The December session of the Cátedra Al-Andalus will take place on the 11th and will feature a lecture by Emilio González Ferrín on The Geopolitics of History: Islam and al-Andalus. The use of history for political purposes is one of the main characteristics of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. If in the second half of the twentieth century the choice of sides and ideology (communism versus the West) was essential, the post-Twin Towers world does not depend on present choices and is experiencing a frenetic reinterpretation of geographical divisions according to a particular historical narrative: the vision of long centuries of confrontation with Islam. The expansion of Islam, the role of al-Andalus in the Mediterranean and Europe, the Crusades, the expulsion of the Moriscos or the Turkish invasions are decontextualised from their respective historical present to link them in a long chain of alleged Islamic induction.
Emilio González Ferrín is a tenured professor of Arab and Islamic Thought at the University of Seville and scientific director of the Al-Andalus Chair of the Fundación Tres Culturas since its creation in 2009. He has published numerous articles and a dozen monographs on issues of cultural cooperation with the Arab world and Islam, among which the following stand out Euro-Arab Dialogue (1997), Eastern Salvations (1999), y The word descendedThe book, an intellectual reading of the Koran, was awarded the International Jovellanos Essay Prize in 2002, and until 2009 was a member of the Jury of Letters for the Prince of Asturias Awards.
In 2006 he presented his theory of al-Andalus as the orientalised Europe that partly brought about the Renaissance. It is included in his book General History of al-Andalus (Europe entre Orient et Occidentin the French edition). These are the conclusions of a research project for the Junta de Andalucía on al-Andalus as an intermediate land between East and West, an essential subject in the aims of the Gordion Foundation (East and West), which he has chaired since 2004.
He has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Louvain, London, Amman, Damascus and Cairo, where he studied in the late 1980s (Dar al-Olum Faculty), and returned in 1993 with an Arab League research project (invited by ALESCO; Arab League Education, Science & Culture Organisation). He is a member of the Editorial Board of two Bulletins: that of the Spanish Society of Iranology, and that of the Egyptian Institute of Islamic Studies. In September 2012 he presented his first novel, set in the context of the so-called Arab Spring: Bicycles are not for Cairo (Ediciones En Huída, 2012).
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