forward to 8/18/2017
Catalonia's Islamic extremism problem
http://www.dw.com/en/catalonias-islamic-extremism-problem/a-40155371
Radical Islamists are more active in Barcelona than in most other Spanish cities. The reason lies partly in the autonomous nature of the government, and partly in the multicultural character of the city.
"The threat in Catalonia is clear." With these unflinching words in 2010, made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, the US State Department was already voicing concern over the potential for radicalization among young Muslim men in Barcelona.
The city was a "crossroads of worrisome activities," according to the leaked document, with a large Muslim community of which a small portion was vulnerable to being recruited by jihadi groups. Migrants from North Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh had turned the region into a "magnet for terrorist recruiters," it said. ...
Until 2013 the majority of jihadi suspects detained - 90 percent - were foreigners, mostly migrants born in Morocco, Pakistan and Algeria, according to terrorism researchers Fernando Reinares and Carola Garcia-Calvo. Beginning in 2013, however, they found the situation began to change. Since that year, around half of those detained have been Spanish-born citizens.
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