The great debate about the colours of our flag and where they came from, which grew out of that other great debate on whether we should keep the George Cross or let it go, seems to be just another inanity driven by the sticky heat of the south wind. Yet it points to something more fundamental and with far-reaching effects: our general ignorance about our origins and our belief in the carefully-constructed myths that we were fed as “Maltese history”.

Because these myths have shaped our national identity, we are loath to let them go, or even to consider any facts that might undermine them. We mock historians, dismiss carefully-researched papers as rubbish, and march into battle bearing the standard of political and religious ideology rather than that of history.

So we cling lovingly to the story that “the Maltese” – whoever they were – have been Christian since the shipwreck of the apostle Paul. It is not enough for us to be Christian now; we have to have been Christian since the very beginnings of Christianity. We never stop to ask: “But how do we know that we have been Christian since AD61?” The answer is: we don’t, and we almost certainly haven’t been Christian since then.

There is no evidence that we have been, and a certain amount of evidence that indicates the contrary. Then, of course, there is that even bigger question of who “we” are, when the concept of Maltese nationhood is a fairly recent historical construct. Whoever those farmers were who pulled Paul and his captors out of the sea (if they did so at all), they certainly did not think of themselves as Maltese. To the shipwrecked, they were barbari – people who spoke neither Greek nor Latin, which seems rather curious given that the islands were supposed to have been under the hegemony of Rome, and tradition holds that the man who hosted him was some kind of official called Publius. But let’s move on from that.

Most of us think of our history, if we think of it at all, as a single continuum in which cheery and heroic people called “the Maltese and the Gozitans” plodded through their days, fighting off invaders and Islam, courageously tilling the fields, and bearing the standard of Christianity and Maltese nationhood to the present day. It is a childish notion that would be touching if it were not so annoying. It is the kind of thing that you would expect simple and uneducated people to believe, but not educated adults in a developed economy in the 21st century.

“Know thyself”, the oracle said, and the importance of this applies to whole peoples inasmuch as it does to individuals. Many of our problems are caused by our perverse refusal to know ourselves as a nation, preferring instead to perpetuate the folk-myths that we feed to our children as history, and to tourists as reality.

Think about it. The Maltese – let us call them the people of the place – cannot possibly have been Christian for 2,000 years. The islands underwent massive population changes in the 1,500 years after Paul’s shipwreck, the location of which is contested in any case. Historians suggest that Malta and Gozo may have been depopulated for some time, to be repopulated by Sicilian people of Tunisian origin, who spoke Arabic and practised Islam.

Because this discourse takes place in the realms of academia, and not in the popular press, two parallel “realities” have developed. There is the popular “reality” in which the general public repeats the myths that were created by priest-politicians in the last 200 years, and feeds them to tourists. Then there is the academic “reality” in which the historians and linguists whose business it is to research these matters lay out the evidence before each other and discuss it within their own private enclosure.

You can’t blame them for doing this. It is virtually impossible to engage in discussion with people who have been brainwashed with myths since kindergarten, and whose entire sense of self and of nationhood is rooted in those fantastical stories. It is easier to keep one’s mouth shut and one’s head down, and to keep the debate going in the rooms around the university campus than it is to try and convert the population to the novel concept of rational thought.

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The Normans did not expel the Muslims from Sicily, something that would have been very difficult given that they were the people of the place and not aliens. Instead, they did what the British went on to do in Malta and elsewhere throughout their empire: they allowed the locals (in this case, the Siculo-Arab Muslims) to practice their religion and they integrated them into the system of administration and power, thereby securing at a stroke their loyalty and the best of their talents.

If the Norman Court at Palermo was teeming with Siculo-Arab Muslim philosophers, geographers, historians, merchants and others who would today be described as “consultants”, then a silent cough must greet the suggestion that those same Normans charged heroically into Malta and “expelled the Muslim invaders” to cheers from the “Christian Maltese” as the folk-tales would have it.

The people who believe the myths think of the situation in the Maltese islands in the 11th century as being something like that of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the Maltese – who by now had a clear sense of distinct nationhood indelibly linked to Catholicism – carried on with their daily lives under the colonial yoke of the British Protestants, waiting for Dom Mintoff to come along and liberate them. The obvious does not occur to those who believe the myths: that it was the people of the place – those who are anachronistically called “the Maltese” – who were Muslim. So who were the Christians liberated during the Norman raid? Well, Goffredo Malaterra, a member of the Norman entourage who wrote the only known contemporary account of the event, is pretty clear about that: they were the slaves of the people of Malta, and when they were liberated from

slavery by the arrival of an invading force of fellow Christians, they were loaded onto the next ship out of the island to start the long journey back home, wherever home was. The people of the place – the Muslims of Malta – stayed where they were, just as they stayed on in Sicily throughout Norman rule, presumably doing their own housework or buying more slaves instead.

* * *

We speak a language that is the result of a small cluster of Arabic-speakers being cut off from the rest of the Arab world and exposed instead to French, Italian and English influences over many centuries. We have transposed Muslim religious idiom directly into Christianity, rather than using Christian terms, which might indicate conversion from Islam. The name of Christ is conspicuously absent from the name we use for the festival that marks his birth. Instead, we use the name of the minor Islamic festival which commemorates the birth of the prophet Mohammed: milied. We call our period of religious fasting by a corruption of the religious term for the period of fasting in Islam, Ramadan, and our name for the feast that marks its end is identical, eid (though it is written like that in neither language, but rendered that way for those who read no Maltese or Arabic). Our God is Allah, our heaven is genna, Satan is a xitan, – all Islamic – but the novel concepts of angels and a hell for nasty sinners, introduced by Christianity, are angli and infern, from the Italian. If we were police inspectors we would be sacked for failing to read the glaring clues.

If we think about ourselves and our origins a little bit more than we do now, instead of merely swallowing the pap that is spoon-fed to us in primary school and failing to move on intellectually, then we might find that our real history is a great deal more fascinating than those boring old tales about descent from the Phoenicians and conversion by the Apostle Paul (he wasn’t yet a saint), after which we were happy farmers for 1,700 years, until we became happy merchants and dockyard workers. Maybe we don’t want to think at all, because we would be forced to address certain aspects of our identity and to throw away the collection of folk-tales and 19th-century political spin that we call Maltese history.