The Future of al-Andalus

[Aomar Boum]: Hi everyone, my name is Aomar Boum. I am an associate professor in anthropology and NELC. It gives me a great pleasure to introduce our speaker today. First of all, thank you for coming such a busy time at the end of the quarter but I'm really really honored to have and happy to have a speaker for the day Eric Calderwood with us today. If you he's definitely one of the I would argue as a North African also interested in Muslim Spain is probably one I would say one of the academic forces that drive in conversations about Muslim Spain and North Africa today from reinterpreting that history and I think if you haven't read his work, I would really advise you to look especially at his book on colonial al-Andalus. But Eric is an associate professor in the program in comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the program in Medieval Studies, the unit for criticism and interpretive theory, and the program in Jewish culture and society. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011. His research explores the political uses of past in modern Mediterranean culture with a particular emphasis on Spanish and North African literature and film. His book Colonial al-Andalus, it's a I would say it's little at it's a great book it's really an excellent book. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture was published by Harvard University in 2018 and just recently won the 2019 Carl Brown Ames book prize in North African Studies and received honorable mention for the Nicky Kelly Book Award for the Middle Eastern Studies Association. He's published in many articles, in many academic journals. I won't go in I don't have enough time to list them but all of them relate to his work on Muslim Spain and North Africa, mostly northern Morocco. He has contributed essays and commentary to such venues as NPR the BBC foreign policy and today he's gonna be talking about the future of al-Andalus so please join me in welcoming Eric.

(audience applause)

[Eric Calderwood]: Let's see if I can manage to do this without losing all of my papers.

(audience laughs)

Hi everyone. Thank You Omar for that really lovely introduction and thanks so much to all of you for coming. I know even though it doesn't look like it outside I left snow in Illinois yesterday and so this doesn't look like December to me but I do know that the calendar says it is which means it's a very busy time of the year. I appreciate you guys making time to come out. I want to thank our sponsors the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for sponsoring this event. It's a real thrill and an honor to be here and to have this chance to share my work with you. So I'm going to start today by talking about a story that some of you might remember. In 2010, a controversy erupted over plans to build an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan about two blocks away from the site of the 9/11 attacks. Opponents dubbed this controversial Center the Ground Zero mosque but the Muslim cleric behind the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, called the center Cordoba House. The name he wrote referred to the Cordoba Caliphate in what is now Spain, during which Jews Christians and Muslims lived in what was then the most enlightened, pluralistic, and tolerant society on earth. Let's see if I can raise my papers here. So those of you who are familiar with Iberian history will know that Imam Feisal is referring here to the Umayyad Caliphate of 10th century Cordoba. This is one of the pinnacles of eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula and in particular he's drawing upon of a very specific idea about Cordoba. He's drawing upon the widespread perception that Cordoba was a place of exceptional tolerance where the three Abrahamic faiths coexisted peacefully. Today at a time of increasing anxiety about the place of Islam in the United States and in Europe, Cordoba has become a comforting symbol of a past and perhaps a future in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews could live together peacefully. Now this idea that Imam Feisal is working with - Cordoba's symbolic association with the ideal of tolerance - it's just one of many competing ideas that circulate today about medieval Muslim Iberia, known in Arabic as al-Andalus, which is the term I'll be using from now on. In contemporary culture, the memory of al-Andalus is like a Swiss Army knife, a kind of very kit of tools ready to address any problem or question. Al-andalus is the name of a major shopping mall in Saudi Arabia, a publishing house in Israel, and a cinema in the West Bank. Al-Andalus is a hallmark of Moroccan national identity and a major driver of tourism to Spain. Al-andalus, as I've said, is a symbol of intercultural coexistence and at the same time it's also a rallying cry for right-wing groups opposed to the arrival of Muslim immigrants in Europe. In short, al-Andalus is proven incredibly malleable and useful for politicians, writers, scholars, and artists all around the world. The past several years, I've been thinking about this about the cultural afterlife of al-Andalus, an afterlife that cuts across traversing national, religious, and linguistic borders. And along the way, my interest in the modern legacy of al-Andalus has taken the form of two books. The first one Aomar mentioned, Colonial al-Andalus was published last year by Harvard University Press. That book uncovered what I found to be a surprising story of collaboration between Spanish colonialism, Spanish fascism, and Moroccan anti-colonial nationalism. These strange bedfellows, which we shouldn't think go together easily, they came together in 20th century Morocco to celebrate Spain and Morocco's shared Andalusi heritage and to help make al-Andalus a hallmark of Moroccan national identity. So one of the paradoxes that lies at the center of that book is that the legacy of al-Andalus served both to justify Spanish colonialism in in Morocco and to define the Moroccan national culture that would eventually supplant colonial rule. So in other words al-Andalus was both a tool of colonialism and also a symbol of Moroccan nationalism and anti-colonial resistance. My book dwells on this paradox, and more broadly, it tries to show that many of the ideas that we have today about al-Andalus are in fact not medieval legacies but are instead products of the colonial encounter between Europe and North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. I'd be happy to address any questions that you might have about that book in the Q&A. Today, though, I'm going to be presenting some new work. I'm going to be focusing on my current book project which is tentatively titled The Future of al-Andalus. This project and I'm not going to talk right now about this image but I'm happy to come back to it that for those who don't read Arabic it's it's called Cordoba station it's like a Manhattan station and it's by the interesting artists I talk about in the book. So this project explores representations of al-Andalus in contemporary literature, film, television, music, and tourism from contexts spanning Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Palestine, and the United States. The book's premise is pretty simple it's that contemporary claims about al-Andalus generally tell us more about our current moment than they do about the medieval past but more broadly with this project I'm trying to challenge a tradition of scholarship that has treated al-Andalus as a symbol of tolerance, as a symbol of cross-cultural understanding, while at the same time generally ignoring the voices of contemporary Arab and Muslim artists and scholars who are talking about al-Andalus. I'm also aiming to ask larger questions about the political uses of history such as: Why and how do some historical moments like al-Andalus become useful and usable in different cultural contexts? How does the past travel across time? Can anachronism be benign or perhaps even desirable? These are some of the questions that are driving the book. Ultimately what I'm arguing is that I believe that the story of al-Andalus is in fact not about learning to tolerate difference but rather about learning to tolerate contradiction. Al-Andalus means many different things to many different people and for us I think the ethical challenge is to keep all of these disparate meanings in mind without having one trump the others. So there's an element of kind of multi-directionality here to site my friend Michael. In this sense, al-Andalus is not, my view in my view, a blueprint for interfaith tolerance but rather an invitation to a mode of cultural memory that is capacious enough to accommodate and even welcome competing claims on the past. Before I turn to a few specific examples from that project, I'd like to say something about its title The Future of al-Andalus. The original title for this project was actually The Invention of al-Andalus, and in fact, some of you who know my work might have read an article with that title. Over time, though, I've become dissatisfied with it and one of the main reasons is how the title lands. As I've had the opportunity to present this work to a variety of different audiences, I've noticed that the word invention leads some people to assume that I'm making a sort of true or false claim - something along the lines of you know, "Al-Andalus is fake, you've all been duped." That's that's that's not really what I meant by invention but nonetheless I don't I don't want to introduce the term the project with the term that puts readers in a defensive posture. More importantly, I wanted to find a title that would help me to address what I see as a pretty common misconception in the scholarship on the modern afterlife of al-Andalus. Much of the work on this topic I think leaves one with the impression that talking about al-Andalus today is always a nostalgic backward-looking enterprise. In contrast, at the heart of my project, is the conviction that contemporary avocations of al-Andalus are not just nostalgic glances toward the past but are also vehicles for intervening in the present and even for imagining the future. In the cultural text that I discussed in the book there are of course moments of nostalgia for of looking back at al-Andalus. But there's also, just as importantly, something that I would call an Andalus futurism or perhaps an a Janice-faced Andalus, with its feet planted in the present one eye in the past and another eye on the future. So I'm going to come back to this issue of the complex temporality of al-Andalus toward the end of the talk. Now, though, I'd like to turn to some specific examples from my project and I'll talk the first book that I wrote about The Afterlife of al-Andalus is really it's an historical argument in the sense it's about change over time. What I'm arguing in the book is that the ways that Moroccans wrote about, talked about, and understood their relationship to al-Andalus changed as a result of European colonialism. This new project, the one I'm talking about today, doesn't really have that same historical arc. Instead it's organized thematically and in each chapter I try to identify a specific cultural or political project that is appropriated with the memory of al-Andalus, trace its genealogy, and talk about its politics. So in the book's introduction, that's kind of where I address the thing that most people already know about al-Andalus so hopefully I still have some new things to say about it this idea that al-Andalus is a place of tolerance. Where there's that idea come from? What are some of its surprising roots? How does it trace us back to some some moments that we might feel really proud to be associated with and other moments that are a little bit more tricky, like fascism and colonialism? But in the remaining chapters I kind of take a turn away from this "al-Andalus's tolerance paradigm" and I try to talk about lesser known uses of al-Andalus. Things like how al-Andalus has been used to talk about ethnicity, gender, feminism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, immigration, and so on. In the book, there's kind of chapters for each of those different projects but much of the remaining material for today's talk is going to come from my chapter which is the first chapter of the book called the Arab al-Andalus. This is kind of the most long-lasting historical imaginary that the book looks looks at it's actually it has a longer historical reach than the al-Andalus's tolerance story and I'm going to say say a bit more about what I mean by the Arab al-Andalus and at the very end of the talk I'm going to discuss one quick example from the Palestinian al-Andalus to talk about how al-Andalus operates in the context of Israel Palestine. So as a transition to this next section of my talk I'd like to show you a clip of a performance from the 1960s. Fingers crossed for those of you who are here. There may or might not be a performance from the 1960s otherwise I will try to sing it but the forms in question and this is why you want to hear it is in fact not for me but is by the Lebanese superstar ... , arguably the most famous or one of the most famous Arab singers of the 20th century. And the thing I'm about to show you, it's a clip from a performance that took place that ... gave in Kuwait in 1966 and that performance took place at none other than cinema al-Andalus which was the name of Kuwait's premiere movie house and concert venue. So let's take a look at how that performance began so once again this is ... Kuwait 1966 cinema al-Andalus. Let there be sound.

(clip plays on presentation screen)

Okay well we got we got sound we didn't get image we're back here that's okay. I'm actually only going to talk about the sound for this clip, the next the next clip has more interesting visuals so hopefully hopefully we can get them both at that point. I just want to briefly describe I was gonna say what we saw but what we heard because actually it luckily this I was mostly going to talk about what we heard so this is the very beginning of the concert, okay. We imagined ourselves from Kuwait 1966, lights go down, orchestra strikes up a tremolo, and all of a sudden this voice from offstage recites these two lines of poetry, "May the rain cloud shower you when the rain cloud pours," this is what he was saying, "Oh time of union in al-Andalus ... Union with you was but a dream in slumber or the deception of a deceiver." Does anyone recognize this poem? I don't know if any any al-Andalus fans out there, ok well, it's actually it's a really famous poem from al-Andalus by ... He's a poet from 14th century Muslim Granada and this particular poem which is one of the most famous from al-Andalus enjoyed a revival in the 1960s precisely because ... set it to music and performed it on her album titled Andalusia whose title roughly translates as songs from al-Andalus. This was one of her biggest hits, it was released in 1966 and the ... poem from the 14th century from 14th century Grenada was gave the lyrics to its most famous track. So the same year that she released this album, she went on a tour that tour included her first-ever concert in Kuwait and I'm doing some research on that concert right now and at the end we already saw that that concert began with this kind of disembodied voice reading this poem from the time of al-Andalus yearning for this time of union with al-Andalus and ... then comes back to that poem at the end of the first act and kind of brings the house down by performing her famous rendition of ... poem. So let's look at that part of the performance, hopefully with both lyrics and sound so you can see what what what this performance of al-Andalus look like. Um uh oh hold on they're already going. Try this again. My apologies for technical difficulties.

(clip plays on presentation screen)

That's okay I can I can do with that. The uh, well. Do you want you want to try it with full screen mode? Okay so we are seeing these dancers in dancing in what is supposed to be the medieval marketplace of Cordova. This entire operation I think would be more impressive if you could actually see it see this music performance with it but maybe we can we can get that up at some point in the Q&A. What what I like about this clip is so this is the end of the concert first act and basically how it ends is the male members in the chorus shout out, "Oh time of Union in al-Andalus." The female members of the chorus shout out, "Oh time of Union in al-Andalus." ... chimes in, "Oh time of Union in Al Andalus," and then they all step forward throwing their fists up into the air and they shout, "In al-Andalus! In Andalusi," and the crowd just goes absolutely wild. So I want it I wanted to show you a little bit of the ways in which kind of performance of al-Andalus operates in popular culture in this context of 1966 Kuwait. Hopefully we can come back and find this archival clip again but I do I kind of want to stop and see if I can draw attention to the intricate web of references that underpin this scene. So we have ... who is if you don't know a Lebanese Christian performer singing a poem by ... a Muslim poet from 14th century Granada in cinema al-Andalus, a Kuwaiti venue named after a place that is on the other side of the Mediterranean and a time that predated the creation of the modern state of Kuwait by several centuries. So my question is like: What what is what is making this stick? What system of memory and meaning makes it possible for all of these different threads to cohere into an intelligible web? It's clearly not a system based on geographic or temporal proximity, we're in Kuwait in 1966, nor is it one based on nation-state identification or religious affiliation. We have Christians and Muslims, we have Kuwaitis and Lebanese, ... has this multi-national orchestra. Instead it seems to me that what's at work here is a system of meaning that's made possible by the notion of Arabness, and by Arabness I mean an identity that's rooted in a common language and in the perception of a common ethnic and cultural heritage - a heritage that encompasses Arabs of different faiths so ... and her Muslim majority audience here as well as Arabs in different contexts everywhere from medieval Granada to the modern Gulf states. So as it turns out this this notion of al-Andalus functioning on the hinge of Arabness - this performance that we're seeing by ... - it participates in a long tradition of cultural commemoration, a tradition that traces its roots back to the time of al-Andalus itself. Since the medieval period, roughly the 8th century until the present, many Arab writers and artists have cast al-Andalus as an Arab- an Arabic phenomenon rather than a Muslim one. What I mean is that they've identified al-Andalus predominantly in ethnic and linguistic terms rather than in religious ones. This particular view of Andalusi history champions the period in which the Umayyads, an Arab dynasty that originated in Damascus, ruled al-Andalus with Cordoba as their capital. The Arab-centric view of al-Andalus it emerged in conjunction with the foundation of the Umayyad state in al-Andalus roughly in the eighth century and has survived intermittently until the present. Since the 19th century, and this is the piece I'm going to be focusing on right now in the talk, this view has generally associated al-Andalus with the Levant and with the Greco-Roman heritage while distancing al-Andalus from North Africa and Islam. So in other words it's a view that has served to make al-Andalus whiter, less religious, and more compatible with Europe. By that I mean more compatible with the cultural tradition that imagines a kind of direct continuity between Greco-Roman antiquity and European modernity. In Chapter one of my book I survey some of the key moments in the development of this historic of this historical imaginary which I'm calling the Arab al-Andalus. How did al-Andalus come to become understood predominantly as an Arab phenomenon and what political needs does that serve in different contexts? Along the way I try to show how debates about al-Andalus have often intersected with debates about ethnic identities in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Middle East. Today I'm going to focus on one of the key junctures in this story - the resurgence of interest in al-Andalus that took place in Arab intellectual circles in Egypt and the Levant in the late 19th and early 20th century as part of a cultural movement commonly known as the Nahda, which is sometimes translated as the Arab Renaissance. In particular I'm going to be focusing on this guy, ... a prolific novelist, journalist, and scholar, who played an important role in reviving popular interest in al-Andalus at the turn of the 20th century. Now ... was born to a Greek Orthodox family in Beirut in 1861 but he spent most of his adult life working as a journalist and media man in Cairo. Although he made important contributions to several fields, he's best known today for his historical novels which were widely wildly popular during his lifetime and which continued to be printed until the present day. Now despite the immense popularity of ... historical fiction, I mean this guy was like the Tom Clancy or the Dan Brown of his day,

(audience laughs)

they've really not received much attention either in cultural histories of the Middle East or in literary histories of modern Arabic literature and I can say a bit more in the Q&A about why ... despite his popularity is kind of falling through the cracks. For now though, I really like to suggest that we as scholars would do well to pay attention to ... because through his novels it was really his novels that introduced generations of readers to the major figures and events of Arab history and in so doing they helped to create a popular historical consciousness among readers of the Arabic language a historical consciousness of what Arabness was, what it meant to be an Arab. ... would commonly refer to himself he refers to himself in a few points in his writings as a ... a phrase that has been translated as non-specialist writer though I think that an even better translation would be public writer in the way that we say public humanities today kind of public facing writer. ... and I'm quoting him, "The servant of the nation and the guardian of its instruction." The nation to which he refers here is not Egypt or Syria but rather the Arab nation a construct that ... himself helped to build. ... would speak of his pan-Arab audience as quote "the nation of language" or quote "the Arabic linguistic society." Those are both quotes from from the same text that of I have up on the slide. For ... the Arabic language was a force and perhaps the only force that could forge a common identity among Arabs of different faiths and from different places and times. This view was likely informed by ... own experience as a Levantine Christian immigrant writing in Muslim-majority Egypt at a time when Egyptian nationalism was on the rise. So this is a man who had a vested stake in saying there's something there's something that binds us together and indeed ... and many other Christian Arab intellectuals of his generation asserted a place for themselves in Egyptian and Levantine society by advocating for a pan-Arab identity based on a common language and cultural heritage rather than a common religion. This vision this vision of a pan-Arab identity is what comes to the fore in ... historical novels. They're these novels are commonly referred to as the novels of the history of Islam but it's really a misnomer because it's mostly the novels of those periods of Islam that are dominated by Arabs. That would be it's a much chunkier but a much more accurate title and this this this dynamic is particularly comes into view in a trilogy of novels that ... wrote about al-Andalus in the first half of the 20th century. So he was a famous historical novelist, famous for trying to kind of come up with this notion of Arabness and a pan-Arab identity and one of the vehicles that he did this was through a trilogy of novels that were widely read at the beginning of the 20th century. The first part of this trilogy ... al-Andalus - the conquest of al-Andalus - tells the story of the events leading up to the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, focusing on the political discord and palace intrigue that led to the demise of Visigoths rule in Iberia. ... second Andalus-themed novel, ... follows the campaign of the Arab commander ... the time a governor of al-Andalus into today's France culminating with the defeat of Abdul Rahman's army in the Battle of Poitier's in 732. I'm going to come back to that novel. As ... third and final novel set in al-Andalus is called Abdul Rahman ... It celebrates the cultural splendor of Cordoba during the reign of the Umayyad caliph ... who ruled from 912 to 961 of the Common Era. So the first thing I want to note about ... trilogy is that it only covers the period in which al-Andalus was under the control of Arab rulers with roots in Syria. So this is really the Umayyad his trilogy is al-Andalus Umayyad edition. In other words, ... ends in the 10th century before the decline of the Umayyad caliphate and in so doing effectively leaves aside 500 more years of Andalusi history you know mind you there were still Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula until 1492. But ... really saw the period of Arab Umayyad rule as both the essence and the apogee of al-Andalus and he speaks quite explicitly to this point in another work that he wrote at the same time as he was writing this trilogy. So this quote I'm going to show right now is from his multi-volume history of Islamic civilization which was published in the beginning of the 20th century at the same time as his novels about al-Andalus. And I quote, "al-Andalus reached its greatest glory during the days of Abdul ... who died in the year 350 of the Hegira. Arabs were at the forefront of the state and were people of ethnic solidarity, possessing stature and influence because the Umayyads were strongly attached to the Arabs as we have previously said. When the Slavs and Berbers seized the posts and jobs the might of the Arabs gradually became weak. What I want to draw attention to here is that ... very explicitly narrates the kind of rise and fall of al-Andalus in ethnic terms in this passage as in his novels, Arabness is really the foundation upon which the glory of al-Andalus is built. This is an idea that plays out in all three of the novels in the Andalus trilogy but it's probably most explicit and pronounced in the second installment ... That novel as I've already said follows the campaign of an Arab commander ... into today's France culminating in his defeat at the Battle of Poitier's. That defeat marked the end of Islam's expansion into medieval Europe but in the novel the characters who stand in the way of Abdul Rahman's victory are in fact not the Christian Franks but rather the Berbers or indigenous North Africans who fight in a Abdul Rahman's army. So in other words the novel blames the Berbers for the failure of Muslim forces to establish a permanent foothold in today's France. Not surprisingly then the novel features many moments of eventually frustrated but attempted alliances between Christians and Muslims and the novel's villain is not a Christian but is instead a Berber, a Muslim Berber commander whose name is ... I'm going to read the narrator's first description of Bustan because I think that it illustrates ... treatment of non-Arab characters as well as his emphasis on the threat that non Arab groups posed to the spirit of al-Andalus. And I quote from ... novel, "Among them was a Berber commander named Bustan. He and his tribe had only converted to Islam out of greed for profit, plunder, booty, and the like. He was strong-bodied and ill-tempered. Anyone who laid eyes on him would shudder at the sight of him on account of his huge head, his wide face, his enormous nose, and his inflated nostrils. To say nothing of his oily colour, the harsh crudeness on display in his entire appearance and his thick lips of the darkest night, suggesting lewd pleasures." So first of all this passage asserts that North-African Berbers only converted to Islam out of greed and a desire for plunder. This is an idea that surfaces frequently in the novel including the novel's culminating scene when ... Berber soldiers abandoned him right in the middle of the Battle of Poitier's so that they can rush back and protect their war booty. But what I find most striking about this description is the fact not the kind of weird comments about the sincerity of his faith but rather the passage's attention to Bustan's physical attributes and the passage's reliance on racial stereotypes. Put bluntly the description Africanizes Bustan attributing to him features that are commonly associated with people of African descent such as a dark complexion, a wide face, and thick lips. Furthermore these physical attributes they're not neutral they're quite explicitly associated with moral flaws such as lewdness, crudeness, and an ill temper. To just take a step back here it bears noting that ... before publishing his Andalus trilogy had in fact shown a sustained interest in physiognomies, phrenology, and other related European race sciences. In fact his interest in European race science culminated in the publication of a little-known work no ... scholars really want to touch this thing but it's out there his book on the modern science of physiognomies whose cover page promised readers a guide to quote, "judging people's character, ability, talents, and varieties of actions from the shape of their limbs." In fact ... cites this very work in the footnotes to his three Andalus novels. So returning to ... description of the Berber commander Bustan what I'm saying is that it illustrates ... adherence to the principles of 19th century race science and in particular to the belief that the study of someone's physical features reveals truths about their underlying moral character but also and this is really the key point for my argument about the Arab al-Andalus. This passage is part of ... systematic effort to represent Berbers as racialized others who are culturally inferior to Arabs and were threats to Arab civilization in al-Andalus. Let me see if I can pivot here from this passage to a larger point so I'm trying to I'm trying to use this passage to signal a larger theme that runs through ... writings and that's going to run through other writings that we're going to kind of see later in this talk and also in tomorrow's documentary. ... trilogy casts al-Andalus as a hub in a cultural network that bypasses Africa and connects what the western Mediterranean to the eastern Mediterranean. His imagined geography places particular emphasis on the links between al-Andalus and the Levant so roughly today is Syria but it also highlights the links between al-Andalus and the Greco-Roman heritage. To illustrate this point I'd like to look at another passage and this one comes from the first novel in ... al-Andalus trilogy. The conquest of al-Andalus or ... al-Andalus. In that novel ... not only depicts the Muslim conquest of al-Andalus as an Arab enterprise he time and time again refers to it as the Arab conquests of al-Andalus even though it was famously led by a Berber commander ... but also and more importantly for what I'm going to talk about right now he depicts this conquest as the continuation of the Roman heritage. Now this is important because in kind of the historiography of the Andalus whether or not al-Andalus is a kind of break with Europe one of the main points here is: Are Muslims compatible with the Western the Western tradition the Greco-Roman heritage or not? And ... is clearly on the side of I'm gonna write Arab the Arab conquest of al-Andalus into the history of Greco-Roman heritage and the Mediterranean tradition. To this point he writes, "The Goths," this is in a passage in which he's explaining why the Arabs were able to conquer Iberia, "conquered Spain but they were unable to substitute their language for Latin as the Arabs were able to substitute Arabic for the languages in the areas that they conquered in the Eastern Roman kingdoms. In their conquests of former Roman kingdoms, the Goths and Arabs shared a lot in common but it was the Arabs who managed to achieve something that the Goths did not. Building on the vestiges of Roman civilization, they managed to wreck anyone that was uniquely their own. With the passing of generations, they managed to mold the various nations with whom they came into contact into a single nation that spoke a single language. The Goths on the other hand spent over two hundred years in Spain and then departed without leaving a trace worthy of mention." First, this passage describes the creation of an Arab national identity predicated on the shared use of the Arabic language, clearly an important thing for a guy who's trying to lead an Arabic language media empire that wants to communicate with Arabs all across the Arab world. That's ... More significantly I think the passage casts the expansion of Arab rule in the Mediterranean as the continuation of the Roman heritage suggesting that the Arab civilization in al-Andalus was built and I quote "on the vestiges of Roman civilization." At work here is a historical narrative in which the Pax Romana passes the torch to the Pax Arabica and in which latin passes the torch to Arabic as the language of cultural prestige in the Mediterranean. ... suggests that the Arabs are the heirs to the Romans in the sense that both peoples were able to forge an ecumenical national identity based on the shared use of a language. This passage is just one of many in ... novels in which al-Andalus appears as the bridge that brought the Greco-Roman heritage into Europe, a process of cultural transmission that currently includes the Arabs but does not include North African Berbers or the other ethnic groups in al-Andalus. Why am i harping on this? I'm trying to strike I'm trying to strike a note of caution here and this is going to be come up again for those of you are who do show up to tomorrow's documentary called The Ornament of the World which I hope you will if you're interested in having a second day of Andalus talk. What I'm driving at is that modern celebrations of al-Andalus are often predicated on a historical imaginary that reduces al-Andalus to a stepping stone between classical antiquity and European modernity. They're also often linked implicitly or explicitly to claims of the ethnic and cultural superiority of Arabs over Berbers. Let me offer you another example just to show you that Sudan is not an isolated case and this example comes from something that's much more recent. It comes from María Rosa Menocal's book, The Ornament of the World, which is the inspiration for the documentary we're going to look at tomorrow. Menocal describes her book as quote "an account of and tribute to the culture of tolerance brought to Europe by the Umayyads." Now remember that the Umayyads are the Arab dynasty originating in Damascus that ruled in the first few centuries of al-Andalus. In Menocal's account, the enemies of this culture of tolerance are the North African Berber dynasties that rose to power in al-Andalus after the fall of the Umayyads and at various points in our book Menocal refers to these Berber dynasties as fanatics - a term she used five times - fundamentalists - that gets ten uses - and even barbarians. In other words Menocal, like ... , structures her account of al-Andalus around the binary of enlightened Arabs and backward Berbers and she also graphs that binary on to the lexicon of the post 9/11 war on terror with its fanatics, fundamentalists, and so on. So all this begs a question: Can al-Andalus be rehabilitated as anything but a backdoor form of Eurocentrism? Is that is there any there there is it is it nothing more than a way of celebrating Muslim and/or Arab civilization insofar as we can insert it into Europe? The short answer is yes. I think there is I think there's more to it I think that this is not a dour story where it's like "bummer, al-Andalus is Eurocentrism, let's all go home." But in order to get there I think that we need to start looking in new places, I think we need to start looking at the work of contemporary Arab and Muslim writers, artists, and scholars who have offered visions that move beyond the dominant paradigms of al-Andalus' tolerance or al-Andalus as Arabness. As this quote from Menocal shows, these two dominant paradigms often converge and sustain each other. Arabs are tolerant Islam is tolerant when it's ruled by Arabs it's kind of circular system. But these two paradigms do not of course exhaust al-Andalus as a potent cultural signifier. For that reason, what my book is trying to do is to to identify and to trace the genealogy of other projects that have appropriated the legacy of al-Andalus and used it to intervene in present-day debates particularly in the 20th and 21st century Mediterranean. What are these projects? Well, some of them include recent efforts by North African filmmakers, writers, and scholars to reevaluate and celebrate the contributions that Berbers made to al-Andalus. This is what I call the Berber al-Andalus and just last month at the Alondra in Grenada they opened a new exposition that's called Alondra and the Berber Universe and so this is this is a kind of hot topic in Spain and Morocco right now. Another project would be efforts to imagine al-Andalus is a place of exceptional freedom and creativity creativity for Arab and Muslim women. This is what I called the feminists al-Andalus, trying to imagine a feminist heritage that does not necessarily run directly through the feminist movements of Europe and the United States, a kind of indigenous feminism and al-Andalus has played a really significant role in that. Or the projects of works that use al-Andalus as a model or metaphor to understand conflict and coexistence in the context of Israel Palestine. This is what I call the Palestinian al-Andalus. There's a chapter in my book for each of those projects but before anyone takes a look at their watch and panics I'm not going to walk you through each of those case studies. I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the directions in which my book goes and maybe also to suggest some topics that we could take up in the Q&A. I would like to conclude today by looking at one quote from my chapter on the very uses of al-Andalus in Israel Palestine. It's actually I would say since the 1930s al-Andalus has frequently been paired with Palestine as kind of two lost paradises that fell to a foreign occupier of a different faith. This is a very significant undercurrent that that appears all over the place in modern Arabic literature and the chapter is in part about that but it's actually much more , al-Andalus functions in weird ways in Israel Palestine and so it's about other things too. But today I'm just going to give you a little snippet and this quote comes from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish perhaps the most famous 20th century Palestinian poet and in particular comes from an interview that Darwish did with the French newspaper Lamont in January of 1983. When the interviewer asked Darwish to talk about his childhood - interview question is, "Tell me about your childhood" - Darwish responded with the following intriguing statement, now mind you as I read this, this is the answer to the question, "Tell me about your childhood." "My childhood - it's not just mine. It's a collective childhood. Its place does not evoke al-Andalus because this has been lost forever. There was nothing about al-Andalus in the question. Al-Andalus is no longer a place. It is a psychological state. As for Palestine, it is my childhood. It is an achievable paradise, not a lost paradise. When I speak about it, and I speak about it a lot, it is to get my hands back on that which was the origin of my existence. In this sense, Palestine is not a memory but rather an existence, not a past but rather a future. Palestine, it is the aesthetics of al-Andalus. It is the Andalus of all possible." I love this quote as an answer to the question, "Tell me about your childhood." So so to unpack it first let's just say that Darwish is playing with one of the most common nicknames used to describe al-Andalus in modern Arabic writing: the lost paradise. ... This is a nickname for al-Andalus that has been in circulation since the early 20th century. However Darwish insists that Palestine, unlike al-Andalus, is not a lost paradise. Rather it is a once and future paradise. It is, to use his words, the Andalus of the possible. What I like about this passage is its complex temporality, a temporality that tells us something about the multifarious and slippery ways in which al-Andalus operates in modern memory and culture. Here al-Andalus is not merely a past on to which we project our present concerns. Nor is it merely a past that is repeated in the present in a kind of cyclical and endless loop of cyclical history. Rather al-Andalus is a past that holds out the promise of potential futures. It is a past that is not past but also is not present and yet might be future. In my reading, Darwish is both using and bridling against the common equation of Palestine and al-Andalus. To equate them, he suggests, is to renounce Palestine, to relegate it to the past. And yet he does not entirely abandoned the equation. He suggests that the power of al-Andalus, like the power of Palestine, resides in the future - a future that is possible if not yet fully articulated. I wanted to end on this quote from Darwish because I think that it points toward the larger conceptual stakes of my project a project in which I'm trying to think through the politics, ethics, and limits of using the past to understand the present and to imagine the future. The simplest but least satisfying way of formulating this project would be to think of it as an exercise in debunking - an exercise in which you identify over and over again the anachronism that often characterizes our modern understanding of al-Andalus. After all, calling out anachronism is in fact the most common strategy that most scholars use, either to decry, deride, or just simply ignore many modern avocations of al-Andalus. Oh, al-Andalus is not really ... But I think that if we're too quick to cry anachronism then we run the risk of losing sight of a much more interesting set of questions such as: What are the specific cultural or political needs that al-Andalus serves in the context at hand? Clearly the Andalus of the possible that Darwish is talking about is not the Andalus of white Arabness that ... is talking about. Under what historical and cultural conditions does it become possible to talk productively about al-Andalus? As we saw in the case of ... concert or heard in the case of ... concert, geographic or temporal proximity is certainly not, those aren't prerequisites. We can be very far away from al-Andalus and still use it productively. Finally, how can we map the modern memory of al-Andalus in a way that is both cohesive and heterogeneous. That is, in a way that accommodates contradiction without falling into the cynical position that says al-Andalus means everything and nothing at the same time. In short, acknowledging anachronism I think should be the starting point rather than the end point of our discussion. I also think that Andalus anachronism, in its persistence, in its resilience, in its ability to mold itself to such diverse contexts, it must be telling us something about what we want from the past, what we need from the past. And this is the larger question that I'm grappling with right now - the question that I hope will make this project relevant to scholars who are working on memory politics in other contexts. I'd wrelcome any suggestions that you have about that part of the project or about anything else that I've presented today. For now, I just want to thank you again for your interest in my work and I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

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