Muslims Demand Right to Return to Spain

Following the recent approval of a law that would grant Spanish citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, a number of Muslim groups are now demanding similar grace for potentially millions of descendants of Muslims who were expelled from Spain during the Middle Ages.

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In the interest of equality, the Muslim supporters say that they are entitled to the same rights and privileges as Jews because both groups were expelled from Spain under similar historical circumstances.

However, historians state that the Jews were in Spain before the Christians, and so their expulsion was on the grounds of bigotry, whereas the Muslims in Spain were colonial occupiers who called the territory Al-Andalus and imposed Arabic as the official language, and so their expulsion was a matter of decolonization.