Like most Sicilians, I was never taught the history of Muslim Sicily.

Hollywood films like True Romance have succeed in solidifying the vague belief that Sicilians have Arab or North African heritage. Like a game of telephone, this belief has been distorted and transformed into all types of folklore, often told to children by their parents and repeated to the next generation. At best, most Sicilians acknowledge that our cuisine, language, and even our appearance has trace elements of the Arab world. In Sicily, for commercial reasons, it became popular to promote our pistachios, sweets, couscous, citris, the markets of Palermo, and Arab-Norman architecture as remnants of this misunderstood history. Yet, we are not at fault for this lack of understanding of Sicily’s past. There is alarmingly little scholarship and few popular histories about Muslim Sicily. Much of the scholarship that does exist either glosses over several hundred years of history or refers to it in calamitous terms. Amongst these, there are only a handful of resources written by Sicilians and almost none of them written in English.

A lack of popular understanding of the history of Muslim Sicily has real consequences for Sicilians and the Sicilian diaspora. In the 2000s in America, I remember hearing Sicilian-Americans shout Islamophobic insults at Muslims in New York. The irony was that they too likely had some Arab and north African heritage. Efforts to minimize this history have been successful. Today, neo-fascists who promote a violent anti-immigrant agenda in Sicily, actively advance a narrative that Muslim Sicily was little more than an “Islamic invasion” or brief occupation. The following fact would likely undermine their entire political narrative:

For over 400 years, Sicily was ruled by or inhabited by a large Muslim and Arabic-speaking population.

Broadly speaking, this period roughly began in 827, when an army from Ifriqiya (modern day Tunisia along with parts of Algeria and Libya), landed in Byzantine Sicily, marking the start of the Aghlabid rule on the island. It continued under the Fatimid caliphate where Siquilliya became famous throughout the Muslim world. In the years after the Norman invasion in 1071, Sicily became a multicultural and multireligious kingdom where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in relative peace.

Up until the end of Norman rule in 1189, a majority of Sicilians were Muslim and spoke Arabic. Beginning in 1189 under Emperor Frederick II, violence against Sicilian Muslims by Latin immigrants from the Italian mainland increased. As a result, many Muslims fled major cities and formed an independent Islamic state in across in-land western Sicily. This rebellion was ultimately crushed and over the next two decades, Frederick II’s launched brutal campaigns of pogroms, forced conversions, and deportations of Muslim Sicilians to Lucera on the Italian mainland until 1245-6. The largely Sicilian Muslim settlement in Lucera where tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim Sicilians lived was ultimately destroyed in 1300.

The deportation and masacers of the Sicilian Muslims didn’t completely end Sicily’s Muslim and Arab culture. Arabic continued to be spoken for at least another century with written Arabic records dating upto the expulsion of Jews and any remaining Muslims in 1492 during the Spanish Inquisition.

Much of this history was obscured from the collective memory of the Sicilian people under successive rulers, including the Italian fascists in the 20th century. Given the today’s political and social challenges on the Island and in the Sicilian diaspora, there is an urgent need to illuminate our past. Siqilliya Mia will explore this history and celebrate this vibrant history. A history that has been erased, ignored, and re-written to suit various religious and political narratives.

To end this inaugural post, I will share a poem, Sicilia Mia, from Muslim Sicily’s premiere poet, Ibn Hamdis. The poem, written in exile, in many was inspired the creation of this blog. It is translated into English from its original Arabic:

Sicilia Mia / My Sicily

I remember Sicily, as agony stirs in my soul
all remembrances of her.

An abode for the pleasures of my youth that has been abandoned,
where once inhabited by the noblest of people.

For I have been vanished from Paradise,
and I [long to] tell you her story.

Were it not for the saltiness of tears
I would imagine my tears as her rivers.

I laughed at twenty years old out of youthful passion;
now at sixty I cry for her crimes.

ذكر صقلية . لابن حمديس الصقلي

ذكرت صـقـلـية والأسـى        ✵    يهيج للنـفـس تـذكـارهـا

ومنزلة للصبـا قـد خـلـت            ✵     وكان بنو الظرف عمـارهـا

فإن كنت أخرجت مـن جـنة     ✵   فإنـي أحـدث أخـبـارهـا

ولولا ملوحة مـاء الـبـكـاء       ✵  حسبت دموعي أنـهـارهـا

ضحكت ابن عشرين من صبوة    ✵    بكيت ابن سـتـين أوزارهـا