The death of Caliph ‘Uthman b. ‘Affan in the second half of the seventh century and the subsequent political upheaval and retribution by his Umayyad clan both sparked the First Islamic Civil War and created a political rift that continues to the present day. Killed following a period of sequestration in his home, Caliph ‘Uthman succumbed to a violent stabbing while reading the Quran; a book he played no small part in collecting and standardizing. ‘Uthman’s blood-stained shirt was famously displayed on the pulpit (minbar) of the Mosque of the Prophet in Madina by then governor (later caliph) Mu‘awiya b. abi Sufyan not only to rouse emotion and rally support but also to counter rival claims of succession. Centuries later the Umayyad Emirs and Caliphs of Cordoba, as preservers and protectors of that legacy, incorporated similar practices. Including the blood spattered pages of ‘Uthman’s Quran into their public ceremonial and thus re-enacting the trauma of ‘Uthman’s assassination they hinged narratives of the usurpation of their own rule by the Abbasids onto broader claims of Umayyad legitimacy. Through a series of questions, this paper addresses the Umayyad fear of forgetting in early Islam and Medieval Islamic Spain by contextualizing the politicization of relics in public ceremonial as agents for the re-enactment of historical trauma. How should ‘Uthman’s relics be understood within the context of Medieval Islamic relics-both ‘Alid and Sunni (such as the relics of the Prophet Muhammad)? Does his martyrdom alter how these relics were mobilized by the Umayyads of Spain, considering how relics formed the bedrock of contemporary Fatimid claims of legitimacy? What does the contextualization of performative relics at the Great Mosque of Cordoba teach us about Medieval Abbasid and Fatimid shrines and reliquaries? By considering how ‘Uthman’s relics formed a line of remembrance and re-enactment of historical trauma in the public space of the mosque, this paper aims to both de-stabilize and unravel traditional views of the role of relics in Umayyad legitimacy construction.

In the medieval period, the modern European nation-state of Spain was a collection of small kingdoms, both Christian and Muslim, who sometimes fought each other, at other times allied with each other, and regularly engaged in trade and cultural exchange, resulting in a unique civilization on the edge of the medieval worlds of both Europe and the Middle East. After 1492, however, with the final defeat of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada and the unification of Spain under Christian rule, and especially by the time of the expulsion, between 1609-1614, of the descendants of those earlier Muslim populations, a new, solely Christian and Western European identity was being forged that endeavored to forget or to minimize its Arab and Islamic heritage. It's a process of selective remembrance, or even a fear of remembering, that has continued to the present day, with the official public image of the country emphasizing a Christian and European heritage and downplaying its centuries-long medieval Arab and Islamic roots. In researching this project, I plan to consult three main sources or ideas for the fear of remembrance: a popular perspective on medieval Spanish history as seen in brochures and tourism promotions, for example, with the Andalusi Umayyad mosque in Cordoba, which demonstrates the official governmental version of Spanish collective memory, including advocacy of a specific public image and attempts at co-optation of Islamic architecture in the modern day; the development and perpetuation of the myth of 'reconquista', which is present in both popular and academic circles and attempts to create a largely Christian order from a chaotic period of medieval Iberian history; and a recently published and controversial monograph by Dario Fernandez-Morera entitled, "The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise," that argues against the concept of 'convivencia' and rejects the enduring role of Arab and Islamic culture in the modern Spanish state. A fear of remembrance of the historical and cultural influences of Al-Andalus allows for an emphasis on a Christian, Western European identity that is the preferred official memory in the modern day and avoids the potential political, social, and cultural conflicts of identity that could result from an association and/or affinity with both Western Europe and the Middle East.

What characterizes the Palestinian and Arab reaction to the 1967 War can be described as an almost panic or fear of complete epistemic erasure. The War made it clear to Palestinians that Israel is capable of physically erasing Palestine, as well as (if not more importantly) its history. In order to assess the impact of the war on the Palestinian literary and academic production, this paper will address the works of Palestinians from three geographical and political contexts (the West, Israel, and the Middle East), who published before and after the 1967 War. The rationale behind this comparison is simple: to check whether there were any transformations in their writings, to characterize the changes, and to identify patterns if there are any. The paper will focus on the works of Edward Said, Emile Habiby and Ghassan Kanafani. It will explore how did Palestinian intellectuals deal with the fear of oblivion in different geographical, political and ideological contexts in which they lived? How did it propel and shape their writing? What are the underlying themes, issues, and parameters that they utilized to address this fear? For example, what propelled Ghassan Kanafani and Edward Said to investigate the depiction of the Palestinian/Arab in Jewish and Western literature and consciousness immediately after the war? The paper will show that all three authors agree on the need to maintain and preserve ‘Palestinian presence’, through ‘fighting falsifications and distortions’, as well as through providing ‘corrective knowledge’. Nevertheless, the question is: whose ‘corrective knowledge’ should Palestinians adopt? The question of context is crucial. My contention is that the outcomes of Palestinian fear of oblivion exceed the boundaries of Palestinian literature and discourse. For example, Said admits, in his 2001 eulogy of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, that this article was the basis of his research that led to Orientalism. In other words, given that Said’s Orientalism was credited of the creation of Postcolonial Studies as an academic field, and the use of Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘resistance literature’ in research on other ‘post-colonial’ literatures, would it be possible to say that the 1967 War have propelled and shaped one of the biggest academic developments in the humanities in the 20th century?

Abstract The Palestinians – and Palestinian culture/s – are defined (in part) by fragmentation. These breaks, above all else, are territorial in nature and rooted in national traumas affixed to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. This is why the case and cause of the Palestinians are largely analyzed in the realms of history, geopolitics, and international law; and subsequently, most discussions dealing with the states of oblivion confronting the Palestinians remain centered upon national fate and a resolution to the Palestinian refugee crisis rather than how an overarching fear of oblivion has shaped Palestinian culture and identity historically and contemporarily. Given the stakes, this is not at all surprising, even if the continued specter of oblivion has had clearly traceable impacts upon Palestinian cultural praxis and self-reflections since 1948. Toward the latter, it is perhaps instructive to highlight that until 1976 the communal name for Israeli-Arabs in colloquial Arabic was mansiyyin [‘the forgotten’]. Yet the fear of being forgotten is shared among Palestinians. For example, the Palestinian Resistance Movement of the 1960s and 1970s sought to resurrect the ‘question of Palestine’ back into international consciousness after being pushed off the map, so to speak, in 1948. Later within this historical window, the PFLP’s spectacles of violence and terrorism were motivated to some degree by a fear that the world had forgotten about the Palestinians and needed to be reminded of their misery. However, less discussed are the ways in which a fear of being forgotten has played out among non-political Palestinian actors. Seeking to analyze how oblivion has influenced Palestinian visual culture in particular, I argue that Palestinian graffiti is a materialized form of cultural memory partially derived out of communal anxieties driven by threats of erasure. As such, graffiti is a performance of being that both distills and refuses these anxieties through nonverbal iterations of an unforgotten, and unresolved, past. While inside the occupied Palestinian territories specifically, dense agglomerations of graffiti spar with oblivion head on. Additionally, shahid [‘martyr’] posters are an axial visual cultural production performing a similar function by memorializing – and transubstantiating – loss into a larger living collective struggle. Like graffiti, these sun-washed blue-violet faces are a marker of Palestinian space; and represent a more macabre articulation of oblivion. This paper is buttressed by fieldwork and photographs collected in the West Bank from 2015-2017. Keywords Palestine, graffiti, visual culture, collective memory, oblivion, erasure