This paper focuses on the role of songs and music about the memory of losing al-Andalus –within an Arab and Muslim context- in constructing and promoting transnational ideologies and sense of belonging. In this paper, I examine three songs from the 20th century Arab and Muslim world in relation to their common ability to construct Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic identities or consciousness. The songs tend to embed political ideologies or identities through the trivial and apolitical medium of the love song. I argue that the triviality through which such traumatic loss is being mediated and consumed help further entrench an authorized version of looking back at al-Andalus. Doing so involves a process of selective remembering for an age that was problematic in its own terms. These songs take part in the cultural politics of the region and establish thereof a culture of memory about time and place. The songs were compared to poems that were in turn produced during the 20th century by celebrated Arab poets like Darwish and Qabbani in order to demonstrate that there had been an intellectual high culture in place from which these songs drew. This research aims to highlight the political aspect of nostalgia which often goes unnoticed.