In Jumilla, a municipality of just over 25,000 inhabitants in the Murcian Altiplano, the City Council – held by the Popular Party – has recently approved a measure that prohibits the celebration of religious festivities in public spaces. Although the norm affects all confessions in theory, its application has been selective: the two great festivities of the Islamic calendar, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the Lace-up party and the end of Ramadan, have been vetoed in municipal facilities such as the sports center. The decision, unpublished to date in the Region of Murcia, has been interpreted by numerous groups as a gesture of institutional Islamophobia.
The context is not neutral. Jumilla has been the scene of a tension escalation in recent weeks, in parallel to what happened in Torre Pacheco, where there have been riots, aggressions and hate speeches directed against the Muslim population after the spread of racist bulos in social networks. The alarm has reached the Islamic community as a whole, which denounces a dangerous drift towards exclusion and political signaling.
To understand the scope of this situation, we speak with Mounir Benjelloun, president of the Spanish Federation of Islamic religious entities (FEERI). Benjelloun denounces the lack of resources, the absence of real institutional channels of representation and an Islamophobia that – in his words – is no longer disguised: “We are living a planned persecution,” he says.
How are the events of recent weeks living in the Islamic community?
For us it is unfortunate that such a great change in the political class and public administration is being given, and also in a part of society, which is inclined to such a dangerous speech, not only for Muslims, but for the whole country, it is a step back in the exercise of fundamental freedoms and rights, including religious freedom.
Do you think this is going to be replicating in more municipalities?
Well, it starts something. The ultra -rightist ideology has no other purpose than to lash out at any matter that has to do with Islam and Muslims in this country. They have undertaken a path that puts us all in danger. What happens in Jumilla and what has happened in Pacheco is what defines these people, they just want to erase from the Spanish map everything that has to do with Islam and Muslims. Something that, by the way, is very difficult, because the Spanish Muslim legacy is very extensive and is everywhere. Islam has been here for 850 years, Murcia is a city with a Arab name founded at a time when Muslim Spain was the only light in a Europe dull by the Middle Ages. All the scientific, social and cultural development that occurred here is of Islamic inheritance. I think all this is going to more.
Has Islamophobia accelerated in recent months?
That is why I say that the thing is going to go, because the hate is beginning to normalize, and the problem is that much is being done to prevent it. We do not see a very urgent intervention by the State when we talk about Islamophobia or hate crimes. There is nothing more to look at what has happened in Torre Pacheco. That is simply and plainly terrorism, because terrorism is to terrorize people for political purposes, and it has not acted as it should. All this threatens the principles of this great country. At the prosecution level we do not see that there is anything that is willing to stop this.
What margin leaves the legal route so that they can defend themselves? Have you planned legal actions to reverse the decision?
At the moment, nothing, because we do not receive subsidies or a single euro from anyone, that limits our access to a right such as legal advice, putting lawsuits and making demands. All that costs a lot of money, lawyers have to collect their fees and we cannot face, as a community, the exercise to the right to defense. We do not have economic means as they have other religious confessions. That is why we turn to the work of lawyers who offer to help, but we have no resources to face this.
In that sense, the situation of Muslims in Spain is dramatic. All confessions have the right to receive money from the rental box to maintain their infrastructure, but Muslims do not have; We are the most disadvantaged faith; Sociologically we are too, and now, politically, too. A planned persecution is being given and sometimes we feel very helpless.
Muslim faith in Spain is professed thanks to the workers who get up at 6 in the morning and return at 8 and pay their monthly fee to keep the temple.
Do you think it is necessary that Muslims in Spain have political representation?
At all. We do not want to mix politics and religion; Each Muslim citizen must have the ideology that seems best. But a representation, let's say more institutional, such as the Episcopal Conference, which has its structure, its budgets, its mechanisms … the phone you are calling me now I pay every month, it is my personal phone, and I represent more than five hundred Islamic communities throughout Spain. It is true that we do not want a political representation as such, but what is less that there is a phone to be able to call.
The same thing happens with the mosques! Many times they are spaces that a neighbor gives so that others can use them. Muslim faith in Spain is professed thanks to the workers who get up at 6 in the morning and return at 8 and pay their monthly fee to keep the temple.
Given this prohibition of Jumilla, and in the case of parties so, in quotes, mass, is your celebration impossible by not being able to use the public space?
Notice the one that has been mounted by requesting to use a sports center twice a year for forty -five minutes. We are talking about the two biggest parties in the Muslim world, no one could imagine that in a country of democratic rights such as this this kind of thing can occur.
And, in your opinion, what do you think distinguishes the aconfesionality of a country with religious exclusion? Where is the line between secularism and discrimination drawn?
Spain has a very good deconfesional model. When we travel abroad, we make congresses and talk out of here, we talk very well about this country because it enjoys a system that guarantees the religious freedom of its citizens. We consider that this form of state is better than secularism because people with a religious confession in general discriminate more, but this model was the one that gave credibility to Spain as a guarantor country of freedoms and as a model of coexistence between religions that has been giving from the time of Al Andalus.
The problem I think is not in the model, the parents of the Constitution knew how to do this approach very well, but now, suddenly, they want to change it. And this harms the image of Spain internationally, even The Guardian has published about it. Not only does Muslims harm us, huh? This harms us all as a society.
Have they contacted you from the Jumilla City Council? Is there any dialogue line? Because it has been the PP who has proposed the veto, not vox.
Not at all. Absolutely no one has contacted the community of Jumilla or the Spanish Islamic community. For me, Vox is like the PP but a little more radical, nothing more. Vox's birth was seen coming from the Aznar era where life was very difficult for the foreign citizen who came to contribute to this country. Patriotism is a concept that they want to sell and that has little to do with real patriotism, which is to get up early to go to work and pay taxes and do not cause problems.
Is social pedagogy failing with respect to Islam?
That is why I tell you that this context is a planned thing. The objective of all this, we do not make up, is to get votes for the extreme right. And if for this they have to criminalize an entire population, if they have to generate hatred, if they have to lie and make coexistence impossible, if they have to say that this is an “invasion”, they will do it. I've been living here and I have never felt fear here, but it is the first time I feel, that we feel all of us, persecuted. All for a handful of votes. At the expense of citizens' fear, at the expense of the image of Spain in the entire world and a coast of defrauding those who proposed in their day a stable model for Spain that guaranteed a series of rights that today want to disappear.
