Foreign Policy > Spain

The Reconquista Reversed

Demographic destiny and the shattered myth of Andalusian harmony.

Lars Møller | April 25, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Batalla de las Navas de Tolosa (Francisco de Paula Van Halen, 1864)

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whose wife has recently been charged with corruption, is having his way with the destiny of his homeland. A socialist and social engineer at heart, he reserves the right to legalize a civilian invasion by Muslims. 

So far, the Muslim population has swollen to an estimated 2.4 to 2.5 million souls—roughly 5% of the nation’s total—fueled overwhelmingly by immigration from North Africa, above all Morocco, which accounts for 65% of the Muslim immigrant cohort. These communities cluster with ominous symbolic precision in the ancient strongholds of al-Andalus: Andalusia and Granada alone shelter some 400,000 Muslims, while Madrid, that later-born capital, now harbors 100,000. Fertility differentials compound the shift; children born to at least one Muslim parent represented 11% of all Spanish births in 2024, a rate that mocks the anemic native birth figures.

From a historical perspective, this is no neutral migration. It is a slow-motion reversal of the Reconquista, a reconquest not by scimitar but by womb and ballot box. And yet polite discourse still clings to the saccharine fable of al-Andalus as a lost paradise of harmonious convivencia between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. That fable is a lie—a dangerous, ahistorical lie—and the gathering tensions in present-day Spain expose it as such. The impending conflict between post-Christian, secular Europeans and the resurgent Muslim Arab (and Arabized Berber) populations is not a fever dream of the far right; it is the inexorable consequence of incompatible civilizations colliding once more on the same soil.

The myth of al-Andalus must be dragged into the light and eviscerated. For centuries, European romantics and modern multiculturalists have peddled the image of a tolerant Islamic Iberia where Jews and Christians flourished under benevolent Moorish rule. This is historical malpractice of the highest order. From the Umayyad conquest in 711 until the final fall of Granada in 1492, non-Muslims existed as dhimmis—protected but explicitly subordinate subjects under the Pact of Umar and its variants. They paid the jizya, a humiliating poll tax that bought mere survival. Public display of their faith was curtailed; new........

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