The Crescent and the Dagger: Representations of the Moorish Other during the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The figure of the Moor has long been central to the Spanish collective imagination. From the Reconquista to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial campaigns in Morocco, maurophilial and maurophobic representations of the Moor have circulated in Spanish culture. During the Spanish Civil War, the figure of the Moor was revived when the Nationalist insurgents employed native Moroccan troops in their fight against Spanish Republicans. This article examines different forms of Republican and Nationalist discourse on the Moorish Other and the relationship between self-representations of Spanish identity and representations of the Moor. It argues that discourse on the Moorish Other did not primarily serve the purpose of representing the Moroccan soldier, but rather of representing conflicting visions of the Spanish nation. Nationalist representations of the Moor served as a mirror for the Nationalists, reflecting and affirming their self-imagined identity as a strong militaristic nation with an imperial destiny, while Republican representations served as a window through which Republicans witnessed, and set themselves apart from, the betrayal and brutality of the Nationalists.