Grant Proposal Archive
Proposal Cover Sheet
Submitted to the AAUW
Manuela Ceballos, Graduate Division of Religion
Crossing Borders, Inscribing Boundaries: Frontier Literatures of Encounter and Violence in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Iberia and North Africa
Posted April 2013
Manuela Ceballos AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship
Crossing Borders, Inscribing Boundaries: Frontier Literatures of Encounter and Violence in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Iberia and North Africa
Project Description and Significance
Beginning in 2010, a heated debate emerged in the United States over the
construction of a Muslim community center two blocks away from the site of the 2001
attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The initial director of this project,
which was originally called Cordoba House (now Park51), was New York-based Imam
Feisal Abdul Rauf, who explained in interviews his vision of the project as an interfaith
and intrafaith communal space. Abdul Rauf was also the founder of the Cordoba
Initiative, a self-described multifaith NGO.1 The name of the Initiative (and formerly of
the community center) refers to Umayyad Cordoba, invoked to emphasize the
organization’s mission to foster interfaith understanding: “A thousand years ago
Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted and created a prosperous center of intellectual,
spiritual, cultural and commercial life in Cordoba, Spain.”2 Scholars writing about al-
Andalus (Islamic Spain) refer to this coexistence as convivencia.
The community center has, however, been the source of much controversy and anti-Muslim rhetoric. In reference to the original name of the center, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich declared, “Every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Muslim conquest,” and thus questioned the narrative that Cordoba was a
1 The Cordoba Initiative, http :// www .cordobainitiative . org /?q=content/frequently-asked-questions ) 2Questions,”Ibid (accessed April 19, 2011
city of religious tolerance.3 Former New York Governor David Paterson, in what
seemed like an attempt to distinguish between “types” of Muslims according to their
proximity to Islamic orthodoxy and where they stand in relation to the West, said: “This group who has put this mosque together, they are known as the Suffi [sic] Muslims. This is not like the Shiites [sic]…They’re almost like a hybrid, almost westernized. They are not really what I would classify in the sort of mainland Muslim practice.”4 With this
statement, Governor Paterson situated Sufis close (but not within) “the West” by virtue
of their “hybridity,” and in the same breath, drew a line between them and Muslims who
are not Sufis. In this view, the “mainland of Muslim practice” lies squarely outside what
Paterson defined as authentically Western.
The debate about the composition and mechanisms that facilitate coexistence
between religious groups has churned up a variety of conflicting views about the
Andalusian paradigm of convivencia, and about different Islamic practices and their
perceived association (or lack thereof) with violence and with normative Islam. In light
of this background, my project challenges the way that convivencia and violence have
been constructed as opposites in contemporary public discourses and in historiography,
and questions the spatial, historical, ethical, and intellectual boundaries within which these concepts operate. In this respect, I draw heavily from David Nirenberg’s
Communities of Violence, where he states that “Convivencia was predicated upon violence; it was not its peaceful antithesis. Violence drew its meaning from coexistence,
3 Fox News.com, http :// www . foxne ws . com / opinion /2010/08/04/peter-ferrara-muslim-mosque-manhattan- constitution“The Proposed-saudi New-arabia York- synagoguesMosque and/ the(acces Constitution,” ). 4 Newyork.cbslocal.com, http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2010/08/26/paterson sed December-mosque 19,-developers 2011 -hybrid-almost- westernized “Paterson: Mosque-muslims/?utm_source=Islamic+Information+Center&utm_campaign=d894d68df0 Developers ‘Hybrid, almost Westernized’ Muslims” - Interfaith&utm_medium=email (
accessed December 19, 2011)
not in opposition to it.”5 It is my view that violence had an integrative role in community
conceptualization and formation in the Medieval and Early Modern Western
Mediterranean.
Moreover, I argue that the historiographic concept of convivencia, because it is
grounded in the philosophy of liberalism, serves to reinforce the idea of the secular state
as the only space in which people can truly coexist. As a normative concept, convivencia exerts and justifies its own kind of violence, which engenders, regulates, and shapes subjects. To support these claims, I draw on Talal Asad’s insights on secularism, which he defines not as the absence of religion in matters of state power, but rather, the set of practices, concepts, and dispositions that engender, regulate, and authorize categories central to modernity such as “religion” and “politics” as well as how they relate to each other.6 In addition, I utilize historian Gyanendra Pandey’s insights on violence in the
writing of history.
Furthermore, my research challenges the Romantic historiography that
writes Christian and Muslim mystics into the convivencia/violence dichotomy as
visionary and heterodox precursors of the liberal notion of privatized spirituality and
apolitical love, which promotes a secular notion of pluralism within a multi-religious
and multi-ethnic nation-state. I examine how, in particular, the Jazuliyya Sufi
brotherhood and its tradition of military engagement and reform, and the Discalced
Carmelites (especially John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila) and their tradition of
ascetic discipline and enclosure, used violence as an ethical tool to create ideal
5 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 245. 6 Talal Asad, Formations of the secular : Christianity, Islam, modernity, Cultural memory in the present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).
individual and collective bodies and transform society as a whole. These groups have
been at the center of various conceptions of community, nationalism, and nationhood in
Morocco and Spain, both in conversation with and in opposition to each other.
In my research, I have found that mystics were in fact crucial in reconstructing
communities and re-inscribing boundaries in their written works and in their social and
political activities, sometimes through violent means. Eventually, some of their reforms
and even their transgressions were appropriated and re-written into the national
narrative. This paradox has been overlooked in previous historiographies of Iberia and
the Maghrib. Furthermore, my work examines the ways in which violence is
constructed, performed, remembered, and represented in my selection of Muslim and
Christian texts. Through close readings, I explore whether there is a relationship
between textual violence and literal violence, between sacred scripts and violent acts, and attempt to rethink notions of agency and power in the context of ascetic practices that seek to tame or suppress the ego.
Methodology
This dissertation project brings together literary sources in Spanish and Arabic written during the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries that specifically deal with Christian-
Muslim encounters and conflict in the shifting geographical and communal boundaries
that eventually led to the contemporary notions of nationhood and nationality in
Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. It makes use of critical methodologies in literature,
history, anthropology, and religious studies, in order to investigate the ways in which narratives about Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and North Africa have constructed communities and boundaries, insiders and outsiders, how they have characterized the
relationships between these groups in terms of violence or non violence, and the assumptions that underlie this ordering of the past and of the spaces that people inhabited. Through close readings of selected primary sources, I inquire into what subjectivities are possible outside of the concepts that dominate the historiography of these regions during these periods, to examine the boundaries the texts themselves construct, cross and re-inscribe in the context of conflict and encounter, and the ways in which violence itself is deployed in the narration of histories of violence. Each chapter of the dissertation explores a different conception of community and the role of violence in its formation and development through the lens of a primary text. The project thus explores cloistered women’s communities, prisoners and captives, communities of warrior Sufis, and communities formed by those excluded from power, immigrants, and refugees.