Sunday, March 16, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
In this paper I will explore engagements with temporality and Spain’s Islamic past amongst the Murabitun, a community of converts in Granada, Spain. As a point of contestation, an object of study, and a matter of bodily practice, time and temporality are emerging in contemporary Granada as salient points along which to challenge secular normativities. As I will try to show, such an intervention is oriented around the perception, recognized by scholars such as E.P. Thompson, Reinhart Koselleck, and Michel de Certeau, that inhabiting a secular, modern subjectivity involves distinctive ways of organizing, experiencing, and valuing time. Critical of the effect progressive, secular models of time can have on the self, Murabitun engage with various aspects of the Islamic tradition in an effort to insert themselves into a different temporal stream. One such intervention, for instance, involves an extended consideration on the part of one woman in the community to read and reflect on the writings of the fourteenth-century North African scholar Ibn Khaldun. History–its very narrative form–becomes a site of productive contestation, inflected in particular ways by Spain’s positioning within Europe as a country with a significant Islamic tradition. How might we understand the claims being made about the link between subjectivity and temporality? How is the presumption to a stable, secular European future undermined, not only through a memory of an Islamic past but through the very act of historiography itself? How are historiography and everyday practice seen to be intimately related, and to what effect?
