Is the party over for fiesta-loving Spain?

Noisy they may be, colourful they certainly are, and anyone who has lived in Spain for more than a few months cannot have missed the country’s vivacious, energetic fiestas.
Although they range from mildly bizarre to downright crazy at times, and Semana Santa is the ideal time to move to a remote country location for a week or to totally sound-proof your house, Spain without its fiestas would be like paella without the rice – a massive chunk of its basic essence missing and, in fact, near-impossible to imagine.
Given their centuries-old tradition and unquestioning participation by townspeople aged from a few days to over eighty years old, the future of the fiestas seems set in stone and it is hard to believe that anything could rock the their solid foundations.
Especially political correctness, which those of us originally from the UK thought we had left behind on the tarmac at Gatwick.
Yet last week, President of the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities (FEERI), Extremadura-born Félix Herrero, demanded that the hugely-popular Moors and Christians festival, celebrated in Aragón, Andalucía and all over eastern Spain, be scrapped.
He believes that a pageant commemorating the expulsion of the Arabs from the Peninsula by the Christians ‘has no place in today’s democratic Spain’.
He even went as far as to describe them as ‘cultural genocide’.
“How would the Spanish react if there was a fiesta celebrating the arrival of Franco’s troops, and the resulting punishment they meted out on the people?” Herrero commented.
Herrero, who is also the Islamic leader of La Unión mosque in Málaga, has called for the partying to stop ‘in the interests of harmonious coexistence’.
Yet it is clear even at first glance that Spain’s fiestas promote precisely that – harmonious coexistence. Citizens of all ages and walks of life rehearse together, parade together and finally eat and drink together until the early hours in marquées scattered around the towns - often in the middle of the road, yet few people would complain too loudly about traffic obstruction or the inability to park, accepting that the festivities simply represent a fundamental part of the town’s heritage and society.
Even those who have seen the same parades and acts year after year for decades continue to watch them avidly – not only those who were born in the locality but those who have come from other parts of Spain or from overseas to live there.
Later, though, Herrero partially retracted his request, saying that he only wanted to see the battles between the Moors and the Christians

abolished. The Imam admitted he had only seen the festival once, in Alcoi 30 years ago, and that it ‘did not seem offensive’.

Just a bit of fun?
Thankfully, the harmless nature of these enjoyable festivals is recognised by other members of Muslim society.
Leader of the Islamic Community of Alicante, Majed Kadem, does not consider the Moors and Christians fiesta an attack on either his religion or the Prophet Mohammed.
“It [the fiesta] is a product of a long historical tradition, which should be seen just as it is – a festival. We don’t see it as anything out of the ordinary.”
The president of the Islamic Commission of Spain. Malik Ruiz says he can see nothing wrong with the Moors and Christians, provided there are no elements of them that could be seen as provocative or cause widespread upset to the Islamic community.
To this end, he has called for the suppression of images or acts that might offend Muslims.
By ‘offensive acts’, Ruiz refers to Bocairent’s tradition of filling a papier mâché head depicting Mohammed with fireworks and letting them off, or Beneixama’s custom of destroying a three-metre-high effigy of him with rockets.
Both these Valencia province villages took such events off the programme this year, without any intervention from Islamic leaders.
“It just wasn’t necessar