the Spain-North Africa project

 Enjoy the StoryMAP and see below for a conclusion and bibliography.

Both al-Ḥajarī and Mármol Carvajal participated in a cross-confessional exchange of ideas, through their writings, as they remapped their own Mediterranean worlds. They de-familiarized the landscape and themselves within it. The question of ordering time pestered each writer as they moved about and attempted to record their experiences. Not only did al-Ḥajarī abandon his traditional garb for European dress – his rituals, language, and practices began to slip away as well. The nightmare aboard the boat of demons reveals his struggle with striking a balance between his internal and external spiritual practice. He even recalled that, after two years in France, he began to hear a knocking sound on the walls and tables. “Between one knock and the next there was an interval equal to the time used by man to count three times from one to four. I became so afraid . . . then I understood that it wanted me to leave the country of the Infidels.” Upon his return to Islamic lands the knocking did not cease. Al-Ḥajarī finally concluded that the sound, perhaps a divine jinn, was urging him to perform ṣalāt, as it usually kept him awake when he was meant to pray or study. The knocking would force him out of bed in the mornings and persist in rapping until any “impure thing” in his room was removed. Al-Ḥajarī had lost track of sacred and worldly time. While the extended sojourn through Europe did not necessarily whittle away his sense of religious devotion, it certainly re-organized his place in the world. With his daily routine and surroundings completely turned on their head for two years, the traveler began experiencing the effects of temporal disjuncture.

Mármol Carvajal found himself in the midst of his own chronological debate – one that sought to dovetail eastern calendars with that of the Latin West. In his Descripcion he attempted to explain the chronology of the Islamic lunar calendar. Carvajal was the first Spanish author to do so, but he mistakenly placed the hijrah in 613. The soldier-turned-historian even consulted with Alonso del Castillo (Al-Ukayḥil), al-Ḥajarī’s Arabic instructor, and adjusted the date to 621 – still a year off the mark. While Carvajal’s effort to make sense of his temporal displacement was also part of the broader humanist enterprise of ars historica, it is noteworthy that his propensity for describing the physical surroundings in North Africa always went hand-in-hand with locating them in time as well. In other words, his writing was incredibly personal as well as professional. Much like al-Ḥajarī, he was fixing himself in his own time and place while those concepts were consistently changing meaning. The primary difference between al-Ḥajarī’s account and that of Carvajal was simply literary genre – or, riḥlah and humanist chronicle.

Both travelers recast the Mediterranean world through the parameters of these genres along with their own personal experiences. Of course, each provide rich accounts in which they describe the sounds, smells, sights, tastes, and touch interactions with unknown places and people. Al-Ḥajarī and Mármol Carvajal were continuously driven to reconceptualize their positions in time, space, and place, relative to new sonic regimes, religious hierarchies, and temporal patterns. As a result, they used authoritative literary genres of their “native” lands to provide new ways of gathering meaning across the early modern Mediterranean world – for themselves as well as their readers. And indeed, they had readers. Al-Ḥajarī consulted his own copy of Mármol Carvajal’s Descripcion de Africa – even citing it directly in his writing.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

del Mármol Carvajal, Luis. Descripcion General de Africa, Tomo I. Madrid: CSIC, 1953.

del Mármol Carvajal, Luis. Descripcion general de Affrica, Tomo II. Málaga: Iuan Rene, 1599.

del Mármol Carvajal, Luis. Historia del rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del reyno de Granada Tomo I y Tomo II. Madrid: La Imprenta de Sancha, 1797.

Felipe II de España. Pragmatica y declaración sobre los moriscos menores del reyno de Granada. Madrid: Casa de Alonso Gomez Impressor de su Magestad, 1572.

ibn Qāsim al-Ḥajarī, Aḥmad. Kitāb Nāṣir al-Dīn ‘alā ‘l-Qawm al-Kāfirīn. Segunda edición, revisada y ampliada. Edited by P.S. van Koningsveld, Q. al-Samarrai, and G.A. Wiegers. Madrid: CSIC, 2015.

Secondary Sources

Bernabé Pons, Luis F. “La nación en lugar seguro, los moriscos hacia Túnez,” in Cartas de La Goleta 2: Actas del Coloquio Internacional Los Moriscos y Túnez. Tunis: Embajada de España, 2009.

Boronat y Barrachina, Pascual. Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión. Valencia: Imprenta de Francisco Vives y Mora, 1901.

Cardaillac, Louis. “Un aspecto de las relaciones entre moriscos y cristianos: polémica y taqiyya.” In Actas del Coloquio Internacional sobre literatura aljamiada y morisca, 107-122. Madrid: Gredos, 1978.

Caro Baroja, Julio. Los moriscos del Reino de Granada. Madrid: ISTMO, 2000.

Castillo Fernández, Javier. Entre Granada y el Magreb: Vida y obra del cronista Luis del Mármol Carvajal (1524-1600). Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2016.

El-Rouayheb, Khaled. Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Galán Sánchez, Ángel. Una sociedad en transición: Los granadinos de mudéjares a moriscos. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2010.

García-Arenal, Mercedes and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano. The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism. Translated by Consuelo López-Morillas. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

García-Arenal, Mercedes and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Translated by Martin Beagles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

García-Arenal, Mercedes and Gerard Wiegers, eds., The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Grafton, Anthony. “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline.” History and Theory 14 (1975): 156-185.

Grafton, Anthony. What was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Harvey, L.P. “The Moriscos and their International Relations.” In L’Expulsió dels Moriscos. Conseqüències en el món islàmic i en el món cristià. Congrés

Internacional 380è Aniversari de l’Expulsió dels Moriscos. 135-159. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1994.

Hess, Andrew C. The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Penella, J. “Le transfert des moriscos espagnols en Afrique du Nord.” In Recueil d’Etudes sur les Moriscos Andalous en Tunisie, edited by M. de Epalza and R. Petit, 77-88. Madrid- Túnez, 1973.

van Koningsveld, Peter, and Gerard Wiegers. “Islam in Spain during the Early Sixteenth Century: The Views of the Four Chief Judges in Cairo (Introduction, Translation, and Arabic Text).” In Orientations: Poetry, Politics and Polemics, Cultural Transfer Between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, edited by Otto Zwartjes, Geert Jan van Gelder, and Ed de Moor. 133-152. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1994.

Vincent, Bernard. El río morisco. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2006.