One of the rhetorical strategies deployed by Arab and Muslim feminists, from the end of the nineteenth century until the present, has been to ground feminist claims in episodes from Islamic history. This strategy casts feminism as an essential part of the Islamic tradition, rather than a challenge to it. Al-Andalus has figured prominently in these efforts to articulate an indigenous or “authentic” Arab or Muslim feminism, independent from the history of feminist movements in Europe and the United States. This paper will explore recent attempts to imagine al-Andalus as a place of exceptional freedom and creativity for Arab and Muslim women. The paper will focus on Radwa ‘Ashur’s Granada Trilogy (Egypt, 1994-1995) and Farida Bourquia’s film "Zaynab, The Rose of Aghmat" (Morocco, 2014). ‘Ashur’s trilogy narrates the saga of a family of Granadan Muslims, from the time of the Christian Reconquest of Granada until the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609. The saga centers on the women of the family, who fight to preserve the Arabic language and the practice of Islam in the face of oppression and violence from the new Christian occupiers. ‘Ashur’s female characters are not mere keepers of tradition; they are, instead, writers, thinkers, and resistance fighters, who embody the cultural splendor of al-Andalus and also hold out the promise of a future return to that splendor. Bourquia’s film, Zaynab, also places a female protagonist in a position of political empowerment. The film narrates the life of Zaynab al-Nafzawiyya, an eleventh-century Berber princess from Aghmat, in southern Morocco. Zaynab married Yusuf b. Tashfin, one of the founders of the Almoravid dynasty, which helped to unify the Maghrib and to bring al-Andalus under its rule. The film depicts Zaynab as a political counselor and military strategist who played an indispensable role in the creation of modern Morocco and the political unification of the Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula. The film seeks to counter the predominant Arab-centered narrative of Andalusi history by placing Moroccans – and, in particular, Moroccan Berbers – at the center of Andalusi politics. It also emphasizes Zaynab’s expertise in botany in order to draw attention to the contributions that Muslim women made to science in the medieval Mediterranean world.

Al-Andalus has long fascinated Brazilians. Among Arab immigrants in Brazil, the first large-scale literary movement called itself “Al-‘Usba al-Andalusiyya” (the Andalusian League); it was formed in São Paulo in 1933 by poets such as Shukralla al-Jurr, Mishayl Ma‘luf, Rashid Salim al-Khuri, and others, who left a mark on the development of modern Arabic poetry and are considered the second most important school of Mahjar (immigrant) writers, after Al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya (the Pen League) of New York in the 1920s. The São Paulo poets looked to al-Andalus as a sort of Mahjari golden age in which immigrant Arabs established a civilization on foundations of cultural mixing and hybridization—the same values that Brazil embraces as defining features of its own national character. This idea of Brazilian identity was given powerful, celebratory articulation, also in 1933, by influential sociologist Gilberto Freyre in Casa grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), in which he argued that Moorish influence pervades Portuguese culture as one of the three main sources of Brazilian culture and society (the others being the Amerindian and the African). This convergence of two kinds of nostalgia for al-Andalus—one mainstream and one minority, the former expressed in Portuguese and the latter in Arabic—has numerous implications for Brazilian identity and for the position of Arabs and Arab immigrants both in Brazilian society and in the Brazilian imaginary. Cultural expressions of that nostalgia have also been abundant. In previous work, I have analyzed the representation of Morocco, colored by the legacy of al-Andalus, in the popular Brazilian telenovela O Clone (The Clone); in this presentation, I offer a reading of Gilberto Abrão’s novel O escriba de Granada (2014, The Scribe of Granada) as the latest manifestation of that nostalgia and a more direct linkage than ever before between Muslim Spain and contemporary Brazil.

While there is a persistent emphasis on the fall of Granada as the ending point of the golden age of the shared cultural and historical legacy between Morocco and Spain, the ramifications of the eight hundred years ‘coexistence or convivencia have continued to inform and shape cultural production by writers and artists from both sides of the straits. In The Moor’s Account, published in 2014, Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-American writer, engages with this topic via a rewriting of a failed Spanish campaign in Florida and the South West of the US known as the Navaez’ expedition. She rewrites it from the perspective of Estebanico, a Moroccan slave from the city of Azemmour, known then as Mazagin, who participated in the expedition but never had his views incorporated in the Joint report that Núñez Cabeza de Vaca submitted to the Spanish Crown. Although purportedly regarded as counter factual narrative, I argue in this paper that the Moor’s Account engages with this specific event, right after the expulsion of the last Moors from Granada, in order to contest the veracity of the Castilian history-writing practice. By invoking a variety of rhetorical motifs and narrative strategies, this narrative not only subverts the Spanish version of the expedition but also valorizes and validates the contribution of Moors and Africans to Native American history and culture. In this paper, I specifically explore the writer’s strategic inclusion in this rewriting of the interaction between Iberia and Morocco of Andalusian episodes that reframe the narrative within a revisionist and a postcolonial cultural-historical trajectory. Lalami’s narrative in this regard seeks to recover the lost or repressed histories and reveal the mechanisms of subjugation and control that inform Spanish cultural hegemonic discourse towards indigenous peoples in the new world. Similarly, I examine how this text interrogates the Spanish original text of Narváez expedition known as La Relación (Report), also known as Naufragios (Shipwrecked), which is Cabeza da Vaca’s official account of his travels, prepared for the Spanish crown and first published in Zamora, Spain, in 1542.