Borderland Anxieties: The Politics of Genealogy in Late Medieval Grenada - A Lecture by Prof. 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. 

Mohamad Ballan is an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University. 

His research focuses on the intellectual, political and cultural history of the Mediterranean world, with a focus on late medieval and early modern Spain. The core themes of his research are borderlands, mobility, and scholarly practices in the premodern world. His work closely examines intellectual networks, the transformation of institutions during moments of crisis and transition, the role of borderlands in fashioning identity and difference, the centrality of migration and cultural change in human history, and the importance of medieval and early modern literary representation and historiographical production in shaping modern understandings of the past.