Race in the Premodern World Working Group Lecture with Mohamad Ballan

This lecture offers a new interpretation of the centrality of genealogical notions of “Arabness” (ʿurūbiyyah) in the writings of political and intellectual elites in the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1232-1492), the last surviving Muslim polity in medieval Iberia. The construction of a local identity is examined in light of the political and social reality of Nasrid Granada’s existence as a borderland polity entrenched in the farthest reaches of the Islamic world, between Latin Christendom and Islamic North Africa. The talk will demonstrate how this genealogical notion of “Arabness,” which fused together notions of Arab identity and the Islamic faith, constituted an elite discourse of power that sought to legitimize the authority, status, and territorial claims of the scholarly, military and political elites in the Nasrid kingdom. .