Paper Short Abstract:

For migrants & Spaniards whose lives straddle the Mediterranean, everyday heritagization of Muslim Spain narrows the nationalistic chasm of ‘home’ & ‘unlike home’. The blurring of this binary presses upon authorised heritage defenders to again work to refute formerly discarded views of this past.

Paper Abstract:

For migrants and Spaniards whose lives have straddled the Mediterranean, narrating the Muslim history and heritage shared between southern Spain and the MENA region has long collided with the national-Catholic version of Spain’s medieval past. As an alternative representation to the official State and Church history of the Fascist dictatorship, their collective memory dissolves key dominant historical interpretations, blurring entrenched binaries of Europe (and the West) and its Others; European Judeo-Christian secularism and foreign Islam. Consequently, the everyday ways in which they’ve engage with this past – including their academic scholarship, their rejection of most local commemorations and their occupational connections to this past – are often discredited, dismissed by scholars, politicians, and even their own neighbours as a ‘romanticisation’ or idealisation of Muslim Spain, or simply ignored. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I consider the everyday practices; historical narratives; and engagements with this past of residents in Granada, Spain – North African migrants, Spanish converts to Islam and left-wing activists – who have considered both Spain and the MENA region as ‘home’ at different life stages. For this disparate group, the medieval Moorish quarter of the Albayzín with its built heritage becomes a space in which the distance between the strict nationalistic distinction of ‘home’ and ‘unlike home’ is shortened and assuaged. Their everyday heritage not only connects those with Iberian origins to wider subaltern views of this past that entirely unsettle hegemonic epistemologies, but also tempers anti-Islamic racism that those of North African descent face in their new home.