It was the weekend, finally. After wrapping up my lecture, I stood by the podium, smiled at my students and said warmly, “Have a nice weekend.” I meant it. I was determined to give myself a break too. No books, no writing, and definitely no thinking about the world’s endless contradictions. I deserved peace.
I stepped out of the classroom with the lazy satisfaction of someone about to hit pause on the chaos. My eyes scanned the parking lot where my car stood waiting, like a loyal companion promising a silent ride home and an evening of stillness. Just as I was about to head out, I turned left and there it was. The college library.
A silent voice whispered within me, “You still have around 30 minutes to log out for the day. Why don’t you just take a round in the library?” I paused. That familiar inner dialogue started, the weekend mood resisting. But the voice won. I stepped into the sanctuary of books, that quiet place where time dilutes and thought sharpens.
“What to read now?” I whispered under my breath. I avoided the textbook aisles and instead wandered into the lesser-explored shelves. That’s when I saw it. A title that stopped me, Blood and Faith by Matthew Carr. The cover had weight, the kind that hinted at hidden histories and uncomfortable truths. I pulled it off the shelf and took a seat.
I turned the first pages. The book opened with the brutal expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in the early 1600s, Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Christianity but were never truly accepted. “The campaign to eliminate the Moriscos was a form of religious and racial cleansing before those terms even existed,” Carr wrote. His words struck like echoes from a past that refused to stay buried.
I leaned back, the sounds of the world fading as I dived deeper. The narrative wove together the paranoia of religious purity, the intersection of race and faith, and the myth of national unity built on exclusion. Blood and Faith wasn’t just a historical account, it was a mirror.
Suddenly, I felt a chill not from the air conditioning, but from the recognition. History wasn’t over. It had only changed costumes.
I thought of Palestine and Israel, of India and Pakistan, of the ethnic tensions across Europe, and of displaced souls drowning in the Mediterranean still caught between “blood” and “faith.” We still ask the same question today: Who belongs? Who doesn't? Who has the right to believe? And who must bleed for their belief?
At that moment, a fictional conversation formed in my mind. A young student, Amal, sat across from an elder historian in exile.
Amal: “Why does history always repeat itself?”
Historian: “Because we never learn to read it. We glance at it like a museum display, not realising we’re standing in the same exhibit.”
Amal: “But all they had to do was let people believe in peace.”
Historian: “And yet belief terrifies the powerful more than war ever will. Belief unites, war divides. That’s why blood is spilled in the name of faith.”
Carr writes, “The ghosts of Spain’s past have not been laid to rest they continue to haunt modern debates about migration, identity, and multiculturalism.” That statement stayed with me.
Today, debates over faith are used to shape border policies. Citizens are asked to prove their loyalty, not through civic behaviour, but through cultural conformity. Those who are “other” are still treated as threats, just as the Moriscos were.
As I closed the book, I realised the weekend had already started, but not the way I planned. I hadn’t escaped the world. I had entered it more deeply. Blood and Faith didn’t ruin my weekend, it gave it meaning.
Before I left the library, I scribbled a thought in my notebook: “To understand the world is not to escape from it. It is to carry its weight with clarity.”
I walked out of the library, not with silence, but with purpose. Faith, blood, and history are not abstract concepts. They are living with truths. They surround us in the stories we silence, the people we exclude, and the borders we defend. And perhaps, in quiet corners of libraries and minds, there is still space to question them.
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