The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia By Charles Hirschkind

Abstract

This is a curious book. It appears at times not so much as a work of scholarly history and more as a manifesto of some sort of intellectual gnosticism. The author begins: Muslim Iberia did not disappear from history with the seizure of Granada in 1492 by Christian armies, as our history books have it. Rather, forced into hiding, it continued on as an invisible warp within the fabric of Spanish society. The medieval realm of al-Andalus and contemporary Spain and Portugal, in other words, do not belong to two distant historical periods, one medieval and one modern, but cohere in a single continuous development, unbroken by the periodicities imposed by modern historiography. (p. 1) Any student of Islamic Spain is well aware that Islam here was not eradicated in 1492. Likewise, there are few (at least since the time of Américo Castro) who would not recognize that the Islamicate culture (including the Jewish culture) was essential to the development of modern Iberian culture. Not so with the suggestion (the ahistorical hyperbole) that the histories of al-Andalus and contemporary Spain and Portugal represent an ‘unbroken continuum’. Apparently, neither the mass exile of the descendants of the Peninsula’s Muslim inhabitants between 1609 and 1614, the eradication of Arabic, the colonial estrangement vis-à-vis the Maghrib of a Spanish Empire creaking towards modernity, nor the relentless historical, cultural and demographic churn of four centuries constituted a ‘disruption’.