EnglishIsWesternCivilizationUniversalPage25

24 When Muslim power in Spain was supreme, Christian Spaniards readily adopted the Arabic language and the dress and mode of life characteristic of the Moors even when they remained steadfast in the Christian faith. When that power declined and the Christian monarchs gained ascendency, the process was reversed, as Ibn Khaldun himself witnessed and described. Like the westernized Muslims of today, those Spanish Muslims of Ibn Khaldun’s time who imitated the Christians must have considered this the fashionable and smart thing to do. But what was the ultimate fate of those Muslims (along with the Jews) who sought entry into the orbit of European civilization? Torquemada’s instructions to the Inquisition have shown us that the tribunal gave the first encouragement to Limpieza by excluding from all public office anyone condemned for Jewish or Islamic practices. Individual authorities quickly extended this disability to any member of the family of those condemned. Soon public bodies everywhere began to exclude any convert, even those who had no quarrel with the Inquisition. It is at this

stage that Limpieza ceases to be a defensive mechanism against heresy and becomes openly racist. Since the statutes clearly discriminated against orthodox Catholics simply because of their ancestry, the use of the word “racism” is inescapable. With the success of the statutes, it soon became necessary, when seeking public employment, to prove that one was not descended from any but “Old Christians.”

In theory the Inquisition listed the sins of the fathers only up to the second generation and this was supported by the Church canon law. But the zeal of limpieza did not stop at this limitation. If it could be proved that an ancestor had either been made to do penance by the Inquisition or was a Moor or a Jew, then his descendants were condemned as “impure” blood and correspondingly disabled from any public office. Therefore it was a supreme necessity for all applicants to public positions to draw up detailed genealogies to prove the “purity” of their lineage. By the end of the 16th century,