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In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam

and the West, and the Relevance of the

PastValerie Gonzalez

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a Stanford University, California

Available online: 15 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Valerie Gonzalez (2011): In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam and the West,

and the Relevance of the Past, Al-Masaq, 23:3, 257-266

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Al-Masaq, Vol. 23, No. 3, December 2011

Review Essay

In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam and the West, and the Relevance of

the Past

SIMON R. DOUBLEDAY and DAVID COLEMAN (Eds), 2008

[The New Middle Ages]

New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Xx 217 pp., ill.

$85.00 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781403983895

This cluster of essays about the relevance of the past and history for theexamination of the present is of great interest. As the title of the series in which it

appears, The New Middle Ages, indicates, it concerns the medieval past that

specialists offer to revisit in the light of its connections with the realities of the

present, in this instance via a case-study of al-Andalus. The old polity of Islamic

Spain certainly compels one to reconsider the vision of the medieval past belonging

to the past as it continues to exist virtually through a protean phenomenon of

actualisation in politics, literature, and other cultural and social milieus. In the

framework of the complex relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds,

noticeably after 11 September 2001, different protagonists of the international

scene have revived, invoked or reinterpreted the history of Islamic Spain. Thisphenomenon is analysed from different disciplinary viewpoints throughout the

book. Nevertheless, this linking of a well-known past with a history in process is not

yet well understood and it presents challenging views underpinned by the authors

political sensitivities, cultural sympathies and other personal inclinations. Some of

its material is therefore necessarily debatable and will provoke commentary.

In the foreword, The Guardian correspondent Giles Tremlett grants the reader

with a slightly ironic Welcome to Moorishland, characteristic of journalistic

eloquence. His detailed report highlights a feature of the ordinary Spanish reality

that significantly conflates past and present. This feature is the more or less

phantasmagoric revival and commodification of Spains Islamic past in the

countrys arenas of cultural and political expression, public spaces, media, national

commemorations, etc. Particularly telling is the use and abuse of the theme in the

Spanish political rhetoric addressing tensions provoked by various factors related to

the Muslim world, such as the former engagement in the war in Iraq, North African

immigration and Islamic terrorism. Tremlett concludes his observations by asking

the appropriate question concerning the intellectual role of historians in facing a

situation of this kind. This question is thoroughly dealt with in Simon R.

Doubledays epistemological introduction.

Implicitly condemning the war in Iraq, Doubleday sets the tone in denunciating

what he calls the ethically culpable neutrality (p. 1) of historians on behalf of

scholarly objectivity. Looking at examples of intellectual passivity toward conflictsand cases of human rights violations, such as the political crisis in Haiti and the

ISSN 09503110 print/ISSN 1473348X online/11/030257-10 2011 Society for the Medieval Mediterranean

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2011.595944


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19921995 Balkans wars, the author expounds the theoretical and moral issues

that objective historical practices arouse, relevantly recalling Nietzsches discus-

sion about the linkage between history and politics. Scholarly culture also turns out

to be problematic as far as Iberian history is concerned. Doubleday explains how

the history of Spain was stigmatised as a history disconnected from the lively reality

and modernity, leading to intellectual neglect. Yet, the sole striking actuality of thetopos of al-Andalus, in Spain and beyond, invites a revision of this attitude.

Henceforth, while carefully warning against the dangers and difficulties of historical

analogies, Doubleday convincingly pleads for the validity of the trope of

multicultural medieval Spain to comprehend the cosmopolitanism with which

our contemporary world is confronted. This new reading of Spanish history is

carried out in the books eight chapters, sometimes with arguments more or less

well grounded and questionable, but always mind-stimulating.

In Chapter 1, Anne-Marie Wolf explores the intellectual itinerary of the ninth/

fifteenth-century Spanish theologian, Juan de Segovia, whose unique and relatively

tolerant attitude toward Islam in the context of the conciliar era serves the authorssubtle examination of the myth of the coexistence of different cultures. While

cautioning that Segovia cannot be posited as a model of tolerance due to his

negative perception of Islam, Wolf proposes to retain lessons from the theologians

remarkable pacific intentions and willingness to dialogue with Muslims. Cleverly

drawing parallels between the ninth/fifteenth century and our own days under the

shadow of the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East, she

repositions in contemporary perspective the marginal and marginalised pacific

position of Segovia against the front of his peers aggressive attitude toward

heterodoxy and all forms of otherness. In doing so, Wolf identifies universal

patterns of intolerance, in particular the scheme of silencing voices and stifling

ideas that do not fit the mainstream of thought.

Her argumentation is most convincing, except in her discussion about the

religious legitimisation of warfare, which appears far too biased. Observing that

those with belligerent agendas often resort to religious rhetoric, the scholar

illustrates her remark with the Israeli-Arab conflict, a perfect example indeed of

political-religious confrontation conducted with both weapons and words. But after

strongly condemning the processes of intellectual selection and the silencing of

voices and histories, one would expect her to apply her reasoning to the Middle

Eastern situation whose very complexity commands the most nuanced judgment.

Instead, the author resorts to the very scheme she so beautifully decries when she

singles out a discourse by Benjamin Netanyahu. Without proper contextualisation,she points out that the Likud Partys leader once called for the support of American

Christians, invoking belief in the biblical prophecy Christians share with Jews, in

order to claim Israel divines right to the land (p. 45).

This criticism would have made more sense had she made at least a mention of

the no less religiously connoted political discourse of the conflicts other

protagonist. For Netanyahus Zionist-based proclamation is not a self-contained

verbal construction. It has to be understood in its engagement in the confronta-

tional dialectics with the Palestinians quite elaborate discursive apparatus, with its

Jihadist rhetoric and references to the various holy wars carried out by the Prophet

Muhammad at the beginning of Islam. Noticeably, this apparatus is utilised tojustify combat actions such as suicide bombings. Wolf further alludes to the Israeli-

Arab conflict by stating with a certain cynicism that the suggestion that Christians

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should involve themselves in driving people off their land to establish a Jewish State

because of biblical prophecy would have been unfathomable to Juan de Segovia (p.

47). In similarly overlooking some historical details, one might also wonder about

the infamous Palestinian suggestion of throwing the Jews to the sea and similar

propositions of elimination of the Jewish element from the Middle Eastern scene.

Would Segovia have approved this as well? It is difficult, indeed, to bring a clearand open mind to new circumstances to borrow Wolfs own words (p. 48).

Leyla Rouhis reading of Miguel de Cervantess Don Quijote in Chapter 2 is

certainly not the first attempt to define the famous writers appreciation of the

Moriscos and Islam. It is known that the extraordinarily complex textual structure

of this masterpiece, well summarised in this essay, prevents any definite response

and opens itself to multiple interpretations. What Rouhi skilfully brings into new

light here is the perception of this text in Spanish scholarship, revealing diverse

understandings, projections or psychologies vis-a-vis the theme of Iberian multi-

cultural society. Relying on quotations by Americo Castro, Juan Goytisolo and

other Spanish intellectuals, she shows how these approaches are in one way oranother the product of the resonance of tenth/sixteenth-eleventh/seventeenth-

century Spain that the epic work of Cervantes arouses in contemporary Spain. This

investigation ultimately leads the author to see in the multilevel structure of Don

Quijote and the plurality of responses it provokes, a model of nuanced thinking in

our quest for answers to the intercultural relationship-related questions of the

present day. The implementation of Rouhis wise advice would surely help towards

a better, less Manichaean grasp of the contemporary political and sociological

imbroglios.

Chapter 3 provides a detailed historical account about the fate of the Muslim

population in Spain after 1492 for those little acquainted with it. On the base of this

well-known historical material, Mary Elizabeth Perry develops a critique of the

workings and powers of memory associated with suffering. Memory continues to

live and to empower or dis-empower people, not only through mental processes of

recollection and cultivation, but also through certain practices purposely main-

tained, even in the most repressive of circumstances. For the Muslims of pre-

modern Spain forced to convert, hidden religious and cultural practices, together

with the visible remains of Islamic arts and architecture, sustained the perpetuation

of their identity.

Perry is much less convincing when, beyond this adequate reasoning about the

concept of memory, she undertakes to interpret further the Morisco narrative. For

example, she attributes to Morisco artists an intention to utilise the artistic mediumto resist the oppressor, or to ridicule it as she puts it that is not sustainable in the

light of the history of Spanish Islamic art (p. 70). In fact, since the beginning of the

so-called Reconquista, an adaptation of Muslim art in Christian milieus has taken

place by means of cultural exchanges, independently of the political struggles. This

art, called Mudejar, rapidly became a Spanish artistic tradition in the fullest sense

of the locution well before 898/1492, and continued to be fashionable for some

time afterwards. Craftsmen of the three Spanish faiths were trained in Mudejar

techniques and style, and in Arabic calligraphy. Consequently, in the absence of

evidence of authorship, actually a quite rare occurrence in the period, it is difficult

to attribute to a Morisco, a Christian or a Marano (converted crypto-Jew) anIslamic-style of artwork realised in a re-conquered territory. By inference, the

interpretation of the Arabic inscription (discussed on p. 70) as an example of the

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Moriscos cultural resistance relies on flawed premises. Besides, the very standard

inclusion of the inscription Eternal Happiness to Allah is not specifically Islamic.

Typical of the artistic hybridity that defines Mudejar art, the phrase fits the three

monotheistic faiths equally. For sure though, Mudejar art constituted a powerful

stimulus for the maintenance of the Morisco memory, as Perry argues in the

paragraph Stones and Stories (p. 71).The last part of the authors essay, dealing with the relevance of the history of the

Moriscos to the present, falls short as it consists of too general and shallow an

enunciation of vague connections and at times questionable statements. Thus, she

cites with great lyricism the Christian practice of taking Morisco children from their

parents, which, to her eyes, echoes an ongoing violence that she does not, however,

specify (p. 81). Not only is the comparison much too loose, but the underscoring of

such a practice as a specificity of the Morisco condition in pre-modern Spain is also

rather misleading. World history of medieval, pre-modern and modern times is full

of such painful stories of children forcefully enrolled in politically and religiously

oriented projects. For example, in Islamic history, the Muslim military bodies of theMamluks and Janissaries were created by means of exactly such a practice. To quote

another example from European history, children from poor families were deported

from Victorian England to Australia in the nineteenth century, where they were

placed in educational orphanages with the intention that they would later populate

the land.

In Chapter 4, Denise K. Filios guides us with the utmost depth of thought and

psychological sensitivity through the fascinating literary work of three living exiled

intellectuals, the Cuban Maria Rosa Menoca, the Lebanese Amin Maalouf and the

Moroccan Rachid Nini. Each of them deals in his or her own way with the pain and

issues of exile by nostalgically invoking a lost al-Andalus, perceived as a paradigm of

tolerance between different communities. Filioss excellent study is packed with

pertinent references to writers such as Salman Rushdie and Edward Said, who have

scrutinised the complex condition of the exile and its symptomatic stance toward

both the past and the present. This critical material allows Filios to penetrate the

mind of the intellectuals in question through their portrayals of al-Andalus.

Exploring a significant literary piece by each author, she remarkably deciphers the

enigmatic process of projection of the personal experience of each of these

individuals onto the Spanish historical topos and the fantastical representation of

the latter this produces. Filios enlightening study ends with a fine reflection on the

intellectual movement of cosmopolitanism and its rather utopian aspirations.

The topic of Moroccan immigration, brilliantly examined by Daniela Flesler inChapter 5, is heavily loaded with significances in terms of the present-day relevance

of al-Andalus. Obviously, the massive displacement of population from Morocco to

Spain reactivates the memory of the Islamic history of both sides of the

Mediterranean, a memory that was repressed during Francos dictatorship. It is

then easy to figure out that the issues immigration arouses in general are, in present-

day Spain, supplemented with fears related to a hypothetical repetition of the

Islamic conquests of the peninsula in the Middle Ages. Flesler explains this fact

with great sensitivity. Occasionally, however, her arguments lack precision and/or

contextualisation and they may therefore be potentially misleading. Without being

adequately contextualised in the contemporary socio-economical reality of Europe,her analysis thus tends to force the image of the scared and hostile Spain,

irrationally overwhelmed by the spectre of its Muslim history. Even though her

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observations per se are well grounded, they nevertheless convey the wrong

impression that, due to their specific history and the problematic way they deal

with it, Spaniards are particularly discriminatory against Muslim immigrants, as

compared with the attitude of other European states vis-a-vis their foreign

communities. To dissipate any potential misrepresentation, several points must to

be clarified.First, with regard to Iberian history, the encounter between guests and hosts in

Spain carries significances and perceptions different from those that exist in the rest

of Europe. To avoid the danger of demonization, however, one should underline the

fact that, even without this specific background of centuries of cultural mingling

and warfare with Muslims, the other European countries do not display more

serenity when faced with immigration from Islamic countries. They develop similar

fears of an Islamization of their country, of a demographic growth that would lead

to a shift of cultural values, of an uncontrolled Muslim power within the state, etc.

This means clearly that these fears in Spain and elsewhere are triggered above all by

factors stemming from the specific present-day socio-cultural reality of the West. IfSpanish fears are distinct from the fears of other European nations, it is in terms not

so much of content as of form. This leads me to my second point.

If the Spanish psyche is indeed shaped by its unique Muslim-Christian history, it

should also be underlined that political and social practices in Spain are not worse

than, say, those in France or Germany. In some respects, Spain even shows more

acceptance of its Muslim population than other European nations, for example by

granting local citizenship and allowing freedom of religious expression in the public

sphere. Flesler epitomises the incident in El-Ejido (p. 118) as characteristic of a

dual pattern of Spanish intolerance/anxiety. This incident should be seen in parallel

with analogous events that have occurred elsewhere in Europe, such as the

numerous blunders by the French police that have led to the death of Muslim

immigrants, or the burning of Turkish cultural centres in Germany. The French law

prohibiting conspicuous religious signs in public spaces on the basis of the national

value of lacite, implicitly targeting the hijab (Islamic veil), and their leading role in

banning the burqa (Islamic female garment covering the full body), could also be

mentioned in order to fairly place in perspective the Spanish attitude toward the

countrys Moroccan community.

A third problematic point concerns Fleslers psychoanalytical interpretation of

the Spanish fear of the Moor and the definition of the Spanish cultural entity she

provides on the basis of it (pp. 123125). To summarise this part of her discussion,

the author postulates that, in spite of their efforts to construct their Europeanidentity by repressing their North African heritage, contemporary Spaniards are still

not so different, or not different enough from the Moroccan immigrants (p.123).

Accordingly, one of the deepest national anxieties is the possibility of confusion of

identity between the Moor/Moroccan/Muslim and the Spaniard/European/

Christian.

Without being entirely faulty, this argument nevertheless contains pitfalls. For to

build it, and substantiate the central theme of closeness or resemblance between the

two peoples, Flesler engages in a purely intellectual exercise whose brilliant but

sometimes too abstract intrinsic logic forces her to present a debatable version of

Spanish history and identity. She thus makes the reductive statement: What makespeople from one side of the Strait different from those at the other side is only

circumstance (p. 124). In many regards, this statement is puzzling and carries a

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high risk of ideological slippage, particularly in the absence of a definition of the

term circumstance in the text. Does circumstance mean history, an autonomous

phenomenon evolving apart from socio-cultural developments with no conse-

quences for their shaping, or perhaps the reverse? The undefined term of

circumstance certainly implies an underestimation of some kind, and, in this,

Fleslers direction of thought reflects an intellectual trend in cultural studies. Thetrend encavages underscoring the similarities between the various components of a

given phenomenon of hybridity or cosmopolitanism at the expense of the

distinctions, particularly when they disturb or challenge promotional discourses

of peace, syncretism or osmosis between peoples.

This approach to the difficult topic of alterity (to which Flesler refers herself in p.

123) has established norms of political correctness that coin culturalist racism

the exploration and pointing out of differences. The problem is that both the

double patterns of similarity/continuity and difference/discontinuity can be ideo-

logically loaded if postulated one against the other in extreme or radical terms. An

extreme example is Francos remodelling of a Spanish national identity rid of theMuslim and Jewish heritages. As we know, this forged identity rested upon the

occultation of the pattern of similarity/continuity in multi-ethnic and multi-faith

Spanish history and culture. Opposing this unacceptable scheme, Flesler never-

theless underestimates the opposite pattern of difference/discontinuity by mini-

mising the important feature of the countrys European/Christian historical

engagement and cultural substance. If, as is undoubtedly the case, an ethnic and

cultural blending has resulted from the long encounter of Spain with Arabo-Berber

peoples, the nearly 600 years of independent political and cultural history between

North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula since 898/1492 cannot be reasonably

described as mere circumstance.

The nature of Spanish national identity constitutes the last problematic point in

Fleslers discussion. When she writes precisely at a moment [nowadays] when

Spain seems to have finally achieved truly European status (p. 123), she reduces

the countrys European identity to a painstaking process recently completed against

the odds. Right away, this remark disturbingly re-positions Spain apart from the rest

of Europe and subliminally reactivates the old prejudices and pufferies, attributing

to this country various arguably distinctive non-European features, among them

the monopoly of dictatorship, intolerance and religious fanaticism in Europe.

Without engaging the latter debate, it is sufficient to mention French and British

colonialism, the Nazis and the Holocaust to deconstruct this view, which is rooted

in European romanticism and, in particular, in French culture bourgeoise.Interestingly enough, this view of Spain, which has affected Iberian and Hispanic

studies, is openly criticised in Doubledays and Wolfs essays.

In the context of a book exploring the projective effects of the memory of

al-Andalus on contemporary issues, the reiteration of this conceptualisation of a

differentiated Spain in Europe is preoccupying. To begin with, it potentially

corroborates an amalgam between the two distinct aspects of Spanish history, its

Islamic and post-Islamic history, both of which the Western tradition has posited as

features not fully associable with the European substrata. This subjective view was

amply nurtured by the French romantic vision of Spain expressed in the aphorism

Africa begins at the Pyrenees, which is indeed cited in the text but again in tooambiguous a manner (p. 123). One has to bear in mind the history this locution

metaphorically condenses. The romantic vision in question became heavily

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symbolic of a negative perception of Spain and its people cultivated in the

ideological garden of French colonialism in North Africa, particularly in Algeria

which had an important community of Spanish political and economic immigrants.

The latter, already despised for their modern history, seen as the antithesis of the

glorious French history of Enlightenment and Human Rights, were implicitly

associated with native North Africans by virtue of their shared Islamic legacy, withall the degrading consequences this entailed in French segregationist colonial

society. This negative perception persisted long after the end of the Algerian war

and began to fade only recently. One may wonder, then, whether Fleslers remark

about the Spanish European status unwittingly revives the romantic-colonialist

trope of a Spain closer to Africa than Europe because of its Islamic past or/and its

history of dictatorship and intolerance.

The remark about Spain seeming to have finally achieved truly European status

may create a second disturbing amalgam, between medieval Islam and modern and

contemporary Islam. If indeed, in trying to sort out the exact meaning of Flesler

statement, we retain from the arguments logic that Spain has obtained Europeanstatus by forcefully leaving its Islamic past behind, this somehow posits medieval

Islam, like contemporary Islam, as a major separatist factor preventing, or making

seriously difficult the affiliation with the European entity (here the case of the

enrolment in the European Union denied to Turkey comes to the mind). In other

words, if the remark possibly conceptualises al-Andalus as a differentiating factor in

the geo-political configuration of modern Europe, by extension it conceptualises

those two Islamic histories without distinction as phenomena of obscurantism

contrary to modernity and human rights. Clearly medieval Islam cannot be merely

superimposed on contemporary Islam or vice versa. Therefore, the puzzling

postulate ultimately arouses a fundamental question: that of the very status of Islam

as a full component of European history and culture. Without going into this

question fully here, it can be said right away that its Islamic heritage by no means

compromises Spains European identity and affiliation throughout the ages

precisely because Islam has shared that very history since medieval times.

Fleslers fascinating investigation ends with the case study of a Moroccan writer,

Miloudi Chaghmoum, who revisits the Andalusian past through the medium of

literary fiction. She observes that in his short novel, La quema de los barcos, ethnic

commonalities between Moroccans and Spaniard are fully assumed. In the absence

of explanation, however, this observation may lead one to believe incorrectly that

Moroccans are more tolerant towards others or more open to pluralism than

Spaniards. In fact, this acceptance must be understood in the light of Moroccanhistory, the prism through which, understandably, Moroccan immigrants perceive

Spain and the Spaniards. To the Moroccans eyes, the re-attachment to Spain

through the revival of the al-Andalus theme, the physical resettling in the peninsula

and the reminder of ethnic commonalities with its inhabitants, signify the virtual

and imaginary enactment of a history that did not happen but should have

happened, namely the Islamic history that, like their own uninterrupted Islamic

history in Morocco, should never have been interrupted in the Spanish lands.

Unlike the Spanish imaginary, which does not seem to fancy a Spain that would be

a polity equivalent or analogous to present-day Morocco, the Moroccan imaginary

is at ease with the idea of a contemporary Islamic Spain had al-Andalus continuedto exist throughout the Modern Age. Ultimately, Moroccans and Spaniards are

compelled to confront their ineluctably shared fate: yesterday this fate took the

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form of conquests and the development of a brilliant Muslim civilization; today it

occurs in the form of immigration.

In Chapter 6, the journey between historical al-Andalus and its contemporary

imagined version continues with Lisa Abends enlightening account of Spains new

Muslims. With much finesse, she tells the genesis of this small community of

twentieth-century Europeans converted to Islam struggling for both the recognitionof their ideas and institutional support for their initiatives. For example, particularly

significant of this struggle is their vain effort to restore the original function of the

Mezquita-Cathedral of Cordova as a place of Islamic worship. The counter-

argument that existing originally Christian monuments that were transformed into

mosques have never been returned to Christianity, such as St Sofia in Istanbul, has

contributed to the failure of this initiative. (On p. 150, the celebrated Byzantine

building, now the Hagia Sofia Mosque, is mistakenly called The Blue Mosque,

which is the seventeenth-century Ottoman Ahmadiyya Mosque, whose interior is

famously decorated with blue tile work, that stands on the other side of the garden

between the two buildings.)Claiming an intellectual if not ethnic descent from the medieval Moors, these

converts have constructed their new identity and religious deontology by embracing

the idealising Andalusian myth of convivencia (peaceful coexistence of Muslims,

Christians and Jews). The majority of the community members are native

Spaniards, but it also includes prominent foreigners, such as the Scottish Ian

Dallas and the French Roger Garaudy (not Gaudry as it is misspelled in the book

on pp. 136, 154), both known for their radical and controversial ideas. This feature

of radicalism (Garaudy being notorious for his anti-Semitic inclinations) does not,

however, represent the whole multifaceted intellectual construct of these new

Andalusians. Abend skilfully unravels the intricacies of their thought, which

construes itself as a form of modernity and criticism against both the Spanish and

global history of religious intolerance, and the anti-modern fundamentalist forms of

Islam itself. She thus points out that, while trying to find a middle way between the

Western ideal of modernity and traditional Islamic values, this new Iberian Islam is

not free of contradictions and radical interpretations of national history and

identity.

However, she also underlines the communitys contribution in sorting out ways

to respond to the Wests hostile attitude toward the Muslim world by offering an

alternative Muslim ideal. It would be pertinent to note here that European Islam,

practised by European Muslims, and impregnated with Western values of

modernity such as democracy and gender equality, was formed long ago in theBalkan region. Noticeably, both Spains new Muslims and the Balkans old

Muslims strongly claim the difference of their religious approach from that of other

Islamic nations or communities, which practise an Islam considered extreme, anti-

modern and/or anti-democratic. Abend concludes her essay with a pessimist

remark, however. To her eyes, the beautiful ideal of these spiritual heirs of the past

Moors does not seem weighty enough to ensure for itself a sustainable future as a

powerful Islamic voice.

In logical continuity with Abends discussion, David Coleman examines in

Chapter 7 the case of the construction of the new Great Mosque in the Albaicin

neighbourhood of Granada. From this event of a priori local importance, Colemanextracts the most profound teachings and meanings as he approaches it as both a

historical fact and a polysemic phenomenon of society, and beyond these as a

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paradigmatic example of the relevance of the past in the present. With the help of

a solid theoretical methodology, he meticulously explores all levels of significance of

the event for the location, its inhabitants and the various communities to which they

belong, including the symbolic, ideological, social and political significances. At the

regional and national level, the Great Mosque represents the resurfacing of

Granadas medieval past in contemporary times, as it was erected in a district thathas managed to maintain, more or less artificially, traces of its original Islamic

character. For its commissioners, the building constitutes a visible and triumphant

form of recognition that finally certifies the validity of the new Spanish Islam after a

long battle against the various competent authorities and voices involved in the

process of obtaining the construction permit. Coleman retraces and analyses step

by step this battle, sustained in no small way by an elaborate rhetoric about the

legitimacy of a living Islamic presence in a location acknowledged by all as a mighty

Islamic cultural signifier. Also no less revealing of the toughness of the process and

the tense feelings and emotions it has triggered is the conflict within Granadas

Islamic community itself. The fact that a congregational mosque already existed inthe city, and the divisions between the various local Islamic groups and

organisations, including between the new Muslims and the Muslim immigrants,

have considerably complicated the rhetoric of Islamic legitimacy and its correlated

political discourse. In all its aspects, the whole story a tale of two mosques as

Coleman wittily calls it (p. 164) reveals an al-Andalus reinvented and reprocessed,

but a more living entity than it has ever been since 898/1492.

The books last essay, in Chapter 8, consists of a sophisticated reflection upon

the destiny of al-Andalus as both a psychic reality and an intellectual re-constitution

or re-instantiation. Playing dialectically with the notion of temporality and its sub-

categories of past, present and future, the author, Gil Anidjar, deconstructs and

reconstructs the mental existence of al-Andalus in the course of its endless cycle of

life, death and rebirth according to peoples and circumstances. The highly symbolic

date of 898/1492, appropriately referred to by Anidjar, exemplifies the process of

mental manipulation deciding of the future fate of the Islamic past of Spain and,

more broadly, the psychological elaboration that fashions the memory of any

important and/or traumatic historical episode after it has occurred. Equally, Anidjar

quite appropriately extends the discussion to the Jewish element, the chainon

manquant (the missing link) in the Andalusian story and myth that has been

overlooked in the book as a result of its focus on Islam. Al-Andalus is a tripod, with

its interacting Muslim, Jewish and Christian components, and Anidjar recalls this

fundamental fact by exploring, among a diversified repertoire of references,celebrated Jewish texts and thinkers of the period, such as the mystical treatise of

the Zohar and the famous philosopher Moses Maimonides.

Relying on this rich material, he dedicates the long final part of his essay to the

theme of exile, which is both the exit from and entrance to a mythical past, the very

agent of continuity of a factually closed history, mutating itself into an endlessly

renewed past. Having included the Jews of Spain in his argument, Anidjar reveals

al-Andalus in its full dimensions as a privileged figure of exile, while cleverly

underscoring the essential fact that, in contrast to the usual cliche, it does not

constitute an absolutely unique case. There are indeed many global histories that

variously engage the tropes of pluralism, exile and displacement, such as the historyof the Balkans. The reader may find it hard, however, to follow the authors dense

thought toward the end of the essay, as the linguistic expression becomes

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increasingly pun-oriented, the complex ideas tending to be diluted in stylistic

devices of wording and word games. Likewise, the reader may not necessarily agree

with the opinionated allusion to Zionism, which is posited as a form of colonialism

comparable to French colonialism, a view crystallised in another of those

caricaturing aphorisms Israels Original Sin (p. 206, n. 5). In sum, Anidjars

pertinent postscript nonetheless brings the book to an end with an opening ontouniversal thoughts centred in, but spreading out from, the shining myth of al-

Andalus.

In conclusion, I would say that, in its attempt to re-establish a meaningful

linkage between the past and the present, and between history and politics, this

seminal book offers a very welcome change from the traditional medieval and

historical studies. It contributes substantially to the fields advancement by

assigning to those studies a new mission beyond the classical historical hermeneu-

tics, which is to clarify the reality in live and real existing peoples. If it cannot be

reasonably expected to fulfil the impossible task of providing the right solutions to

ongoing conflicts and issues, it has the invaluable merit of offering new ways ofcomprehending and thinking about them, for the sake of better responses if not

more just actions.

VALERIE GONZALEZ

Stanford University, California

[email protected]

2011, Valerie Gonzalez

266 Review Essay

Spain Al Masq

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