Rachel Scott & AbdoolKarim Vakil 
Al-Andalus in Motion 
Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Contexts

At a time when the discourse of a clash of civilisations has been re-grounded anew in scaremongering and dog-whistle politics over a Hispanic ‘challenge’ to America and a Muslim ‘challenge’ to European societies, and in the context of the War on Terror and migration panics, evocations of al-Andalus – medieval Iberia under Islamic rule – have gained new and hotly polemic topicality, championed and contested as either exemplary models or hoodwinking myths.

The essays in this volume explore how al-Andalus has been transformed into a ‘travelling concept’: that is, a place in time that has transcended its original geographic and historical location to become a figure of thought with global reach. They show how Iberia’s medieval past, where Islam, Judaism and Christianity co-existed in complex, paradoxical and productive ways, has offered individuals and communities in multiple periods and places a means of engaging critically and imaginatively with questions of religious pluralism, orientalism and colonialism, exile and migration, intercultural contact and national identity. Travelling in their turn from the medieval to the contemporary world, across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and covering literary, cultural and political studies, critical Muslim and Jewish studies, they illustrate the contemporary significance of the Middle Ages as a site for collaborative interdisciplinary thinking.

Table of Content

I: Departure Points

Introduction: Concepts, Origins, Aims –
Rachel Scott

1. Al-Andalus in Motion: Paths and Perspectives –
Abdool Karim Vakil


II: Translating Al-Andalus: Travelling across Languages

2. Translating Tales of True Friendship out of Al-Andalus: The Medieval Castilian and Hebrew Translations of
Kalila wa-Dimna –
Rachel Scott

3. The Return of an Andalusi Moment: Sephardi Alternatives to the Monolingual Imagination, Pre and Post Partitioned Palestine –
Yuval Evri


III:(Re)Visions of Al-Andalus in Diaspora and Exile

4. The Return to Al-Andalus in Blanco White’s ‘The Alcázar of Seville’ –
Daniel Muñoz Sempere

5. Bystanders and Borderlands: The Andalusi Frontier and the Sephardic Ballad –
Julian Weiss


IV: Andalusi Space as Node and Utopia: Europe, Islam, Empire

6. Andalusi Space and the European Network in the German
Rolandslied –
Doriane Zerka

7. Andalusi Utopia and Muslim Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia: Ismail Gasprinskii’s Epistolary Novel
Dar al-Rahat –
Igor Alexeev, Ksenia Kulikova, Sofia Lahuti


V: Al-Andalus and the Politics of Religious Identity

8. Al-Andalus on the Mind: The Jewish Golden Age and the Spanish Inquisition in Nineteenth-Century American-Jewish Historical Writing –
Yitzchak Schwartz

9. Medievalist Passports: Contested Rights of Return for the Descendants of Medieval Iberian Jews and Muslims –
Carlos Yebra López


VI: Legacies, Landscapes and ‘Travel Buildings’

10. The ‘Orient’ Express: The
Neo-Mudéjar Train Station in Toledo and the Spanish Debate on National Architectural Style –
Olga Bush

11. The Forgotten ‘Orient’: Travel Writing in Portugal, c. 1930-1949 –
Juliet Gryspeerdt


Epilogue

Travelling with and through Al-Andalus –
Abdool Karim Vakil

About the author

ABDOOLKARIM VAKIL is Lecturer in Contemporary Portuguese History in the Departments of History and Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies at King’s College London.