On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus

Finalist, Sheikh Zayed Book Award “With extraordinary linguistic range, Calderwood brings us the voices of Arabs and Muslims who have turned to the distant past of Spain to imagine their future.” —Hussein Fancy, Yale University How the memory of Muslim Iberia shapes art and politics from New York and Cordoba to Cairo and the West Bank. During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth or in Poems shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination, especially for Arab and Muslim artists and thinkers in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.