Muslim Women in Southern Spain between Discrimination and Empowerment

In the last two decades, Spain has experienced a remarkable increase in its immigrant population (Cornelius,2004), of which North Africans make up a significant percentage. Concurrent and concomitant to this increase, since the end of the Franco regime, a strong tendency for conversion to the Islamic religion has been observable in Andalusian cities like Granada and Cordoba. In the face of these two phenomena, anti-Islamic and anti-“Moorish” attitudes reflecting the combination of ethnical, religious, and nationalist dimensions of discriminationnow prevail amongst large segments of the Spanish public. These attitudes are deeply-rooted and can be interpretedin one sense as historically transmitted stigmatizations of “the other”.

In the last two decades, Spain has experienced a remarkable increase in its immigrant population (Cornelius, 2004), of which North Africans make up a significant percentage. Concurrent and concomitant to this increase, since the end of the Franco regime, a strong tendency for conversion to the Islamic religion has been observable in Andalusian cities like Granada and Cordoba. In the face of these two phenomena, anti-Islamic and anti-"Moorish" attitudes reflecting the combination of ethnical, religious, and nationalist dimensions of discrimination now prevail amongst large segments of the Spanish public. These attitudes are deeply-rooted and can be interpreted in one sense as historically transmitted stigmatizations of "the other". As Stallaert (1998) explains in detail, since 1492, when the process of the so-called reconquista resulted in the "Christian reconquest" of the Iberian peninsula from the various Muslim ruling dynasties beginning with the final fall of Granada after a lengthy siege by the "Catholic kings", the Spanish nation-state mission has been founded on a mixture of ethnically-based "arabophobia" and religiously motivated "islamophobia" (Runnymede Trust, 1997). The construction and imposition of a common Spanish-Castilian hegemonic identity has always relied on measures of religious persecution -such as the institution of the Santa Inquisición, originated in Spain -as well as "ethnic cleansing", implemented since 1492 through "laws of blood purity", which constantly blur supposedly biological, ethnical, and religious terminology.
Accordingly, even before the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington and the March 11, 2004 bombings in Madrid, increasing xenophobic and particularly islamophobic tendencies were observable within Spanish society; the Madrid bombings have now made former inherently hidden deeply-rooted attitudes more visibly explicit. Particularly affected by this newly emerging islamophobia are Muslim women, whose societal functions, in the opinion of the majority, are reduced to motherhood and obedience to their husbands. For several centuries now, Islam and in particular Muslim women have been misperceived, misunderstood, misinterpreted and consequently portrayed as the opposing reflection of the West's self-portrait as a modern, secularized, and inclusive civilization (Martín Muñoz, 1999). Regardless of their age, profession, ethnical or social class background, citizenship and immigration status, the West focuses on Muslim women as being the stereotypical prototype of "otherness". The recent feminization of North African migration reflects that many Moroccan women from urban areas have been migrating alone to Spain, which is contrary to the traditional pattern of female North Africans migrating from rural areas as dependents of their husbands and families. Currently, Muslim women are becoming the most important protagonists in the process of forming and developing a Muslim diaspora community (Martín Muñoz & López Sala, 2003).

In the Context of Southern Spain
An ethnographic study has been conducted (Dietz & El-Shohoumi, 2005) in order to address the largely unknown daily living conditions of these "different" female migrants living within a secularizing, yet still mainly Catholic, southern Spanish society. Their daily lives are profoundly shaped by diverse, but often overlapping and mutually reinforcing, sources and forms of discrimination and exclusion. Gender-related, citizenship-based, ethnonational and religiously motivated discriminatory attitudes and behaviors are simultaneously at work -both from the "outside", the non-Muslim majority in Spanish society, and from within Muslim minority communities.
Granada was the local setting of the research. In this Andalusian city of approximately 300,000 permanent inhabitants, a highly differentiated migrant population has arrived and settled during the last two decades. The main reasons for choosing this city are economic. Granada is the principal commercial city in eastern Andalusia, with economic relations with both the northern province of Jaén, dominated by olive monoculture, and the eastern province of Almería, which has been transformed over the last decade into one of Spain's most vigorous agricultural export regions. Since the first non-European immigrants started to settle in Granada in the second half of the 1980s, a complex economic pattern of urban construction work (dominated by Moroccans), and urban informal trade (controlled by Senegalese) and seasonal migrations to the olive harvest in the north as well as to the tomato plantations in Almería, has evolved. Further advantages of Granada derive from its character as a university city. On the one hand, the flat market responds to the demands of 60,000 students for cheap rental property, from which the migrants also benefit, and on the other hand, the university has attracted highly skilled immigrants. Furthermore, the "orientalist" legacy of the city has turned it into a point of confluence for Muslim converts as well (Dietz & El-Shohoumi 2005).

Emerging Muslim Life-Worlds
The infrastructure of the Muslim community in southern Spain is still rather inadequately developed. After emigrating from Morocco, Algeria, and other Muslim countries, what were previously routine religious practices frequently become seriously problematic to fulfill, or at least a challenge for one's sense of duty. Different strategies are developed in order to cope with these challenges. Some women try to compensate for the lack of context and of cultural embeddedness by increasingly internalizing their faith. In many cases, however, the suddenly missing framework of family and kinship networks imbuing a deep feeling of personal isolation weakens their willpower for the daily practice of Islam. This supposedly only temporary loss of social support is exacerbated by the lack of a migrant community existing in many of the cities or villages to which some Muslim women migrate. If anything, the recently emerging "religious infrastructure" of mosques, community meeting points, shops that offer halal food, as well as products from the migrants' respective homelands, observable in cities like Granada and Cordoba, paradoxically strengthens the impression of losing the "naturalness" and deeply-rooted characteristics of religious faith. In contrast to the converts, who welcome the "changing face of their city" as a development towards its "oriental legacy", some of the migrants even feel somehow "instrumentalised" by orientalist tourism policies. The sense of the above-mentioned loss is also promoted by the surrounding social context. Members of the Spanish and Catholic majority society are frequently reported to show not just "mere" rejection, but complete ignorance and a lack of interest when interacting with Muslims. In response, some women have abandoned certain salient customs like observing all daily prayers, participating fully in Ramadan or wearing the headscarf. Finally, several younger women have developed "double standards" in order to face the challenge of bridging the expectations of their own family and those of the majority society. This strategy, however, is not only a result of migrating to Spain; since adolescence many of the interviewees were found to systematically change codes of conduct when spending time outside their parents' direct sphere of influence.
These more pragmatic and selective approaches towards practicing Islamic traditions and obligations are completely absent when it comes to converts. They perceive their religious duties not as something negotiable with and against the "forces of tradition" and/or the "surrounding social context", but as the result of an individual choice. In the same way as their conversions are experienced in rather mystical terms, their religious practices are seen as a unique opportunity of encountering divinity in the daily routine of life.
Another frequently discussed issue is the significance and necessity of wearing the headscarf. In Spain, despite the fact that there have been no major public conflicts surrounding the issue of the headscarf, 2 (women are "even allowed to wear it when taking a passport photograph", as one Moroccan interviewee gratefully acknowledged), nevertheless, the veil is seen as a prejudicial obstacle when searching for employment or trying to rent a flat. Institutions and NGOs see the "problem" of veiling as a major indicator of the host society's "racism". Even though tolerance towards veiling is always expressed, some institutional representatives say that Muslim women "should not exaggerate" and should not look "as if they were in Morocco", as this would make it difficult for their Catholic neighbors to "accept" them. A social worker dealing with Muslim women even claimed that some of them are covering their head as a means of "self-isolation".
In order to avoid this kind of discrimination, some migrant women in certain situations strategically remove the headscarf; however, this conforming action does not counter the underlying prejudice concerning the phenotypical distinction arising from wearing the headscarf, which results in islamophobic attitudes and the overt rejection of Moroccans. A majority of women who wear the veil regard it as an integral part of their religious and gender identity, and therefore an unquestioned part of their traditions. However, there is a minority of women, mainly of Amazigh origin, who reject the headscarf, which they identify as "something imposed by the Arabs" and above all by "the macho attitude of Muslim husbands". For this minority, the preservation of an archaic religious symbol, which has nothing to do with higher or lower degree of religiosity, is one of the factors preventing Muslim women from liberating themselves. This perspective, which is astonishingly similar to the mainstream Spanish public's perception of Muslim women as victims, is sharply contradicted by other women, who emphasize that the variability of veiling customs is just as susceptible to changes and fashions as any other "article of clothing". Ironically, several Muslim women, immigrants as well as converts, even claim the hijab serves as an erotic device, while Christian Spanish women are criticized as boringly "naked".
However, in the migration context of a non-Muslim host society, some women perceive the headscarf not as a question of custom or fashion, but as a strictly religious symbol of identifying oneself vis-à-vis the Christian "other". The Spanish converts, while being dressed modestly covering their heads in order to be recognized as Muslims, share this attitude. However, other Muslim women openly reject this tendency of using the hijab as a religious distinction or even as an "ethnical marker" in inter-religious contexts. In their view, it turns the issue of veiling into a superficial question of belonging to a religious minority regardless of one's individual faith and attitude towards religion.

Struggling for Community Formation
Above all, unmarried migrant women, and even many young Muslim women studying at Spanish universities who normally feel well integrated, suffer from loneliness, and especially isolation from their families. Their feelings of isolation also reflect the poor community relations which characterize their daily lives in southern Spain. To some extent, an emerging "transnational" and "trans-Mediterranean" migration network can counter the problem, i.e. experienced by frequent visits from and to families living in the region of origin (González Barea, 2003). On the other hand, even married women who migrated in the context of a family reunion opportunity complain about difficulties in establishing more stable social and neighborhood relations. This is due to their heavy dependence on their husband's social and work relationships or on their own employment in the shadow economy, which will be addressed below. While the necessity of community building in the migrant situation is reflected in all of the interviews conducted, immigrant community life is still strongly fragmented and departmentalized according to the needs of the first immigrants, mainly unmarried male employees. The immigrant sections of the two major Spanish trade unions that still dominate associational life are controlled by male representatives, and their union activities are accordingly focused on sectoral issues relevant above all to male employees. Additionally, men also dominate the religious organizational life that is emerging through newly established mosques and recently created groups such as the Consejo Islámico de Granada at the local level or the Comunidad Musulmana de España at the national level (Rosón Lorente, 2005). Therefore, these organizational frameworks unfortunately cannot satisfy the requirements of migrant women, who above all seek the opportunities to meet other Muslim women, in order to hold informal encounters and exchange practical information without the presence of men. The participation of Muslim women in activities carried out by migrant associations and/or by Spanish NGOs supporting them is actually very weak, either because they are not allowed to by their husbands or because they simply have no contact with or knowledge about these associations or NGOs. On the other hand, the "assistentialist" connotations conferred on such institutions often produce feelings of being somehow "stigmatized" when turning towards them -an attitude that is promoted by the often-criticized "charity" approach explicitly used by several NGOs of Catholic orientation (Dietz & El-Shohoumi 2005). Similar apprehensive attitudes are expressed concerning social services offered by the Spanish welfare system. Apart from those women who have never heard of the existence of such services, many female migrants deploy strategies of simply ignoring and/or explicitly avoiding them. According to one social worker's opinion, this resistance stems from the "illegal" immigrants' fear that these public institutions will denounce and deport them.
While many Muslim women criticize the frequent NGO practice of "diverting" them from one organization or institution to another, NGOs are also critical of interacting and cooperating with Muslim women's groups and associations due to the lack of stability, continuity, and accountability in the daily operations of these organizations. In the opinion of the director of the Albayzín neighborhood Community Social Services Centre, the Muslim communities' organizational diversity prevents them from having a stronger impact on local issues. Apart from internal divisions and sectarianism, the main distinction that presently divides Muslims in Spain is between migrants from Muslim societies of origin and local Muslim converts. Due to their different approaches to and perception of Islam noted above, most converts implicitly distance themselves from the Maghrebin immigrants. In fact, these converts are the only Muslim group that succeeded in building up strong and stable, although rather small communities. This difference seems to be related to the process of conversion itself, which takes place not only as a personal revelation, but also in parallel as a "voyage" of initiation into the midst of a community of already-initiated fellow travelers. Besides, the strength of the convert communities is also the result of the necessity of compensating for one's own experience of being uprooted from immediate family, relatives, and other social relations that existed before conversion.

Between
Gender, Religion and Ethnicity:

Experiences of Discrimination and Racism
Many Muslim women report discriminatory attitudes in the local and personal contexts of their immediate neighborhoods. As one example, overt or subtle rejection is experienced when addressing the initial challenge of renting an apartment. According to public institutions and NGOs, the major factor preventing migrant families from renting a well-equipped apartment is the impossibility of paying simultaneously the first month's rent and the deposit. Due to this and to the stereotypical opinion that Moroccan immigrants "don't clean" and "leave apartments in a mess", real-estate owners feel very insecure when dealing with migrant people. In addition to the financial factor, public institutions also perceive "cultural differences" as a source of "misunderstandings" between local owners and immigrant tenants. When sharing a flat, Moroccan students are said to "lack tolerance" towards fellow Spanish students, particularly regarding alcohol, diet, and sexual habits. Another supposedly "cultural" factor is their refusal to accept the local urban habit of many older people who want to rent them a room in their flat, but who share the flat with their domestic animals.
From the point of view of all the Muslim women who were interviewed, these obstacles do not seem to be completely "culture"-based or economically motivated, but related to a generalized, historically-rooted islamophobia. The fear of, and skepticism towards, their ethnic and religious "otherness" are experienced by Muslim women in the neighbourhood as being the main sites of daily interaction with members of the majority society. It is in these places where converts and immigrants alike feel permanently observed and scrutinized. They become bored and tired of "proving" to their neighbors through their day-to-day behavior that they are "different" from the general prejudices leveled against them. This permanent requirement of arguing and justifying one's "difference" vis-à-vis the mainstream society -according to an Algerian woman -often leads to self-restricting leisure activities, and relating socially solely with other Muslim women or families instead of striving for "integration" into the social networks of their non-Muslim Spanish neighbors. Meanwhile, in the perception of the majority society and its institutions, this phenomenon of self-isolation is seen as an undesirable enclosure and "self-ghettoisation".
In the view of many women, discrimination, which fundamentally takes place on a personal and not on an institutional level, may range from mere joking and stereotyping experienced in daily interactions to legal distinctions between Spaniards and aliens, and finally to overtly racist threats or attacks. For several interviewees, it is not sufficient to explain the discriminatory experiences they are currently suffering by reference to the host society's simple ignorance about the immigrants' region or culture of origin. In particular, the converts stress the negative impact of the Spanish mass media in producing a generally negative and often false picture of the Muslim-Arab world, full of religious, phenotypical, culture-related as well as gender-related stereotypes, which inevitably guide the perceptions and interactions of the local majority society. Many women express how fed up, despondent, and insulted they feel when always having to counter allusions to "machista Muslim men" and "submissive Muslim women", to the "hideousness" of Arab men and the "lasciviousness and eroticism of Arab belly-dancers". They are further angered by having to answer explicit questions about the supposed customs of "Arab revenge and blood-feuds", or even about the strangely cultivated rumor according to which "the Arabs" are trying to reconquer the "Spanish shores" by sending their pregnant women illegally to the peninsula offering them money for giving birth to "so many moritos". The converts, however, who do perceive institutional and structural forms of discrimination, describe these attitudes and questions not as mere expressions of stereotypes, but as new forms of reproducing structurally rooted historical phobias. Since to the converts' mind a mono-cultural and mono-religious core persists inside the supposedly secular and "neutral" Spanish public institutions, conversion to Islam is treated as an act of "disloyalty" and "national betrayal".
Many interviewees perceive this permanent confusion between national, ethnic, and religious dimensions of identification throughout the Spanish majority society's stigmatized and essentialized view of "the other" as the main obstacle to establishing and maintaining a genuine intercultural dialogue. In order to systematize the often overlapping and intertwined areas and sources of discriminatory attitudes and practices, a double distinction will be made between exogenous versus endogenous forms of discrimination (i.e. between discriminatory attitudes whose principal sources are situated outside or inside the Muslim women's own community); and between ethno-religiously motivated versus genderbased discrimination.
On the level of exogenous forms of ethno-religious discrimination, our data show at least five dimensions of distinction, inequality and supposed superiority, which are combined thematically in the following stereotypes against Muslim women: • the religious and/or "civilizational" division between Muslims and Christians/Catholics, i.e. between "Orient" and "Occident" ; • the ethnic distinction between "Arabs" and "Castilians", which reflects historical connotations of "them" and "us" (Stallaert, 1998); • the radicalized perception of a supposed phenotypical bipolarity between "non-Whites" -either "Semites" or "Blacks" -and "Whites" (Hall, 1996); • the national and citizenship-based distinction between "aliens" or "non-Spaniards" and "Spaniards" or "nationals", already codified in the Spanish Constitution (Agrela & Gil Araujo, 2005); and • the dividing line drawn by public opinion between "immigrant" minority communities, who are supposed to be problematic per se, and the "sedentary" host majority society in charge of solving these migration-related problems (Dietz & El Shohoumi, 2005).
The blurring of distinctions between the religious and the ethno-cultural dimensions of being a "Muslim-Arab-Maghrebin" woman are also suffered by interviewees inside their newly-emerging communities, where endogenous forces may also use Islam as an ethnic marker vis-à-vis the host society. As a result, incipient minority communities are increasingly "ethnicized" from within as well as from without (Rosón Lorente, 2005). In the case of Muslim women, this frequently means that particular cultural and geographically limited traits, customs and traditions -be they of Arab, Amazigh or other ethnic origin -are transmitted and acquired as if they formed part of Islam as such (Jawad, 1998). According to a Pakistani woman, who refuses the simplistic identification of one particular cultural horizon with the supposedly global legacy of Islam, "Religion is an easy argument and simply a way of controlling women." Exogenous forms of gender-based discrimination have been documented several times in the course of our study and are mainly based on stereotypes about Muslimcum-Arab men and women, which are shaped by a profound dividing line between the sexes. Whereas Muslim-Arab men are stigmatized as potentially violent, criminal and vindictive, Muslim-Arab women are supposed to be inherently ambiguous. Behind the "mask" of the headscarf, lasciviousness and potential promiscuity are suspected from the sexist perspective of the Spanish male.
Nevertheless, several Muslim women do define certain rules and practices, seen as "female" by the male members of their own migrant community, as endogenous forms of gender-based discrimination. The younger Moroccan interviewees criticize the unequal treatment, inferior educational opportunities, and lack of personal freedom they suffered during their adolescence, compared to their brothers. In general, the women acknowledging the existence of discriminatory practices -in their country of origin or inside their current minority community in the diaspora -agree that the Islamic religion is not to blame for such practices. They believe that the interpretive application of Islamic traditions and gender-biased interpretation of the Holy Quran by male Muslims are the sources of the problem (Jawad, 1998). Converts often take a similar view, their tendency to dissociate Islam from Muslim countries, examined above, is a constitutive part of the converts' religious identity. Finally, convert as well as migrant women concur in identifying male interests as construing forces that have always (also in several other different religions and cultures) ended up "manipulating" and re-interpreting an original distinction of gender-differentiated role-sets, which per se were not meant to be discriminatory, but have become over the course of time de facto sources of gender-related discrimination. Accordingly, "the problem of women in Islam is not a religious but a social issue -i.e. religion being used by a patriarchal society" (Martín Muñoz, 1999, p. 13).

Societal Responses and Institutional Perspectives
Finally, these experiences of discriminatory practices are contrasted, on the one hand, with official public definitions of and attitudes towards discrimination, and on the other hand, with the awareness of ethno-religious dis-crimination and gender-based exclusion as shown by the NGOs and public institutions. Following Article 14 in the section on "Rights and Liberties" of the Spanish Constitution, which limits legal equality to those with Spanish citizenship, and Article 16, where "the ideological, religious, and cult-related freedom of the individuals and communities" is guaranteed, 3 there is neither a particular official definition of discrimination and anti-discrimination currently existing in Spain, nor are there distinctive agencies or institutions dedicated to the implementation of anti-discrimination measures. The debate on the necessity of introducing clearly defined anti-discrimination issues in Spanish legislation itself, as has already been accomplished in other EU member states, is only just beginning. 4 Many Spanish organizations and institutions do not share the differentiated and interrelated perceptions of exogenous and endogenous discriminatory experiences, practices and attitudes, which in the view of Muslim women mutually reinforce each other. Depending on their governmental or non-governmental nature as well as on their Muslim or non-Muslim protagonists, each of these institutional actors tends to perceive only one aspect, source, or dimension of the multi-level phenomenon of discrimination against Muslim women. The representative of the Moroccan immigrant department of the Spanish Unión General de Trabajadores even argues that men, not women, are the sector (group) most discriminated against within the migrant population, since they have more difficulty in finding employment than women. In his view, also shared by most of the male-dominated immigrant associations, discrimination is primarily only inflicted exogenously on Muslims and/or migrants by the host society; furthermore, this external form of discrimination is racist, not sexist in nature. Contrary to this perspective, the Spanish public institutions dealing with migrant and/or Muslim communities tend to emphasize only the internal and supposedly "culture-specific" genderbased discrimination of Muslim women. In this official view, discrimination does not produce social exclusion, but, on the contrary, it is social enclosure and self-ghettoization which generate external rejection. While racist attitudes towards the long-established Spanish Roma communities, but not towards the small minority of Muslim migrants, are acknowledged by the host society, representatives of public institutions generally deny any significant presence of racist or islamophobic attitudes inside their organizations. Paradoxically, the same interviewees cling to the same above-mentioned stereotypes about the submissive, passive Muslim woman, "permanently producing children", which is a discriminatory view combining islamophobic and arabophobic elements.
The perspective of Spanish NGOs dealing directly with migrant populations is more nuanced. Contrary to the public institutions, all NGOs admit that exogenous discrimination against migrant and/or Muslim women does exist and on a rather large scale. The sources of this discrimination are perceived to be mainly of legal and political origins. Migrant Muslim women are exposed to legal discrimination when they are deprived of basic citizenship rights, like voting and social service benefits. Thus, migration and citizenship, not gender or religion, are the initial sources of Spanish discrimination faced by Muslim women. The second most important and distinctive source of discrimination appears to be internally motivated within Islam itself. Reflecting the state institutional perspective, NGOs identify the unequal treatment of women both in Muslim countries and in Islam as a major source of gender-based discrimination.

Conclusions
Even prior to the events of September 11, 2001, Huntington's evidently accurate prophecy of a "clash of civilizations" (Huntington 1996) was increasingly becoming an attractive and often cited framework for the debate not only on international relations, but also on Muslim immigrants and integration policies throughout Europe. As briefly sketched above with respect to the issue of Muslim women, a scenario of increasingly visible and explicit islamophobia, arabophobia and anti-immigrant attitudes, which has been existing implicitly before, has been re-strengthened in Spain. The September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. and the March 11 bombings in Madrid have only accentuated this phenomenon.
Through the comparison of the experiences expressed by Muslim women themselves, on the one hand, and by their Spanish institutional counterparts on the other, the complexity of the Muslim woman's particular life-world as part of an emerging minority community inside a non-Muslim environment has become evident. For the Spanish case, this complexity results from a "double dichotomy" to which not only the Muslim women and their male partners but also the Spanish society and its institutional framework are exposed: firstly, the dichotomy of "oriental" religiosity versus "Western" secularism; secondly, the dichotomy of Christian-Castilian versus Muslim-Arab ethno-religious categories (Dietz in press).
As the institutional representatives frequently state, the "return of Islam" to the Iberian Peninsula challenges the process of secularization which the Spanish state and society are currently undergoing. In this perspective, a fundamental contradiction seems to reside in the relation between an all-encompassing, comprehensive worldview (formerly Catholicism, currently Islam) on the one hand, and Western meta-religious laicism, on the other. This perspective, however, is constantly challenged by an ancient rivalry which has been fundamental to the historical emergence and shaping of Spanish national identity, and which persists today inside the Spanish majority society and culture: the supposed antagonism between Islam, perceived as "Arab" or "Moorish", and Christianity, in general, and Catholicism, in particular, identified with the predominantly Castilian ethnicity. The resulting ethnic, intercultural and/or inter-religious conflicts analyzed above have a negative impact particularly on Muslim women. These conflicts have a negative impact on their daily experiences precisely at the moment when these first generation Muslim women migrants are establishing their own communities, struggling for their positions and networks inside a non-Muslim host context. As reflected in the women's experiences of both exogenous and endogenous forms of discrimination, ethnicized perceptions of religious and cultural otherness, and gender-based tendencies of female exclusion and victimization, mutually reinforce each other and end up restricting the development of flourishing intercultural life-worlds in the midst of the multicultural legacy of Al-Andalus.