Rodolfo Gil Benumeya

Rodolfo Gil Benumeya (Andújar, Jaén, June 5, 1901 – Madrid, March 31, 1975), also called Rodolfo Gil Torres-Benumeya, was a Spanish journalist, essayist, historian and Arabist.

Biography

He was the son of the writer and senator Rodolfo Gil Fernández, and on his mother's side, a member of a Granada family of Moorish origin, descendant of Abd Allah Ibn Umayya or Luis de Córdoba y Válor, brother of the Moorish caudillo Abén Humeya.

He studied at the Alfonso XII School in El Escorial (Madrid) and graduated in philosophy and letters at the University of Madrid (currently Complutense), where he was a student of the Arabists Julián Ribera and Miguel Asín Palacios. He expanded his studies in Algeria, Paris and Tunisia, dedicating himself to research on Andalusian history.

In 1925 he was sent to Morocco by General Primo de Rivera, to direct a Spanish press organ. Since then he has been linked to the institutions of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco. He was a professor of Spanish-Muslim art and Moroccan history at the Center for Moroccan Studies in Tetouan, and later at what would be the first Moroccan secondary school, the Instituto Libre de Tetouan, directed by the nationalist leader Abdelkhalek Torres. He was also Deputy Secretary General of the Universal House of Sephardim, chaired by Ángel Pulido (1926-1932) and a member of the editorial staff of the publications Revista de Tropas Coloniales and Revista de la Raza , among others. He collaborated in La Gaceta Literaria . In 1930 he married Emilia Grimau, sister of the future PCE leader Julián Grimau, with whom he had a son. Between 1933 and 1934 he was part of the editorial staff of the magazine Maghreb, published in Paris by a group of young nationalist intellectuals from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and in those same years he was vice-secretary of the official institution Hogar Arab or Hispano-Islamic Association.

In 1936 he was sent to Cairo on a cultural mission. Between 1938 and 1940 he was a professor of Spanish studies at the Moroccan Students Residence in Cairo, as well as a collaborator at the University of Al-Azhar. The capital of Egypt was then a meeting point for exiles from various Arab countries, and Rodolfo Gil Benumeya had the opportunity to meet people such as Shakib Arslan or Abdelkrim al-Jattabi, leader of the Rif uprising in the 1920s. In 1940 he was appointed reader of Spanish and Arabic in Algiers, and in 1942 he settled permanently in Madrid, where he developed his professional activity as a member of the International Politics section of the Institute of Political Studies, collaborator of the Diplomatic Information Office of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as as a collaborator of the magazines Arbor and África of the CSIC and of the news programs of Radio Nacional de España.

He maintained close ties with Morocco and Egypt, countries where he carried out missions on several occasions. Since 1962 he worked in the Press Office of the embassy of the United Arab Republic (when Egypt had that denomination during its union with Syria) in Madrid and in 1966 he received the decoration of the Order of the Republic of the RAU. In 1970 he received the Spanish decoration of Commander of the Order of Africa.

He died of sudden causes in Madrid in 1975.

The Andalusian ideal

Rodolfo Gil Benumeya was an Andalusian nationalist. In his conception of the Andalusian nation, the vindication of the Andalusian legacy and the memory of the Moors expelled in the XVII century occupied a place of first order . These had mainly settled in Morocco, where a large part of their descendants still claimed their memory, and for Gil Benumeya they were the greatest exponent of the historical and cultural links that united both shores of the Strait of Gibraltar, which he considered as a whole from the geographical and historical point of view, artificially separated after the disappearance of Al-Andalus:

It is absolutely impossible to establish an absolute difference between the two words: Spain and Morocco; to mark a line of separation without all the intermediate nuances: Moroccan and Moroccan abomination Spaniards; Moroccans who have Spanish nationality or protection; the so-called Spanish renegades founded in the Moroccan mass by a singular racial aavism; African moros named García, Carrasco, Molina

This way of thinking led him to move in an intermediate position between collaboration with the institutions of Spanish colonialism in Morocco (which had momentarily made the union of both shores effective) and his sympathy for Moroccan nationalism. In a letter to the nationalist leader Ahmed Balafrej dated July 7, 1933, he said:

I'm not Moroccan, but I'm Muslim. [...] I am mainly Andalusian, [...] and I work for Spain because my country is currently part of it, in the hope of making it reborn the Arab Spain.

In the 50s he was part of the small group of Spanish intellectuals who, by way of lobbying, supported the nationalist demands that were taking place in the north of Morocco, and who were at the same time critical of European colonization and with the desire for hegemony of the nationalists of the south, even going so far as to design an independence or federalism plan for the area of the Spanish Protectorate.

His militant Moorishness greatly influenced the main figure of Andalusian nationalism, Blas Infante, who endorsed the idea that the fate of Andalusia was linked to that of the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar:

More than a million of our brothers, of Andalusians who were driven out of their land—the causes of the peoples never prescribe—have spread from Tangier to Damascus, as one of our most hard-working paladins, the infatigable and cult Gil Benumeya reported a year ago. The remembrance of the Homeland [...] far from being wiped out, is revived every day. They constitute, with the recognition of the fraternal peoples, who keep them in their hospitality, the elite of the blood and spirit of those countries. I have lived with them, I have suffered with them, I have aspired with them the hope of our common redemption because this redemption will be common or will never be.

Gil Benumeya escaped the repression unleashed against Andalusian nationalism as a result of the Spanish Civil War because it surprised him in Cairo. After the contest, he tried to defend the essentials of his ideas within the margins allowed by the Francisco Franco regime.

On many occasions, the name of this author is confused with that of his son Rodolfo Gil Grimau, also a writer and Arabist, who signed some of his works as Rodolfo Gil Benumeya Grimau.

Main works of the author

• Spanish Cartilla in Morocco (1925)
• Mediodía: Introduction to Andalusian History (1929)
• Andalusian Morocco (1942)
• Tangier for the Jalifa. Graphic report of Nicolás Muller (1944)
• Moroccan prints: Cien photographs by Nicolás Muller (1945)
• Relations and links of the Catholic Church with the Arab world (1947)
• The modern tendencies of Islam in a book by Professor H.A.R. Gibb (1950)
• Political parties in Egypt (1950)
• History of Arab Policy (1951)
• Hispanity and arabity (1952)
• Panorama of the Arab world (1952)
• Andalucismo African (1953)
• Spain Tingitana (1955)
• Spain and the Arab world (1955)
• Spain within the Arab (1964)
• Osio, bishop of Córdoba (1964)
• Claroscuro Andaluz (1966)
• Neither East, nor West: the Universe seen from the Albayzin [s.a.] (reissued in 1996)