Abstract
This paper is a study in the political use of Al-Andalus memory during the interwar era and in the context of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine as well as Palestinian interactions with fascism and anti-Semitism in 1930s Europe. This paper will examine how discourses on Al-Andalus were used to conceptualize and legitimate Palestinian Arab responses to the persecution of Jews in Europe, as well as to articulate Arab and Islamic identity and the Palestinian cause at home. This paper argues that various Palestinian Arab press editors and journalists used Al-Andalus to promote notions of “us” and “them,” which marked the basis of their stance on anti-Semitism in Europe and the same time conveyed their view of the Arab-Jewish struggle at home. As this paper will demonstrate, these writers invoked the memory of Al-Andalus as a basis to promote Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic views on the fate of Jews in Europe, which included criticisms of anti-Semitism but also which were apologetic for the actions of anti-Semites and legitimated rising Arab hostility to Jews in Palestine. For example, this paper will focus on editorials in the venue Mirat Ash-Sharq, which used Al-Andalus memory as a basis of imagining a transnational Pan-Semitic community, which protected a notion of Arab-Jewish commonality that connected Europe and the MENA region. Other journalists, invoked the Fall of Al-Andalus to promote notions of Arab and Islamic moral superiority over Europeans and to criticize European imperialism.
This paper draws from a range of Palestinian Arab press venues during the mandatory era, focusing its analysis mainly on editorials that invoked the memory of Al-Andalus in a political context. It contributes to studies on the culture of Arab nationalism in Palestine, and in particular, the question of how Arabs used transnational symbols, such as Al-Andalus memory that bridged orient and occident in their effort to globalize the Arab-Jewish conflict. In a more general respect, this is a study of Arab imaginings of the borders between orient and occident, Arabs and Europeans, Muslims and Christians, and Arabs and Jews. It also a study on the mobilization of historical memory for political purposes and particularly Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic nationalism.
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