‘Frak mill-istorja – ħarsa minn taħt’ includes snippets about:

– the vegetable soup that helped solve a deep political crisis;

– the hermit who fled to Comino after the Pope gave instructions for him to be burned alive as a heretic;

–  the monsignor who wanted Maltese to be written in Arabic script;

– the donkey on which Christ rode into Jerusalem walked on the Mediterranean Sea and passed through Malta on its way to Verona;

– how on Christmas Eve, 1953, the Governor called at the residence of the Maltese Prime Minister and upon not finding him at home left a short note saying that on the following morning he would broadcast a message of Christmas greetings to the people of Malta and would “incidentally” inform them that Malta was going to become NATO headquarters for the Mediterranean.

We all have our preferred narratives of who we are. We do not hesitate to ignore real facts and to create our history in our image. Benedict Andersen defines the nation as “an imagined political community”. Godfrey Wettinger spent his whole life digging up real facts that were not easily accepted, if at all, by those who preferred their narrative of   a linear unbroken story of a community of Catholics from the time St Paul “converted” us in 60 AD till today.

Analysing ‘Arabo-Berber influences in Malta – onomastic evidence’ (1972) Wettinger observes:  “The expulsion of the Muslims in the 13th century, and that of the Jews in the 15th, brought about the final rupturing of the powerful cultural ties which had bound Malta to the North African Arabo-Berber world ever since 870 A.D. Since then — except for the largely unacknowledged contact, mainly among the lower classes, by emigration, trade or slavery — the dominant cultural driving force in Malta has come from Sicily, Italy,  South Europe in general and, latterly, from the whole English-speaking world. In fact, few nowadays are even remotely aware of Malta’s Arabo-Berber past still lurking in some of the less obvious parts of the island’s cultural heritage.”

Reflecting on the ‘Arab heritage in Malta’, Khalid Baheyeldin (29 January 2017) reached the same conclusion: “Although the facts are there, some Maltese … go out of their way to affirm that the Maltese are European and Christian, and have nothing to do with Arabs… This attempt to dissociate the Maltese from Arab influence is similar to the phobia in Iberia in the 1500s and afterwards, from anything to do with Moors and Islam, be it dress, language, customs, taking a bath, circumcision, … This is an all too common phenomenon where people would like to stop history at a certain point for their own bias and ignore all other eras in history, religion, language  and culture.”

In ‘Frak mill-istorja – ħarsa minn taħt’, I try not to ignore any era in our history and base my snippets on the facts that I discover. I offer 80 crumbs that fall from the abundance of 8500 years of human history on these islands. I take a look at them from below, through the eyes of the underdogs.

Teacher, no students?

I suggest that our national identity is inevitably dynamic and made up of a multitude of  identities forged in the fire of the Mediterranean.

I try to narrate this complex social reality through accounts of  people of flesh and blood who are similar to us but also very different. Through these fragments I hint at the deeper forces that have shaped our lives and continue to shape them in changing circumstances. I try to explain how the real world worked, hoping that this helps us understand how the real world continues to work today.

The invasions and occupations we endured formed part of  the wars for the strategic control of the Mediterranean. We have woven a historical narrative for the last 459 years as a nation caught in the crossfire between Christianity and Islam. We have blanked out from our historical memory the unholy wars fought over us between Christian powers competing for power and trade advantages in the Mediterranean.

 Our invaders and occupiers, irrespective of where they came from, were here to use us primarily for their military strategic ends. Any collateral benefits were secondary. While building ourselves from within, we have also been formed by our encounters and clashes with other people and by the fights over us of other people.

Arab rule gave us our Maltese language that saved us from being swallowed up by those who dominated us in the last 1000 years. The Order of St John set us on the road to statehood and sovereignty because it had to build its own administrative, political, economic and military infrastructure in Malta itself. We were able to build on our semitic identity because the Order of St John allowed us to use our language unlike the Andalusians after the Arabs were expelled, who were prohibited from speaking a variant of Arabic and were forced to speak Spanish. With the introduction of a world language like English we were not swallowed up by Italian. At the same time ‘Italianitá’ in Malta saved us from becoming a little Britain while the British Empire supported the introduction of Maltese as an official language to weaken Italian influence. Those who colonized us and wanted us to be a poor imitation of themselves, ended up, paradoxically helping us to become ourselves. If we were to compress 8500 years of our history into 24 hours, we have been sovereign for the last 10 minutes. They have been the best time for us. We forget that at our peril. In today’s multipolar world, instead of being dominated by any great power, we should build good relations woth as many different powers and countries as possible.

While soberly aware  that Antonio Gramsci says: “History is a teacher. But it has no students.” I still, hope that ‘Frak mill-istorja’ will be of some use to those who want to learn from history.

Times 5 December 2025