Introduction
The historiographical idea of progress emerged as a way of containing the crisis of confidence that emerged at the threshold of Western modernity when experience no longer supplied Europeans with an adequate foundation for prognosticating about the future.Footnote 1 The ideology of progress served two purposes for Western states. It allowed for the disavowal of the more errant tendencies of history, ones that could not be reconciled to the hopes and ambitions of modern subjects. But progress also functioned as an instrument with which Western states sought to conquer and subdue Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It constituted the primary discursive offering that the empires made to the peoples they colonized and, it was hoped, the means for assuring the attachment of the colonized to the colonial project.
A certain understanding and ethics of time served as an object of imperial education that the major empires sought to impart to the colonized.Footnote 2 In the Middle East, the conflict between overlapping empires concealed a more fundamental coincidence of temporal aims. All of the modern Western empires in the region invoked a rhetoric of temporality, and more specifically of the promise, for understanding and justifying their work abroad. Although the French didn’t promise the Algerians autonomy as the British did the Egyptians, their “civilizing mission” functioned in an analogous way to redirect attention from the present to the future and presupposed an equally optimistic view of historical time. The British offered less tangible benefits behind their frequent declarations that they were acting to make the Egyptians ready for democracy, but they also made promises in order both to suggest the advantages to be gained from acquiescence and to forestall anticolonial action in the present. Likewise the Americans, who inherited the mantle of empire in the postwar era, employed the discourse of development to counter Soviet designs in the region and to secure oil resources and markets for the consumption of American goods. And the Israelis, proponents of a settler colonial if not clearly imperial formation, have subjected “final status negotiations” with the Palestinian leadership—to say nothing of more fundamental demands for freedom and equality within the existing state—to indefinite delay.
In each of these cases, a distinct logic governs the temporization of the colonizer. And yet the appeal to the promise—of independence, of civilization, of economic development, of recognition—is not merely a cynical ploy to produce passivity among the colonized, but rather the function of sincere beliefs about historical time. The assumption that history unfolds in a linear and teleological fashion, and will so, too, for the colonized if they submit to Western rule and its attendant historical narratives, pervades imperial and settler colonial thought in spite of the differing ends of individual states. The reason for this continuity, I would suggest, has less to do with the reasoning of particular imperial states than with the historical outlook particular to western Europe at the time of the great expansions of empires in the nineteenth century. For it was precisely the experience of conquering foreign lands that contributed to the European sense that history was pliable to their will and bending toward progress. Only the case of Israel suggests a different perception of time, insofar as this is a state instituted by a people fleeing depressingly constant hostility in Europe and then a world-shattering catastrophe during the holocaust, and aspiring to reproduce the mythic past of scripture. Yet the founding ideological commitments of the state and its subsequent history demonstrate a progressive outlook remarkably similar to that of the western European empires and an equally concerted will to forget the past by—literally—plowing it under.Footnote 3 In this respect the “state of fantasy” at work in the Zionist disavowal of the errancy of temporality was only one instance of a broader Western response to modernity’s untimeliness.Footnote 4
Like the Western nations, the colonized peoples of the Middle East experienced a temporalization of history—the becoming uncanny of history—without, however, developing the supplementary and consolatory fiction of progress. It was, in fact, the colonial intrusion that precipitated the temporalization specific to colonial and postcolonial life. Because colonialism entailed the external imposition of change, the benefits of which redounded to the colonizers and a small comprador elite, the perception of an unprecedented historical mutability could not be reconciled with the logic of a meliorative spirit driving history forward. However, the sense of anxiety—which Harry Harootunian calls “the specter of unrelieved uncertainty”—persisted as a marker of modernity’s challenge to existing temporal frames in the colonies.Footnote 5 After the cultural forms that had previously sustained collective existence were distorted and devalued by the colonizer’s representations and subsumed by capital, the colonized could no longer extrapolate a sense of temporal direction from existing historical tendencies.Footnote 6 Even in the absence of any program to indoctrinate colonial subjects with a sense of their culture’s historical inferiority, the project of reorganizing colonial life to make it governable and to integrate it into the world market necessarily depreciated the wisdom gleaned from that past. In colonial Egypt, for example, where Lord Cromer purposefully underinvested in education in order to preempt the emergence of nationalist consciousness (following his interpretation of the Indian example),Footnote 7 a general feeling of “decline” (inḥiṭaṭ, inḥilāl) or “backwardness” (ta’akhkhur) pervaded intellectual discourse. The use of these terms across the eastern Mediterranean during the period of the nahda, or intellectual renaissance, did not simply indicate acceptance of Western norms of progress or a desire for Western education; they spoke as well to a perception that Arabs occupied a much different position in historical time than Westerners and that such historical advancement remained unattainable for them.Footnote 8 For it came to be understood that the drivers of modernity—the ones who set the standards of efficiency, productivity, and instrumentality that were remaking the very landscape of colonial existence—were foreign colonizers rather than Arabs themselves.Footnote 9 Although Arabs were not immured from the globe-girdling projects that had rationalized Western perceptions of historical ascendancy, the subordinate position they occupied within these projects preempted the easy enthusiasm they might otherwise have felt about them.
The promises that the Western empires made to the colonized never managed to construct a new common sense under terms of governance defined by dominance rather than hegemony.Footnote 10 Rather than functioning as scenarios of interpellation into modernity, discursive mediations of a new social order, or safety valves for present discontent, these vows of future historical redemption only demonstrated the gap between the chiliastic rhetoric of imperialism and its perennial deferral of actual emancipation. No less significantly, they turned the timing of making good on these promises into an object of contention. As a consequence, the polemic between colonizer and colonized often took the form of debates over chronology—about the effective supersession of the precolonial past, the justice of the colonizer in the present, and the proper moment for independence. Dipesh Chakrabarty has memorably described one such confrontation in distinguishing the colonizer’s efforts to sequester the denizens of the colony in the “imaginary waiting room of history” from the latter’s insistence on immediate liberation.Footnote 11 It was inevitable that time itself should become an issue for colonial thinkers when they considered their subjection. But if modernity presented the West with a problem of historical orientation that had to be disavowed through appeal to progressive time, in the colonial world the questions opened by the temporalization of modernity prompted questions over which no consensus could be found. The problematic nature of modern time persisted into the postcolonial era as newly independent states like Egypt took up the American-led task of “development” without having the means to secure it.
Among the most interesting solutions to this question is the Granada Trilogy, written in the mid-1990s by the Egyptian novelist and literary critic Radwa Ashour (1946–2014). Ashour’s narrative disrupts the linearity of the past, present, and future by introducing the ontological question of potentiality and actuality. She works against the backdrop of persistent coloniality, which continues to ramify in the forms of war, occupation, sectarian conflict, regime change, and neoliberal development, and she situates these contemporary catastrophes in idiosyncratic relation to a history of similar events in the past. Ashour has chosen the novel form as the vessel for her effort to reconfigure the temporality of Arab history not out of the iconoclasm that motivated comparable attempts by the modernists in the West but rather out of fidelity to a long tradition of colonial and postcolonial Arabic prose writing that has been concerned with interrogating the contemporary experience through which time becomes a problem for thought. In this respect she may be situated within a genealogy of Arabic narratives of time that includes Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s Ḥadīth ‘Īsā ibn Hishām (The Saying of ‘Isa ibn Hisham, 1898–99), Farah Antun’s Ūrūshalīm al-Jadīda (The New Jerusalem, 1904), Tawfiq al-Hakim’s play Ahl al-Kahf (The People of the Cave, 1933), Suhayl Idris’s Al-Ḥayy al-Lātīnī (The Latin Quarter, 1953), and Idwar al-Kharrat’s Rāma wa al-Tinnīn (Rama and the Dragon, 1980). Among these works, however, only Ashour suggests an affirmative vision of historical time that does not depend on the suppositions of historicism.
Ashour is often identified with a realist style that represents thematically the triumph of Arab subjects in their struggles with corrupt authorities. Ashour’s work is marked by a passionate critique of Western imperialism and the narrow authoritarianism, nationalism, politicized religion, and oligarchic capitalism that have come to define Egyptian society. The Search for a Black Poetics, for example, the dissertation she wrote as a student in the departments of Afro-American studies and English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, identified Black Americans’ persecution as a colonial situation.Footnote 12 Likewise, her novels condemn various tendencies in Arab culture, such as a naive faith in the saving power of religion, which cannot provide an effective defense against the systematic colonization of Arab life-worlds in her estimation. Her work is therefore not unjustly characterized as an attempt to foster the cultural conditions for Arab self-becoming. Nevertheless, I argue that her work is less concerned with demonstrating Arab victory than it is with thinking seriously about the philosophy of history in which previous defeats have been understood. Ashour engages the problematic of Arab time in a way that avoids both the nostalgia of cultural conservatism and the “creative destruction” of neoliberal “forward thinking.” Displacing the terms of this debate, Ashour searches the past for traces of a future never realized.
Even as her political aims largely coincide with those of the anticolonial generation, Ashour’s aesthetic choices depart in several significant ways from those of her predecessors. Her novels combine the social realism and plain speech of committed writing with the formal experimentation of those who came to understand this realism as politically futile.Footnote 13 She thus marries the confident self-assertion of the most vocal nationalists to the humility and reflexivity of experimental writers such as Elias Khoury, Idwar al-Kharrat, and Mohamed Berrada to propose a novel historical outlook for the artist-activist, one that is neither glibly confident nor overly pessimistic. This in turn entails a different understanding of the metaphysics of action, one that does not presuppose strictly causal outcomes or repent of concerted action because of uncertainty about the actor’s ontological status. Ashour allows readers to understand that history does not move forward in a simple fashion, with the present constantly cannibalizing all that comes before; nor does it remain at a standstill. History, she suggests, has entered a phase in which the same disasters keep recurring. Although that portends further annihilation and expropriation, it also means that the past, and particularly its dispositions toward its futures, have not been obviated at all but continue to permeate the present.
In the Granada Trilogy (1994–95), Ashour goes to the primal scene of modernity—1492 and its proliferating significations across time and space—in order to rethink both the modernity we have and a modernity that could have been. In this narrative the represented past recalls the present, even as it overflows its chronological frame and gestures toward a future not yet realized. In studying the “Moriscos” of Andalusia during the Spanish Inquisitions, she finds sources of hope to animate the contemporary Palestinian struggle as well as the broader Arab effort to resist the military and economic encroachments of foreign powers. One might say that she has rejected a notion of Arab history as “done, unchangeable, and past” and has sought to “revivify its unaccomplished, cut-off—even slaughtered—possibilities.”Footnote 14 In so doing she has made this history, one of suffering and aspiration, experientially and affectively relevant to the current conjuncture—rather than only an object lesson for those who would glorify or condemn the past.
1492 as History and Warning
Ashour wrote the Granada Trilogy (1994–95) during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011), who justified his authoritarianism by suggesting that the Egyptian people were “not yet able to assimilate full democracy.”Footnote 15 Elaborating later, Mubarak explained why the political system couldn’t yet be opened to popular participation: “We are dealing with a weary people and we must put controls on everything. When we achieve economic stability, rest assured that we will be afraid of nothing. . . . When will we reach the same standard of democracy as [the United Kingdom, France, and the United States]? When we raise our cultural standard.”Footnote 16 Mubarak here gave tacit expression to a number of troubling norms: the paternalism of the leader; the use of a cultural rather than an economic standard to measure social problems; the condescension to and even fear of Egyptian citizens; and the pedagogical role of the state. Mubarak also appealed to the same temporal logic that had been used by the British to discipline Egyptian nationalists and to stave off demands for independence. He assumed that Egypt occupied a position within homogeneous empty time in which the possibility of a meaningful transformation was effectively impossible and suggested instead that the transformation of Egyptian society should be routinized, quantifiable, and predictable. Not only did this assumption work to foreclose the emergence of an alternative to the regime, but it also threw up a barrier to a dialogue between the competing demands of the past and the future. Ashour sought to undo this regnant temporalization of politics by constructing a narrative in which the containers separating past, present, and future come undone.
The Granada Trilogy opens in 1491 in Albaicín, the Muslim quarter of Granada, just as the Castilians have taken the preparations necessary to annex this last Muslim kingdom in Iberia. The narrative centers on the family of a bookbinder named Abu Ja‘far, whose granddaughter Salima develops an interest in medicine and secretly pursues an education in the great tradition of Arab learning. Abu Ja‘far’s grandson Hasan, a conservative family man who abases himself in order to appease the authorities, marries Maryama, the central figure of the second volume. Maryama in turn raises ‘Ali, her grandson and the last of the family line in Spain. ‘Ali, a boy in the second volume, pursues a nomadic existence in the third volume before finally settling down in a village near Valencia, having failed to establish a family of his own. The Trilogy ends with the edict of expulsion in 1609 and a representation of the chaos and despair of the exilees as they board boats bound for the Maghreb.
Among the most significant formal features of the Trilogy is its compression of nearly 120 years into some five hundred pages. Necessarily, then, the author uses a number of ellipses in order to move the story to its culmination; she represents the moments of this chronology through multiple, often brief accounts of particular encounters with the Spanish state. By portraying the period from 1492 to 1609 as an unbroken series of calamities without peripeteia, she denies the possibility of individual or collective bildung that underwrites the historiographic model of progress. But in narrating this history as a collection of fragmentary perceptions of persecution, she suggests that no character has an understanding of the broader historical forces at work. This punctuated yet continuous history conveys the impression that life for these characters consists of an unending sequence of disasters, but one that disallows any possibility of adducing meaning. They are immersed in a gradually unfolding tragedy the terms of which they cannot perceive.
Ashour begins her novel not by representing the plenitude and splendor of Muslim Spain—by which the significance of its subsequent loss could be gauged—but with the first harbingers of its destruction. The novel engages in very little reflection on the specificities of what was lost. Ashour thereby neutralizes the reader’s preunderstanding of Andalusia’s qualities, whether of conviviality or intercommunal conflict.Footnote 17 It is composed instead of a series of calamities and setbacks for the Muslim community, called “Arabs” [al-‘arab] or “Moriscos” [al-mūrīskīyyūn] by the author, from the various edicts proscribing their religious and cultural practices to the two abortive revolts in the Alpujarras Mountains (in 1499 and 1568). From this perspective, we can understand that she is not interested in the “loss” of Andalusia, if by this one understands the deprivation of a preexisting presence or fullness of community. Aiming to reevaluate the conquest, conversion, and eventual expulsion of Andalusian Muslims, Ashour eliminates the ground of nostalgia without underestimating the longing—the affective force—that accompanies Arabs’ cultural memory of their time in the region.Footnote 18
The first volume of the Trilogy opens with a description of three events that the community interprets as auguries of bad fortune. First, a naked woman briefly stops to accept a coat from Abu Ja‘far as she silently passes his workshop. Abu Ja‘far wonders if she is a figment of his imagination [ru’yā min ru’ān al-khayāl].Footnote 19 On the following day, the whole town is abuzz about the drowning of Musa bin Abi al-Ghassan, a rebel who had rejected a treaty proposed by the Castilians. For the next three days, no one can sleep for fear that Musa’s death foreshadows the broader community’s fate. At the same time, the corpse of an unknown woman is found floating on the surface of the river. In a state of anxious apprehension [al-tawajjūs], Abu Ja‘far comes to perceive these events as tokens of an apocalypse: “The whirlpools of the river had swallowed the remaining hope, the spiritual crux and social contract of the nation [‘aqd al-umma] had dissolved, and god’s children had been orphaned.”Footnote 20 By the end of the chapter, Fernando and Isabel’s ultimatum to the Muslims of Granada demanding their submission has circulated around Albaicín. So too has the capitulation to this order by the Muslim leaders under the direction of Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad (also known as Boabdil). A general tone of uncertainty pervades the community, an anticipatory affect that we might also translate as dread.
Several things are noteworthy about the way that Ashour begins the novel. The first is that the image of the nude woman, while clearly symbolic of the Muslim community’s fate, also prefigures the reader’s experience. This omen makes augurs (rather than historians) of both the Granadans and the Trilogy’s readers, demanding that they prepare themselves for further loss and ruin. As Mahmud al-Dab‘ argues, the opening figure condenses all of the terrifying ambiguity of the Trilogy into a single tone and image;Footnote 21 to this we can add that it produces an effect of passive and foreboding expectation. Yet it is crucial to observe that Ashour does not simply endorse an Islamic, religious, or mystagogical disposition. She is deeply skeptical of the trust that many characters put in the power of God or other outsiders, whether Ottoman, Egyptian, French, or English, to deliver the Muslims from the persecution of the Inquisition. The novel presents, as more than a matter of historiographical fidelity, a horizon of expectations that is tempered by belief and nonscientific means of determining causality and consequence. It suggests that to fully appreciate what was lost in the series of disasters culminating in the expulsion of the Moriscos, one must understand the ways in which Andalusians oriented themselves toward their own possibilities and how they conceived of their futures. In doing so it locates the burden of loss in the missed opportunities and the dashed hopes of Andalusia’s human subjects.
Second, the novel commences without attempting to establish a setting, to introduce a narrative voice, or to present an ideological lens through which the ensuing events should be grasped. The Granada Trilogy, ostensibly a member of the historical novel family, differs in these ways from its forebears in this archetypically realist genre.Footnote 22 The Trilogy also eschews the kind of ethnographic and geographic description that is central to novels of becoming, paradigmatically the bildungsroman; such novels inevitably begin by characterizing a state, whether of a character’s interior or social status, which subsequently undergoes a transformation in the course of the narrative. In Ashour’s work, by contrast, the moment of crisis or exception occurs at the outset, so that readers do not have an opportunity to acquaint themselves with a situation that will then be disrupted. Ashour refuses to conjure the idealized world whose ending the opening events of the novel presumably foretell. And by folding the entirety of the novel into the exceptional terrain of impending catastrophe, Ashour questions the capacity for self-alteration under conditions of external duress. Ashour critiques the longing for a supposedly perfected society in which no becoming would be necessary, and she suggests that the impingement of the Castilians on Granadan society arrests the possibility for self-transformation within historical time. Her defamiliarization of the opening chronotope disallows her novel from participating in the construction of a national imaginary, as is common in historical narratives written in both the Western languages and Arabic. Whereas Jurji Zaydan, the most famous Arabic historical novelist of the early twentieth century, thought that “disseminating history in a novelistic style is the best way to urge people to study [history] and to seek out more of it”Footnote 23 —suggesting a view of the historical novel as an instrument of national formation by the aggregation of historically minded readers—Ashour instead presents an absence at the site where the nation’s foundations are expected to be.
Third, the ominous mood that she evokes at the outset spreads by way of rumors [al-shā’i‘āt].Footnote 24 These rumors testify to the lack of an authoritative narrative about what is happening to the people of Granada: the Spanish presence is experienced as sheer, nondiscursive violence, and the Arab leadership is too dispersed to provide guidance. In its absence, theories about the current dislocation proliferate, a fact that tugs against the work’s realistic texture.Footnote 25 But the rumors also function to make the community of Moriscos cohere through a form of communication that is aural rather than visual, rhizomatic rather than serial or simultaneous. Rumor supplies the mechanism through which oppressed, outlawed communities are able to sustain a minimal public sphere and a collective existence.Footnote 26 The people of Albaicín are alert to the signs of danger manifest in the negotiations between the Spanish and Morisco leaderships but unable to construct an adequate response on this stage. Rumor allows them to discursively effect their proscribed collective existence and so to assert a minimal control over these events.
The novel’s omens serve as the pivot allowing the unintelligibility of the present political flux—in which truths established over eight hundred years no longer have any purchase—to be transformed into historiological signs. The rumors about these omens constitute a rudimentary analysis of the contemporary conjuncture that serves as a working prognostication about what must be done to mitigate the worst of what is coming. Omens are ruptures in the fabric of the present through which the future shimmers through, albeit in highly ambiguous ways; this ambiguity in turn calls forth recognition of the mutability and ephemerality of the present. Such an understanding of the present time’s lack of eternal purchase requires a conjunctural politics—a feel for the occasion—in order to turn the omen into a timely intervention. Although the Trilogy’s characters recognize the signs of the times, they fail to seize the moment in order to construct an adequate response to the Spanish incursions.
Hope without Guarantees
The Granada Trilogy represents Spanish power in Andalusia as one that depends on violence rather than persuasion for its effect. This is partly because the Spanish make very few appearances in the narrative, and readers must interpret their intentions through the consequences that their actions have on Muslim characters. In the absence of a figure who could give voice to the ideological basis of Spanish rule in the south, one gets the impression that the Spanish aren’t interested in interpellating Muslims as loyal subjects. For Ashour the Spanish presence signifies a set of interdictions, and yet this negative project functions still to foster a distinctly modern subjectivity. For even as the Spanish figures represented in the novel eschew the kinds of pedagogical projects that would tie Andalusian subjects to modern understandings of economics, truth, or selfhood, they nevertheless act to disrupt existing frameworks of self-orientation. But this disorientation must be understood as a positive condition as well: for it mirrors a larger dynamic characteristic of modernity, in which the increasing migrations of people and constant overturning of established patterns of practice and belief produce a generalized unmooring of individuals from the life-worlds that give them meaning. It is this effort to confound subjective truths, combined with the sheer drive for territory, that makes the Spanish Inquisition a project of colonial modernity in Ashour’s telling. No domain of Andalusian experience makes this clearer than in the Muslim characters’ perception of time.
The temporality of the Granada Trilogy is out of joint because of the differential tempos of Morisco life and Castilian legality. Beginning with reports of the Castilian seizure of the Alhambra, the bad news does not stop coming: the Castilians force Muslims to convert publicly; they confiscate their books; they outlaw the calling of the muezzin; they demand an exorbitant tax from every person in Malaga, selling those who can’t pay into slavery; they close the baths that the Muslims operate; they forbid Muslims from wearing traditional dress, including veils; and they forbid speaking Arabic.Footnote 27 As Iqbal Samir observes, the narrative refers to these ordinances through the use of free indirect discourse or dialogue in such a way as to disclose the manner in which they interfere with the characters’ lives.Footnote 28 The prohibition on celebrating in the traditional way becomes a factor when Hasan prepares to marry Maryama; the ban on books registers as a disaster for the bookbinder Abu Ja‘far and his inquisitive granddaughter Salima; the interdiction of speaking Arabic undermines the education of Maryama’s youngest son and forces him to acquire his mother tongue by clandestine means. The caprice with which the laws are instituted inhibits the characters from forming expectations about what is to come. With each new edict, they find themselves increasingly unable to construct a useful representation of the future.
In contrast to this deadening sense of the history in which they are caught up, Abu Ja‘far’s collection of books offers a counterpoint and a source of hope. Having compiled these books while working as a bookbinder, he passes them to his granddaughter Salima; she in turn puts them to the end of studying medicine and adds several medical encyclopedias to the collection. Salima moves the books back and forth between her two homes in Albaicín and ‘Ayn al-Dama‘ in order to elude the Inquisition. Her sister-in-law Maryama then assumes the burden of preserving them after Salima is executed on charges of witchcraft stemming from her role as local healer, and she passes them on to ‘Ali without putting them to use. ‘Ali buries them in the garden at Albaicín before leaving for Valencia, the last holdout of the Muslims in Andalusia; he, too, understands their vital importance, even without consulting them. The interest these books have for Salima, Maryama, and ‘Ali isn’t limited to their instrumental value. Their keepers intuit that the books matter because they represent the endurance of the broader Morisco community. They occupy a hinge between the past that they carry on and transmit to future generations and the new insights they might potentially generate in the hands of other readers.
In the second volume, the books take on an additional significance. Because very few Moriscos can read Arabic any longer, those who can assume the function of sages and liaisons between the older and younger generations. ‘Ali becomes the scribe and interpreter of Arabic letters for his town after he helps a friend to read a letter from a relative in Tunis, and later he becomes a tutor of Arabic to the town’s children. Teaching Arabic becomes a kind of spiritual exercise for him because it provides him the only meaningful contact he has with other people. In this capacity ‘Ali assumes the status of the last link between the Morisco community and the culture that the Inquisition has been working to eradicate. This transmission of language does not only pertain to the maintenance of convention and recognizable linguistic authority. For the ability to read and communicate in Arabic also implies the potential to ignite the kindling of past thinking for the sake of new, autonomous political projects directed at future political change in al-Andalus and elsewhere. Arabic here represents not simply an authentic, originary language but the possibility of multiple historical trajectories outside of the purview of imperial governance.Footnote 29
The books do not resurface in the third volume, and it is at this point that the Moriscos begin to lose hope. The action of this concluding part centers on the growing threat of expulsion, while simultaneously the promise of help from the French, English, Lutherans, and Ottomans is both evoked and dispelled. When a final revolt in the mountains is put down, and the English conclude a peace treaty with the Spanish, the Moriscos know for certain that “there is no hope.”Footnote 30 Soon after, the Spanish announce the edicts of expulsion. But at the last moment, as ‘Ali contemplates the chaos of mass exodus while watching the Moriscos board ships bound for the Maghreb, he decides not to join them. Watching the boats from the shore, he wonders to himself whether there is any appreciable lesson in the long experience of the Muslims in Spain: “Does the story have a meaning that accompanies it, or is it nonsense [‘abath], without reason [la sabab fīhā], and without resolution [la natīja]? [Is there] a thread organizing the moments or are the moments scattered in the blowing wind, without a principle governing them other than birth in the beginning and death at the conclusion?”Footnote 31 Finally, he concludes that any such principle, if it exists, must be “buried like the books preserved in Maryama’s box.”Footnote 32
The family’s books, which constitute the thread linking the three volumes and the five generations of the diegesis, have become increasingly obscure: fewer people are able to read their script; their material endurance is increasingly imperiled after long years stored in the dirt or behind plaster in “Maryama’s box”; and their religious and scientific content has been reviled by the willfully ignorant Spaniards. The books figure the possibility of deriving meaning within conditions of senseless persecution, and by extension they present the possibility of a meaningful existence.Footnote 33 They represent potentiality in a situation of actual devastation and despair. On one hand they bear the function of soliciting the potential of those who inherit them and put them to use through their creative rereadings; on the other hand, as a buried treasure and cultural patrimony, they symbolize the aspiration to endure in a state of more than mere survival. In other words, the books symbolize the effort of this family and people to preserve their capacity to become something other than what they already are. Because such becoming is possible only on the condition that one has an understanding of one’s identity as well as the ability to question this ground, it is not solely future-oriented in the way the concept is understood in the Western tradition. In other words, the potentiality that the books signify is not an immanent capacity that is simply waiting to be realized by a self-aggrandizing subject.Footnote 34 It is important, from this vantage point, that the books remain buried during the greater part of the novel and that they resurface in order to be transmitted from one guardian and one generation to the next. (In fact, they are transmitted between alternating generations, from the first to the third to the fifth generation, suggesting that the burden of the books is not a filiative one but rather an affiliative, ethical affirmation on the part of each caretaker.) The buried books do not serve only to symbolize actual, accrued knowledge, but also to mark the potential for more or other knowledges. In this way they look forward to a knowledge that has not yet been thought just as much as they reflect the knowledge that has already materialized. Even this actualized knowledge bears a non-actualized potentiality, a surfeit of possibility over and above the intended and transmitted content of the text; as it is put to use in different lives it will assume a variety of different significances. For this reason we might say that the primary content of a book for ‘Ali is a potentiality that traverses and is indifferent to the temporal divisions of past, present, and future. In this temporal figure, he finds reason to maintain a minimal hope in spite of the dismal reality he faces.
Traditional historians maintain that the decision to expel the Spanish Muslims was not taken until the 1580s when various final solutions to the “Morisco question” began to be explored—solutions that included mass sterilization and resettlement in Newfoundland and Cape Cod, as well as sending them all out to sea and scuttling the ships.Footnote 35 Ashour’s narrative suggests a more convincing representation of the temporal dynamic of this event, if not a better explanation or account of causality. The guiding historical insight of the novel is that the ethnic cleansing of Spain constituted a single historical event that played out in the lives of Moriscos as an uninterrupted disaster, one that undoes the previously multiform structure of Andalusian life and transforms it into an ethnically and religiously homogeneous node within a global empire. From the perspective of the characters that populate the world subject to this event, nothing happens to effectively alter its trajectory, in spite of momentary expectations of deliverance at the hands of various outsiders.
Traditional historiography remains bound to the record of what actually transpired and so cannot help but deliver the impression that these events have a certain necessity, argue that alternatives were historically irrelevant, and designate these alternatives as counterfactuals and consign them to oblivion. Fernand Braudel—although not a traditional historian—argued that “[t]he physics of history, the inexorable law of a stronger force was at work” in the Spanish conquests.Footnote 36 He elevated what actually happened into the necessary course of events and the only thing that counts for historiography, and so encouraged a certain kind of fatalism. For ‘Ali, by contrast, the past is not ever really past but has an enduring power: “Time clarifies memory like gold submerged in water. One day or a thousand years, you will find it glimmering at the bottom of the river.”Footnote 37 Through the power of “memory,” one that can be elicited by books, even that which has been lost to history can be recovered for contemporary use. In particular, his capacity to remember the futures in the past—the hopes, desires, and dreams that were never realized—refutes the claim that the past is simply a monolith that determines our present life without any possibilities for reciprocation.
Ashour excavates the inherited but unrealized potential of Andalusia symbolized by the collection of interred books and treats it not only as evidence of the actuality of Spanish persecution but as the sign of another path to human flourishing, then as now. It is for this reason that Ashour takes up and goes beyond what Nouri Gana calls “post-Andalusian critique,” which he defines as a melancholic negotiation of two competing feelings for al-Andalus, “the one seeking to recover it and the other to recover from it.”Footnote 38 Without moving toward a facile optimism, Ashour acknowledges this melancholy attachment but finds something in the Andalusian experience to activate a revolutionary will in the present. The books serve as a lifeline to future generations and a reminder that there remains the possibility of a society capable of producing such books.Footnote 39 The books aren’t simply a static image that offers an alternative to Spanish barbarism by virtue of the author’s differing moral evaluations of each. They bear a dense temporality that differs from the event of persecution and expulsion that submits all of Morisco life to the imperative of its imminent destruction. They preserve the past from destruction and look forward to a rich but unknowable future. The image of the buried books implies a continuity with the community’s past and future rather than a punctuation mark to the life of the Moriscos. This continuity is a dynamic one, marked by an aversion to obscurantism without suggesting answers to all of life’s questions. In this regard ‘Ali’s decision to stay in Andalusia need not register as a romantic dénouement but should be seen instead as an act of fidelity to another order of temporality contained within the one that is otherwise responsible for the end of Morisco time.
Andalusia as Portent and Promise
One of the common readings of the Granada Trilogy takes it as an allegory of the Palestinian expulsion by Zionist forces in and after 1948.Footnote 40 As both Naziya Abu Nidal and Muhammad al-Qadi observe, Ashour writes in the aftermath of peace agreements (at Camp David and Oslo) that were widely perceived in the Arab world as betrayals of the Palestinians by their representatives, just as the political narrative of her trilogy commences with the ill-fated surrender of Boabdil to the Spanish monarchs.Footnote 41 Both the establishment of Israel and the consolidation of Christian Spain involved the mass transfer of unwanted populations, through appeal to the exilees’ originally alien status, with great consequent loss of life and property on the part of the exiled groups. Each conquest forced the subjugated groups to confront questions of group unity, violent and nonviolent forms of resistance, and the ethics of resolve after repeated setbacks. Likewise, the mutual alienation of the novels’ characters refigures the broader theme of contemporary Palestinian and Arab disunity.Footnote 42 It is in this sense that the Egypt of Mubarak and Ashour becomes relevant to a story of dispossession and exile, for the Egyptians had been unable to help the Palestinians—and had even participated in their subjugation—much as the broader Arab community was unable or unwilling to help the Moriscos.
I would like to suggest that the novel proposes a more nuanced relation between sixteenth-century Spain and twentieth-century Palestine (and Egypt) than allegory, one of contiguity rather than analogy. I don’t deny that the novel lends itself to an allegorical interpretation; but, as Angus Fletcher shows, all works are allegorical to varying extents, and the part of a work that is allegorical is always partial.Footnote 43 The “literal” reading that I am proposing will bracket the assumption we normally hold that the centuries intervening between the expulsion of the Moriscos and the nakba—the “catastrophe” of Palestinian deracination in 1948—constitute a historiographic abyss that can only be traversed conceptually and rhetorically. My reading of the relevance of Ashour’s narrative to the Palestinian situation asks whether there is in fact a common historical ground—temporally rather than thematically speaking—that subtends both.
During a lecture she gave in Madrid upon the publication of the Spanish volume of the entire Trilogy, Ashour claimed that she “didn’t use [Granada] as an image [ṣūra] or metaphor [majāz]” for anything else, including presumably the Palestinian nakba.Footnote 44 She was moved spontaneously to write this story one evening while watching TV coverage of the American aerial bombardment of Baghdad in the Gulf War. Ashour writes:
[i]t is likely the scene opened a door of the memory [bāban li-l-dhākira], for it was connected to other similar scenes: the bombardment by Israeli planes of Sinai in 1956 and 1967, the bombardment of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, and the ongoing bombardment of Palestinian encampments, cities, and villages in southern Lebanon. That evening, while I was watching the news of the bombing of Iraq, I saw the naked woman coming closer and it was as if I was Abu Ja‘far the bookbinder in the novel seeing his death in her nakedness. Fear overcame me and I asked: is this imminent death [hal huwa al-mawt al-washīk]? And if it is then what relationship should I take up now with my death? With this question Granada overtook me [dāhamatnī], and I started to read.Footnote 45
Ashour had the uncanny intuition that she was, so to speak, one of the Moriscos. The catastrophe of the Spanish Inquisition had not yet ended when she witnessed the US invasion of Iraq. Ashour is not alone in remarking that the events of 1492 in Iberia and the projects they instantiate—capitalist and imperial expansion, sectarian and identity politics—occupy a position at the vanguard of our modernity.Footnote 46 The singularity of her historical vision, as articulated in the Madrid lecture, is that the relationship between 1492 and what follows is not only one of causality; she is not merely claiming that 1492 set into motion a historical dynamic that we are still grappling with today. Even more profoundly, she suggests that 1492, 1948, 1956, 1967, 1978, 1982, 1991, and so on belong to the same temporal punctum in spite of their discrepant positioning along the authoritative, chronological measure of time. Ashour posits a longue durée of death dealing and destruction. This is a vision of historical continuity and consistency that is nevertheless quite different from the longue durée of Fernand Braudel and his school, whose appeal to the concept is motivated by their desire to diminish the appearance and significance of the event.Footnote 47 Ashour’s longue durée amplifies the event of 1492 by recasting it in much broader and historically encompassing terms.
But the longue durée of suffering is also the time of endurance, as multiple scholars have noted.Footnote 48 Within the “protracted temporalities” of coloniality, a common ground can be discerned that joins together those who have been subjected to power to produce a counter-tradition inspired by hope.Footnote 49 Ashour’s contribution to this conversation is to link the time represented in her novel to the time in which she composed it in order to suggest that the memory her work preserves of a lost way of life proves that something important of this life—its futurity—persists. She produces an identification between the Moriscos of Andalusia and the Arabs of Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq to enlarge the community of the oppressed. In so doing she would teach her readers that their freedom struggles are situated within a much more expansive temporality. By the same token, the community to which they belong might be imagined in more inclusive terms.
Ashour understands 1492 as a kind of temporal paradox: it is an event that marks the beginning of modernity in terms of forces with which we are still familiar today, but one that can be perceived only as an ending because it offers nothing new to experience. Or, to put it more precisely, what it offers to experience (as opposed to expectation) can be grasped only in privative terms: the loss of a community, a relation to the land, and a sense of orientation within time and space. The regime of modernity is intended toward and passes itself off rhetorically as a perennial beginning, even as it radically severs the grounds from which one can find and operate an autonomous relation to what it introduces. Although a select few survive by mimicking its dynamics, adopting a nihilistic and nomadic subjectivity, the vast majority are left to contemplate their historical disorientation without any recourse to transformative action.Footnote 50 Ashour tries to restore the subjective link to experience—but to the experience of loss itself, not to the particular thing that was lost, whether Andalusia or Palestine. Ironically, it is those who have been traumatized by their exile and who relate to their lost land in the mode of nostalgia that have the hardest time conceptualizing their loss as such. They are focused on the place from which they came and face challenges in thinking reflexively about their state of mind in such a situation of geographical remove. It would be callous to suggest, of course, that the ability to reflect on loss could in some way compensate for what was lost or should serve as a substitute for political projects to rectify unjust annexations of others’ homelands. But when Ashour claims, cryptically, that in history, “nothing is lost,” she means that one can still find something profound and existentially nourishing in the contemplation of loss itself.Footnote 51 Like ‘Ali, an exilee can transmute the deprivation of the grounds of experience and sense into a new outlook that is capable of perceiving the loss as a new and contingent foundation from which to construct a relation to existence.
Ashour gestures toward what might be the subjective crux of such an ungrounded ground in her Madrid lecture, where she speaks of the fear of death that she vicariously assumes when contemplating the people of Baghdad under siege and her character Abu Ja‘far seeing in the naked woman an image of his own imminent undoing. “Impending death” here signals not obliteration of presence but rather the loss of a relation to the past and future, what she elsewhere calls “the live burial and assassination of potential.”Footnote 52 Where others figure potentiality as an indelible component of the human way of being, Ashour understands its precarity within conditions of man-made destruction, oppression, and exile. Potentiality, a condition of becoming, is what must be rigorously defended in order to foster the means for our societies to become more equitable, free, and just. Ashour redefines the devastation of war and occupation to include the damage they do to the possibilities, rather than only the achievements, of human activity.
Ashour doesn’t just defend the potentiality of those who currently have it, as it were; she goes back into the past to search the forgotten stories of subaltern lives for a hope that has been lost to the diplomatic histories of great empires and nations. She transposes the destructive force of expulsion—and the potentiality of all of the Moriscos who were oppressed and then expelled—into a present concern. She reactivates the hope of a family that we understand to have been defeated by history. The members of this family, but especially Salima, who builds the collection of books for posterity, and ‘Ali, who preserves the language that makes the books intelligible, demonstrate an exemplary relation to potentiality insofar as they act to leave something by which future generations can find their bearings. Ashour understands the ethical burden of her writing as an effort to apprise readers of their contemporaneity with the victims of history whose stories she narrates in order to reimagine and transmit the hope they felt.
In establishing a relay between Andalusian Moriscos of early modern Spain, post-nakba Palestinians, Lebanese subject to Israeli incursions, Iraqis under the American thumb, and her contemporary Egyptian (and broader Arabophone) readership, Ashour has tacitly constructed a community of the oppressed that spans centuries and continents. The peoples inhabiting these distinct conjunctures are united, she suggests, by their exposure to the turbulence of colonial modernity. In this understanding, colonial modernity designates not a periodizing term but an ongoing event of long duration that confounds efforts to establish continuity between experience and expectation. But this shared vulnerability and disorientation does not imply the total loss of agency. In learning to perceive this shadow community, this community of shadows, its members may also discern the aspirations that cannot be contained by a body, a subjectivity, or a human lifetime. For the longue durée of suffering is also the longue durée of hope, which in turn serves as the condition of possibility for action on behalf of justice.
Ashour suggests that the temporalization of Arab societies consequent upon colonial modernity has two competing implications. She acknowledges that the imperial project involved the annihilation of futures, whether by shutting off the social practices through which such aspirations could be discharged or, more prosaically, by eliminating the persons that carried them. Imperialism produced new anxieties about the future that could not be reconciled through appeal to any preexisting sureties—all of which had been delegitimized in the event—or to the particular ideological frames through which imperial metropoles had contained the threat of uncertainty. Historical time became such a grave and charged matter in colonial polities because no clear implications for the future could any longer be drawn from past models of personal and collective becoming. And yet the new attention to the timing of history did not merely produce an alienation from the present but enabled new identifications to be drawn across the span of time that historicist chronology had partitioned into past and present. The manifestation of imperial force during the US bombing of Iraq incited an anxious attunement to historical time in both Ashour and the Andalusians whom she represented. Generalizing from this experience, Ashour indicated that the apprehension of history as an inscrutable, errant, and cruel force tethers together colonial modernity’s myriad victims. In this shared attunement, Ashour discerned the ground of a possible community of the historically unhomed, one that would join together the living and the dead in pursuit of as yet unrealized potentialities.
