eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, were austere zealots responsible for much violent oppression and persecution of non-Muslims. A degree of popular prejudice and suspicion of the moro—the Moor, or Spanish Muslim, whose true loyalties supposedly lie in north Africa—is a continuing feature of Spain’s political discourse. Half memories of the medieval past have often been blended with less faraway recollections of the course of the twentieth-century Spanish Civil War, which began in Morocco and involved tens of thousands of Muslim troops from North Africa, fighting on the side of the
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