Three Cultures Foundation.
28 November 2013, 19:00.
Free admission until full capacity is reached.
The next session of the Al-Andalus Chair will be given by Elena Arigita, lecturer at the University of Granada, who will speak on Memory and Commemoration of Al-Andalus.
Over the last decade, arguments about the compatibility or, in most cases, the incompatibility of Islam with the so-called European values have stimulated public debates which, in turn, have led to a wide range of initiatives: educational and cultural programmes, citizenship programmes, intellectual debates, prizes, awards, etc. They are diverse both in terms of their objectives and their target audiences.
However, their common link is the explicit purpose of overcoming historical narratives about Europe that exclude Islam or consider it alien to its essence as a civilisation, culture and identity. Al-Andalus is configured, within these initiatives, as a space of memory and commemoration of Islam in Europe.
The aim of this reflection will be to situate the actors of memory in the context of these debates, both in their local dimension and in the transnational space. To this end, Professor Elena Arigita will focus on the controversy surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba as a "place of memory" of al-Andalus and on the memory and commemoration of the history of the Moors on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of their expulsion in 2009.
Elena Arigita
After graduating in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Granada in 1994, she continued her training in Cairo for four years, during which time she worked as a lecturer, first at Cairo University and then at the Islamic University of al-Azhar. Her thesis, read in 2002 and for which she was awarded the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize of the University of Granada, deals precisely with the adaptation of al-Azhar as a traditional Islamic institution to the structures of the modern state in Egypt. In 2004-2006 he did a postdoctoral stay at ISIM (Holland), where he joined a research programme on the production of Islamic knowledge in Europe, within which he developed his research on authority and representation of Islam in Spain.
Between 2007-2012 she worked at Casa Árabe-IEAM (Córdoba) as research coordinator and principal investigator. Since 2012 she has been a lecturer in the Department of Semitic Studies at the University of Granada. Her research interests revolve around the question of authority in Islam, and from there she has worked on issues related to the institutionalisation of Islam in Egypt and Europe, on the use of Islam as a legitimising element of political and social mobilisation, and on the policies that shape the visibility of Islam and Muslims in Spain and Europe. His publications include: Institutional Islam in contemporary Egypt (2005) and the co-edition of a special issue of the magazine The Muslim World "Authorising Islam in Europe" (2006).
Portuguese