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.

This paper provides a categorization of the ways whereby the linguistic and semiotic landscape of Qatar is inhabited by the concept of Al-Andalus. Al-Andalus is viewed as a cultural imaginary (cf. Shannon, 2015), namely as a set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. More specifically, this imaginary is realized as a Discourse and discourse (Gee, 1996). Gee’s distinction between the two types of D/discourse recognizes the interrelationships between social relations, social identities, contexts, and specific situations of language use. The data used for this paper include an ongoing compilation of an image-based corpus from around Qatar of Al-Andalus-related signs (in Arabic with their English transliterations and vice-versa) After providing a typology of the instantiations of the Al-Andalus D/discourse in Qatar in terms of relevant categories (e.g. shops, restaurants, trading businesses, schools), an attempt is made to tap into the functions of this discourse in the shaping of the contemporary Qatari linguistic and semiotic landscape. The Discourse of Al-Andalus in Qatar is argued to be a socially accepted association among ways of using language, other symbolic expressions, such as architecture, and artifacts, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group (Gee, 1996, p. 131), which in this paper is identified with the diverse population and visitors of Qatar. On the other hand, discourse with a lower case d can be seen as "any stretch of language (spoken, written, signed) which “hangs together” to make sense to some community of people who use that language” (Gee, 1996: 100). Examples of both Al-Andalus D/discourse are analyzed. Ultimately, I argue that the Al-Andalus D/discourse gets resemiotized (Iedema 2003) in various ways, which include linguistic (such as its transliteration and semiotic (through creative transformations of Moorish architecture) ones, and it creates a space, where Qatari nationals, residents, and visitors alike are encouraged to spend their time and money. Such a consumerism-led recreation of the Andalusian subjectivities is employed in order for Qatar to construct a distinctive type of semiotic identity for its nationals, residents, and visitors alike which aspires to be seen as Islamically cosmopolitan but without succumbing to the pressures of westernization.

A series of monumental buildings constructed in the centers of major American cities in the second and third decade of the twentieth century bear architectural ornament and inscriptions made famous in the fourteenth-century Nasrid palace of Granada, the Alhambra. These buildings, all constructed as "Temples" for the Middle-Eastern themed Masonic fraternity known as the Shriners, were designed as public-facing symbols of the order's esoteric, Islamic-inspired rituals. This paper focuses on three buildings: Medinah Temple (1912), now a Bloomingdale’s in Chicago, Mecca Temple (1923), now New York City Center in New York, and Yaarab Shrine Temple (1929), now the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Based on the architecture of these buildings, writings by and about the Shriners, and related texts and objects, I will explore what the Alhambra and al-Andalus, as a locus of "European" Islam, meant to the elite American men who patronized and frequented Shriner constructions. I argue that the Alhambra’s architecture represented exactly the same fusion of “ancient,” Eastern, Islamic knowledge and European heritage that the men who participated in the Shriners sought to project. The Shriners adopted hallmarks of the Alhambra’s architecture to affiliate themselves with what they imagined to be the glories of al-Andalus and the beauty of Islamic civilization, without relinquishing a rootedness in Europe. I will also examine how these ideas about race, religion and al-Andalus were being contested between the Shriners and Black civic groups -- through language, material culture and a legal case that would go to the US Supreme Court.

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.