1 Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1979]), 36 Google Scholar.

2 As Giordano Nanni recounts, British settlers in Victoria, Australia, and the Cape Colony, South Africa, attempted to acculturate indigenous subjects to the Sabbath, the rhythms of the workweek, the virtues of punctuality, the use of chronometric devices, and so on. See Nanni, Giordano, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for an account of the resistances to this imposition of standard time in colonial Bombay and Beirut, see Ogle, Vanessa, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” American Historical Review 12.5 (2013): 1376–1402 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Piterberg, Gabriel, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar.

4 Rose, Jacqueline, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; see also Pease, Donald E., The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

5 Harootunian, Harry, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), x, xix Google Scholar.

6 Here one should think of Frantz Fanon’s famous statement that “colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.” See Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 210 Google Scholar.

7 Mansfield, Peter, The British in Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 140 Google Scholar.

8 See Holt, Elizabeth, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 11–12 Google Scholar. Holt finds in the nahda “melancholic” narratives that speak to the unrealized hopes of financial speculation and anxieties discharged by capital flight from Beirut and Cairo. See also Sacks, Jeffrey, “Futures of Literature: Inhitat, Adab, Naqd,” Diacritics 37.4 (2007): 32–43 Google Scholar, 45–55.

9 For a discussion of the opposition that developed in colonial Egypt between “the mechanical, instrumental, rational, material, technological, and efficient time” of the West and “the cultural, religious, spiritual, and slow time” of Egypt, see On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 2–3 Google Scholar and passim.

10 Guha, Ranajit, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

11 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8 Google Scholar.

12 Radwa Ashour, “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975. Ira Dworkin examines Ashour’s philosophical and literary debt to African American political culture in “Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.1 (2018): 1–19. During Ashour’s trip to the United States, she also became interested in the socio-political condition of resident Puerto Ricans, whom she linked conceptually to the third world movement. See Michelle Hartman, “Writing Arabs and Africa(ns) in America: Adonis and Radwa Ashour from Harlem to Lady Liberty,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37.3 (2005): 410.

13 Scholarship on “commitment” is growing rapidly. For the strongest recent work, see Berrada, Mohamed, ed., Taḥawwulāt Mafhūm al-Iltizām fī al-Adab al-‘Arabī al-Ḥadīth (Damascus, Syria: Dār al-Fikr, 2003)Google Scholar; Di-Capua, Yoav, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre & Decolonization (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pannewick, Friederike, Khalil, Georges, and Albers, Yvonne, eds., Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s (Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert Verlag, 2015)Google Scholar. For synoptic studies of the experimental turn, see also Meyer, Stefan G., The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Jassim al-Musawi, Muhsin, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2003)Google Scholar; and Caiani, Fabio, Contemporary Arab Fiction: Innovation from Rama to Yalu (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar.

14 Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1985]), 216 Google Scholar.

15 Interview in al-Siyāsa, November 20, 1982, quoted in Rutherford, Bruce K., Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 233 Google Scholar.

16 Interview in Arab Times, December 29–30, 1983, quoted in ibid.

17 The characterization of pre-1492 Andalusia as a culture of “convivencia” or conviviality was articulated by Américo Castro in The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, trans. W. King and S. Margaretten (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971 [1948]). This view was popularized by María Rosa Menocal in The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 2002); and Menocal, María Rosa, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, vol. 1 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1994)Google Scholar. For analyses of the anti-Islamic tendency in contemporary historiography of Andalusia, see Aidi, Hishaam D., “The Interference of al-Andalus: Spain, Islam, and the West,” Social Text 24.2 (2006): 67–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hirschkind, Charles, “The Contemporary Afterlife of Moorish Spain,” in Islam and Public Controversy in Europe, ed. Nilüfer Göle (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013)Google Scholar. The most recent historiography diverges from the paradigm of convivencia, finding it overly simplistic. Barbara Fuchs argues on behalf of a “hybrid” society rather than one populated by essentially distinct entities, however cooperative. See Fuchs, Barbara, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other scholars note that convivencia wasn’t unique to Andalusia; see for example Soifer, Maya, “Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1.1 (2009): 19-35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 William Granara notes that Ashour’s novel is unique among the many contemporary literary engagements with classical Andalusia in avoiding nostalgia. See Granara, William, “Nostalgia, Arab Nationalism, and the Andalusian Chronotope in the Evolution of the Modern Arabic Novel,” Journal of Arabic Literature 36.1 (2005): 57–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Ashour, Radwa, Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭa (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 2009), 8, 10 Google Scholar. The first volume of this trilogy has been translated as Granada, trans. William Granara (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003). Although I have consulted this valuable edition, all translations from the Arabic are my own.

20 Ibid., 10.

21 Al-Dab, Mahmud‘, “Al-Tārīkh al-Ijtimā‘ī wa al-Ibdā‘ al-Sardī fī Adab Radwa Ashour,” in al-Mu’tamar al-‘Āmm li-Udabā’ Miṣr, al-Dawra al-Thalathūn: Radwa Ashour: Tamaththulāt al-Muthaqqaf, ed. Sayyid Khitab (Cairo, Egypt: Al-Hay’a al-‘Āmma li-Quṣūr al-Thaqāfa, 2015), 31, 37 Google Scholar.

22 Ibrahim Khalil argues that the Trilogy is more concerned with presenting a synchronic picture of Andalusia through elaborate description “to gather up what has been dispersed” [lamlama mā tashattat] by history than to record a historical narrative. See Khalil, Ibrahim, Ẓilāl wa-Āṣdā’ Andalusiyya fī al-Adab al-Muʻāṣir: Dirāsa (Damascus, Syria: Manshūrāt Ittiḥād al-Kuttāb al-‘Arab, 2000), 149 Google Scholar. Muhammad al-Qadi, likewise, argues that Ashour aims to “make history present,” to evoke a “historical climate” or “decor” while simultaneously presenting a world heterogeneous to that which is evoked in the historiography of Andalusia. See al-Qadi, Muhammad, “Al-Riwāya wa al-Tārīkh: Ṭarīqatān fī Kitābat al-Tārīkh Riwā’iyyān,”‘Alāmāt 28.7 (1998): 118, 127 Google Scholar, 134, 136.

23 Jurji Zaydan, Al-Ḥajjāj bin Yūsuf, quoted in ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwāya al-‘Arabiyya al-Ḥadītha fī Miṣr, 1870–1938 (Cairo, Egypt: Dar al-Ma‘ārif, 1963), 52.

24 Ashour, Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭa, 10.

25 Nezar Ajaj Andary, A Consuming Fever of History: A Study of Five Urgent Flashbacks in Arabic Film and Literature, PhD dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 2008, 72; al-Dab‘, “Al-Tārīkh al-Ijtimā‘ī wa al-Ibdā‘ al-Sardī fī Adab Radwa Ashour,” 44.

26 The study of rumor is a centerpiece of early Subaltern Studies methodology. See, for example, Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1983), 251–277 Google Scholar; Arnold, David, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 404–413 Google Scholar.

27 Ashour, Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭa, 21, 46–47, 87, 88, 105, 122, 166.

28 Samir, Iqbal, “Ramziyyat Suqūṭ Gharnāṭa fī Thulāthiyyat Radwa Ashour,” Fuṣūl 66 (2005): 167 Google Scholar.

29 In an interview, Ashour contrasts the various linguistic registers of her novel—fuṣḥā [classical Arabic] and colloquial, Koranic and biblical, the high literary and the documentary—with the “single voice” [al-ṣawt al-uḥādī] of the Inquisition. See Al-‘Aqili, Ja‘far, “Raḍwā ‘Āshūr: al-Ḥakī Asās al-Riwāya,” Āfkār 265 (2011): 107 Google Scholar.

30 Ashour, Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭa, 477.

31 Ibid., 498.

32 Ibid., 502.

33 Christina Civantos, whose reading of the Granada Trilogy also focuses on the books, interprets them as symbols of hope, cultural continuity, and resilience. See Civantos, Christina, The Afterlife of al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), 271–281 Google Scholar.

34 Giorgio Agamben critiques the received understanding of potentiality in Aristotle and his followers, pointing to the teleological nature of a potentiality that would simply await its own actualization. He instead commends a form of impotentiality that would abnegate itself in order to let others have a chance at becoming. Such a radical passivity, however admirable in its context, cannot command the same ethical force under conditions of coloniality, where impotence is enforced. Yet Agamben usefully calls us to think a form of potentiality that would not be hoarded as power but could still inspire efforts at transformation. See Agamben, Giorgio, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

35 Harvey, L. P., Muslims in Spain: 1500 to 1614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 295–296 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, vol. 1 (London, England: Collins, 1972), 788 Google Scholar.

37 Ashour, Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭa, 487.

38 Gana, Nouri, “In Search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent ,” Comparative Literature Studies 45.2 (2008): 231 Google Scholar.

39 Francisco Márquez Villanueva emphasizes that the spirit of collaboration and contact that stimulated the writing of books was not extinguished in Spain despite the best attempts of the Inquisitors. See Márquez Villanueva, Francisco, “On the Concept of Mudejarism,” in The Conversos and Morsicos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, ed. Kevin Ingram, trans. Nicola Stapleton, vol. 1 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 46 Google Scholar.

40 Fakhri Salih sees “a symbolic correspondence between Andalusia and Palestine, the new lost Andalus of the Arabs.” See Salih, Fakhri, Qabla Najīb Maḥfūẓ wa Ba’duhu: Dirāsāt fī al-Riwāya (Algiers, Algeria: Manshūrāt al-Ikhtilāf, 2010), 77 Google Scholar. Caroline Seymour-Jorn describes Ashour’s Trilogy as an allegory of Palestinian displacement and the American occupation of Iraq. See Seymour-Jorn, Caroline, “Teaching Arab Women’s Literature: Radwa Ashour’s Gharnāṭa,” Al-‘Arabiyya, 38/39 (2005–2006): 150–151 Google Scholar.

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42 Kudsieh, Suha, “Expulsion from Paradise: Granada in Raḍwā ‘Āshūr’s The Granada Trilogy (1994-8) and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995),” in Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam, eds. Sebastian Günther, Todd Lawson, and Christian Mauder, vol. 2 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 953–976 Google Scholar.

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44 Ashour, “Li-kullin Gharnāṭatuhu,” in Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭa, 508. Elsewhere Ashour has stated explicitly that the Granada Trilogy “is not an allegory.” See Ashour, Radwa, “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller: My Experience as a Novelist,” The Massachusetts Review, 41.1 (2000): 91 Google Scholar.

45 Ashour, “Li-kullin Gharnāṭatuhu,” 508–09.

46 See for example Anidjar, Gil, “Medieval Spain and the Integration of Memory (On the Unfinished Project of Pre-Modernity),” in Islam and Public Controversy in Europe, ed. Nilüfer Göle (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013), 221 Google Scholar.

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48 Stoler, Ann Laura, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lear, Jonathan, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Jayyusi, Lena, “Iterability, Cumulativity, and Presence: The Relational Figures of Palestinian Memory,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

49 Stoler, Duress, 7.

50 On the loss of a capacity for action in modernity, see Halpern, Richard, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Ashour, “Li-kullin Gharnāṭatuhu,” 514. Edward W. Said makes a similar suggestion in “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Writings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173–86.

52 Ashour, Radwa, “My Experience with Writing,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, trans. Rebecca Porteous, 13 (1993): 170 Google Scholar.