Muslim Voices, Moorish Masks: Theoretical Perspectives on Music and Islam in Southern Spain

Introduction

In the following, I outline a theoretical framework for the study of music and Islam in Andalusia, southern Spain. Drawing on five years of ethnography (2013–2018), I apply this framework to hybrid musical performances that occurred within the context of Andalusian heritage festivals and cultural tourism. As a case study, I offer detailed analysis of a performance that took place at the Millennial of the Kingdom of Granada, an elaborate year-long heritage festival inspired by the city’s founding as an Islamic ṭāifa state in 1013 CE. In this overdetermined context—replete with bodies in motion and voices raised in song, hybrid musical aesthetics invoking Andalusia’s medieval Islamic past, and institutional patrons entangling this Moorish heritage with neoliberal civic discourses of the present—musical analysis opens fresh lines of inquiry into the expression and experience of Muslim subjectivity in Andalusia.

By “Moorish,” I refer to the diverse people, practices, and political formations of medieval Iberia that existed under Islamic rule, subject to a succession of Arab and Berber dynasties (collectively, the “Moors”) from the eighth century CE to the fall of Granada in 1492. These eight centuries of Islam in Iberia—beginning and ending in the South, which continues to bear etymological witness in the derivation of “Andalusia” from the Arabic toponym al-Andalus—appear memorialized in a vast repertoire of fables and fantasies that have shaped Andalusian regional identity since the early twentieth century.¹ Under the influence of this widely circulating historiography around the region’s Islamic past, Andalusian civic discourse has variously repressed and reproduced the forms of exile, exclusion, and erasure that marked the Moorish era’s violent Inquisitorial conclusion—even as Andalusian political institutions have celebrated the remarkable forms of encounter, intimacy, and coexistence (Sp. convivencia) that provoked such an anxious end to begin with.²

The Moorish legacy’s deep and abiding influence on Andalusian civic discourse is, in fact, one that scholars in Hispanic Studies and Spanish Cultural Studies have long attempted to name and to reckon with.³ Discussing historical tourism in the city of Cordoba, Elena Arigita has posed an instructive series of questions on this topic: “However, how is this evocation of the past experienced in the city itself? How is the ‘Spirit of Cordoba’ mobilised, who promotes it . . . for what purpose and with what results? And most especially, do areas of shadow, silences and oblivions exist in this celebration of the past?”⁴ To these vital questions I add another: what happens when this evocation of the Moorish past occurs through musical performance?

To interrogate the complex space in which musical expressions and experiences of Islam emerged at Andalusian heritage festivals, I read Homi Bhabha’s reading of Frantz Fanon along the axis of performativity, adapting resources from Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Performance Studies to approximate the sonorous, intersubjective citations of the Moorish legacy that mutually interpellated musicians, festivalgoers, and festival organizers within the interstices between Islamic and Andalusian, past and present, self and other. In the process, I engage with theoretical debates on hybridity—both musical and postcolonial—arguing that an agile, situational application of the concept to Muslim musical performance in Andalusia enables us to trace the supple ethnographic contours and the diffuse political consequences of cultural difference as performed, experienced, and exploited in the field.

In dialogue with previous work in Hispanic Studies and Spanish Cultural Studies, where scholars have developed deconstructive readings of the Moorish legacy via Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Avery Gordon,⁵ I also think along the borders between hybridity and hauntology to recalibrate discussions of Spanish historical memory for a theoretical framework that ultimately coalesces into scenes of Moorishness: crowded, contested scenes in which musicians, festivalgoers, and festival organizers inhabited the Moorish legacy’s haunted temporality so as to produce a curious quasi-caesura—interrupting, and by interrupting, sustaining the time of an Andalusian civic discourse that thrived on the ambivalence of its transhistorical, transnational Islamic heritage.

The Field: Hearing Music and Islam in Andalusia

I encountered many of my field contacts through participant-observation, which included private lessons on the ‘ūd (a fretless lute played across the southern and eastern Mediterranean); language classes in dialectical Moroccan Arabic; and flamenco dance lessons in both group and private settings. I also prepared meals, organized film screenings, and participated in public protests with the pro-migrant NGO Granada Acoge.⁶ Interviews, both structured and unstructured, were often conducted over steaming pots of mint tea at Andalusia’s characteristic Moorish tearooms (teterías), while other conversations took place across oceans—over the phone, via Skype and WhatsApp—as our relationships continued to develop virtually. With the exception of public officials and institutional spokespersons, I refer to my field contacts with pseudonyms.

My on-site fieldwork began in Granada before expanding to include Cordoba and Seville, bustling urban centers with Muslim populations comprising economic migrants—mostly from West Africa and the Maghreb, including an especially large Moroccan community—as well as a smaller community of Andalusian, Spanish, and northern European converts to Islam.⁷ My Muslim field contacts espoused diverse conceptions of Islam and varying degrees of religious observance. Those who prayed regularly did so in spaces ranging from the Grand Mosque of Granada—an artful building of relatively recent construction, nestled in the verdant hillside of Granada’s historical Moorish Quarter—to fairly nondescript storefronts and other preexisting urban spaces that Muslims had repurposed for prayer.⁸

Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar has identified a certain socio-economic stratification in attendance and access to these diverse places of worship, sustained by an “unequal multiculturalism” in which Andalusia’s Moorish legacy effectively racialized the Islam of economic migrants—as the Islam of the moro, a slur conflating present-day Muslims with medieval Moorish conquerors—while nevertheless assimilating the Islam of non-migrant converts as an index of the Moorish era’s fabled religious diversity.⁹ This applied to my field contacts as well: musical collaborations between Muslim economic migrants and religious converts, often promoted in an ardent language of artistic exchange and cultural encounter, occurred within the context of severe socio-economic and political disparities between their communities. Ahmed, a British convert who sang and played violin in a Sufi fusion ensemble of his own founding, was intensely aware that his experience of musical performance in Granada differed from that of many Moroccan musicians with whom he collaborated:

There are so many great Moroccan musicians in Granada. A lot of those musicians have had to look for other jobs, but for the most part Moroccans are extremely resourceful. Our qānūn [zither] player, who’s a great master, he works in a clothing store shifting boxes around. He’s got a life here, but if he was in Morocco he could be a teacher in a conservatoire. Just an example.¹⁰

There were, however, striking exceptions to this trend. Munir, a Moroccan musician in his thirties who owned a small tearoom in Granada’s Moorish Quarter, offered an effusive account of music and migration that celebrated his musical practice as a source of social capital—all the while, quietly playing melodies of Moroccan classical music on his ‘ūd:

In Granada there is an atmosphere of music, an atmosphere of artists, and of poets as well. A lot of poets come to see me, and I go with them to play the ‘ūd while they recite their poetry, and they know me very well. A lot of poets, and women singers, and men singers, and the truth is: I feel good here in Granada because I know everyone and they value my work and my career here. I am well here.¹¹

I suggest that the study of specifically musical interactions between migrants and converts could offer unique perspectives on the complex triangulation of migrant, convert, and non-Muslim identities that Rogozen-Soltar’s research has documented.¹² It is worth considering, for example, that performances generally took shape through an intimate, ever-shifting network of musical groups that drew migrant, convert, and non-Muslim musicians together around institutional patrons: municipal governments, local universities, and museums as in the case study below. Entering differently into these spaces of patronage, musicians nevertheless collaborated in performing Islam under the disciplinary gaze of Andalusian civic institutions that mutually interpellated them via the Moorish legacy.

Most of my Muslim field contacts had connections to Islamic cultural associations that hosted musical performances as well, some attached to local mosques and some bearing affiliations with international Sufi orders like the Naqshbandi-Haqqani. Rogozen-Soltar has observed that converts in Granada were more likely to embrace Sufism than economic migrants.¹³ This was certainly the case in my experience, however migrant musicians often pursued the opportunities for performance that abounded in this influential sector of Andalusian Islam. Music traced routes of internal migration for economic migrants and religious converts alike, travelling as they did between the urban centers featured in this article and a network of rural Islamic communities (alquerías) like the vibrant Sufi village at Orgiva, located forty miles south of Granada on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, or the Alquería de Rosales, an Islamic retreat in the town of Puebla de Don Fadrique some one hundred miles northeast of the city.

Musical performance thus brought migrant and convert musicians into sustained, ambivalent collaborations within shared spaces of prayer, sociability, and remuneration, which in turn shaped their interactions with Catholic and secular Andalusians. For that matter, my non-Muslim Andalusian field contacts invoked the Moorish past as frequently as their Muslim collaborators, mostly drawing on the language of Andalusian cultural institutions and, with varying degrees of reflexivity, leveraging this shared Islamic heritage in order to calibrate their relationships with Muslim musicians.¹⁴ It is against this background of Muslim being and belonging in Andalusia—intersectional, intersubjective, and permeated by citations of the Moorish legacy—that Muslim subjectivities emerged through musical performance.

Case Study: “Lights of Ancient Light”

On a summer’s evening in June 2013, a crowd of approximately two hundred gathers before a modest festival stage in Plaza Nueva, a public square that marks the boundary between Granada’s gleaming city center and the labyrinth of narrow cobblestone alleyways in the historical Moorish Quarter of the Albaicín. Visible in the distance, crowning a grove of cypress trees that adorns the hillside east of Plaza Nueva, are the towers of the Alhambra. The most visible, known as Torre de la Vela, appears to qualify the monument’s Islamic heritage with a cathedral bell, imported from Castile in the late fifteenth century by the victorious Catholic Monarchs, along with an anxious flurry of flags announcing the Alhambra’s current geopolitical location within four modern territories: Granada, Andalusia, Spain, and the European Union. Directly behind the stage, facing the Alhambra from below, is the Supreme Court of Andalusia, an imposing Renaissance structure replete with iron-studded doorways and grandiose Corinthian columns.

Musicians provide the soundtrack to a video projected above the stage. The protagonist wanders through spaces emblematic of Andalusia’s medieval Moorish past: now observing the florid fixtures of the Alhambra with a longing, lingering gaze, now looking out across the Strait of Gibraltar toward the Moroccan coast. A voice representing Zawi ibn Ziri, the Berber chief who founded Granada as a ṭāifa in the early eleventh century, interjects to powerfully affirm the millennial claims of his Berber dynasty:

But today, the 15th of June of 1013, at the entrance to Gharnāṭa, we will write a destiny other than our relegation to errant executioners, because our peace will be invincible, and we will create a kingdom of water and myrtle, of fertile orchards and paradises, where we will watch our children grow and our women smile. And this land, which we have won from the clutches of predators, will infuse our shadows with light: light of ancient light. . . .¹⁵

Below the video projection, a vocalist begins to sing medieval Arabic verse in modern Spanish translation to an uncanny accompaniment of Iberian, North African, West African, and Middle Eastern musical instruments: the percussive strumming of flamenco guitar mingles with the sparkling buzz of the saz, a Turkish long-necked lute, as a kamanja, or violin played with Arab technique, subtly echoes and embellishes the vocalist’s melody; the hollow patter of a flamenco cajón, or box drum, lays a complex rhythmic foundation in dialogue with the West African djembe. While the video continues to play above, two dancers emerge from the wings to lavish this multimedia production with the spectacle of bodies in motion. One dances flamenco, the other performs an historical reconstruction of Moorish dance overlaid on belly dance (raqṣ sharqī), at first moving together in joyous consort, then circling each other competitively – all the while subtly incorporating gestures from one choreography into the other. My field contacts would generally describe this music as la fusión flamenco-árabe: flamenco-Arab fusion.

At the apex of this performance, the dancers coax a Moroccan poet and professor of Arabic into center-stage for an impromptu trio. Devoid of choreography, the professor inhabits the spotlight anxiously, clinging to the professional dancers who flank him. Yet his body is garbed in the soft white djellaba (hooded robe) and bright yellow babouches (leather slippers) that so potently visualize Moroccanness, and his role has thus far been to recite medieval Hispano-Arab poetry between the musical numbers of this performance. Now, as he moves within a dense agglomeration of musical, textual, and choreographic codes emanating from both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, he elicits a riotous round of applause from the crowd. Having spoken from among the ruins of a filmic Moorish era, the voice of Zawi ibn Ziri is finally enveloped within a haze of hybrid musical aesthetics and live, fleshly presence in the performance space below the video projection. While the ambiguous figure of this Zirid Dynasty ruler haunted the stage as a specter of Granada’s medieval Moorish past, the ensemble staged him ambiguously in the present, transforming Plaza Nueva into a striking scene of Moorishness.

This performance, titled Luces de antigua luz (“Lights of Ancient Light”), formed part of the Millennial of the Kingdom of Granada: a year-long heritage festival to commemorate the city’s eleventh-century Islamic founding. The Millennial was overseen by a consortium of Spanish national, Andalusian regional, Granadan municipal, and six Andalusian provincial governments, with the Andalusian Minister of Health, Social Welfare, & Equality serving as chair. Registered with UNESCO’s Anniversary Program for the year 2012–2013 and receiving financial support from the EU’s Regional Development Fund, the festival also garnered corporate sponsorship ranging from Iberia Airlines to the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica. Representatives of the Moorish Legacy Foundation (Fundación El Legado Andalusí), a cultural organization attached to the Andalusian Ministry of Culture, worked to organize activities on the ground.

Arriving for a private tour of the Moorish Legacy Foundation’s headquarters, which at the time comprised a wing of the local Museum of Science & Industry, I was struck by an exhibit on the first floor that beckoned to visitors with recordings of Moroccan classical music. This was not an exhibit on music in al-Andalus, however, nor on any theme relating to medieval Hispano-Arab civilization, but rather a comprehensive survey of nation-states in the contemporary Arab world: demographics, political systems, currency, culture, and topography from Morocco to Oman. Here, the Moorish legacy appeared to authenticate a display of knowledge—encyclopedic knowledge intended to render the whole of Arab civilization accessible within the Foundation’s headquarters—while Moroccan classical music, widely believed to originate in medieval Iberia, provided an uncanny soundtrack that keyed visitors into the millennial prehistory of Hispano-Arab encounters behind this jarring act of surveillance.

Once the tour had officially begun, a member of the programming committee explained that the Millennial would convert Granada’s Moorish heritage into a platform for local economic and commercial interests: in fact, the consortium had earmarked the festival’s projected revenue for ambitious public works projects, from the construction of a Metro system to the revitalization of the Albaicín neighborhood.¹⁶ She emphasized, however, that the Millennial’s activities were also aimed at Arab and Muslim diplomatic partners across the Mediterranean, including Morocco in particular, through the mobilization of a shared Islamic heritage that would bind these territories into relations of exchange and cooperation.¹⁷

It appeared that the Millennial’s Moorish-themed agenda was meant to invest Granada with the diplomatic leverage of a transnational Islamic past and the timely allure of a progressive multicultural present.¹⁸ Indeed the watchword throughout the festival, ubiquitous in promotional materials and introductory speeches, was convivencia (Sp. “coexistence”). Outlined in the mid-twentieth century by Spanish philologist Américo Castro, this concept evokes a celebratory vision of coexistence among the Moorish era’s multifarious racial, religious, and political communities—often condensed into the tidy formulation las tres culturas (“the three cultures”), which refers broadly to Christians, Jews, and Muslims.¹⁹ It was in this overdetermined, festivalized context that Lights of Ancient Light and other hybrid musical performances occurred.

When the Berber chief’s presence was finally made manifest through the insertion of a hypervisibilized Moroccan body into the hybrid aesthetics of this performance, Lights of Ancient Light generated a scene of embodiment and performativity in which Muslims were interpellated as instantiations of Andalusian social ideals, economic imperatives, and diplomatic agendas—that is, assimilated into a neoliberal system of capital, regionalism, and diplomacy which the figure of the medieval multicultural Moor effectively indexed. Yet the Zirid’s indignant opening narration had been laced with potent allusions to exile, exclusion, and erasure (“we will write a destiny other than our relegation to errant executioners”), while studies by Rogozen-Soltar et al. had revealed an atmosphere of anxious, xenophobic responses to both Islam and migration which my fieldwork seemed to confirm.

It was during an autumn revival of Lights of Ancient Light, in fact, that Andalusian media were covering a controversial proposal to reinstall barbed wire along the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla, where the Spanish national government was attempting to control migration from across the Strait. The first set of cuchillas (“blades”), installed in 2005 and removed in 2007 under pressure from human rights organizations, appeared constantly in the local media. Many reports featured images of the deep red gashes that the cuchillas had torn in dark African skin, lending well-worn political considerations a gruesome ethical immediacy.²⁰

At the center of this controversy were migrants from West Africa, mostly young men from Senegal and Nigeria. Yet the border itself lay restless within the contested territory of Melilla: this Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Morocco, like its counterpart Ceuta some three hundred miles to the west, troubled Hispano-Moroccan relations with the vestiges of Spanish colonialism and an influx of primarily Moroccan migrants from across the Strait. West Africans rendered the border visible in their sensational attempts to cross it, crowding together into desperate bands of hundreds and scaling the fences en masse, some straddling the top just beyond arm’s reach of the border patrol. Their presence in Andalusia, however, which includes vibrant West African social collectives and cultural organizations, was often reduced in the media to those moments of poverty and abjection in which young black Africans became fixtures on street corners, begging for spare euros and peddling miscellaneous wares to passersby.²¹

Lights of Ancient Light is instructive in this respect as well, as it reveals still further complexities in the demographics of Andalusian Islam, along with the expression and reception of Muslim subjectivities through musical performance. While the Moroccan professor was compelled to inhabit center-stage for impromptu dancing, a Senegalese musician continued to play djembe and darbūka (West African and Middle Eastern drums, respectively) in the background. Moussa, who identified as Muslim, had arrived in Granada from Dakar fifteen years prior. After securing documentation and working periodically in construction, he connected with other Senegalese musicians to found the social and musical collective Roots Africa Percussion, hosting workshops on West African drumming and speaking at public forums on migrant rights.

Moussa’s perspectives on music, migration, and the Moorish legacy, discussed below, encoded robust claims to livable space, however my impression during the concert was of a black African voice effectively subsumed under the Arab and Mediterranean valences that only a dancing Moroccan body could lend the medieval Moor. While West Africans were sensationally visible astride the border fences at Melilla, on the Andalusian festival stage they were sights unseen. This maverick performance of Moorishness thus raised a number of urgent ethical questions, only to reinscribe them within the festivalized framework of the Millennial. And yet my Muslim field contacts appeared to thrive in the interstices within the Moorish legacy that heritage festivals like the Millennial opened up, continually entering into and exiting discursive fissures as they sought to revise and reframe its significance. In the following section, I engage with postcolonial formulations of hybridity to theorize the emergence of Muslim subjectivity within these crowded, contested, and deeply ambivalent scenes of musical performance.

Hybridity in Moorish Musical Performance

The rhetorical antithesis featured in this article’s title is adapted from that of Frantz Fanon’s influential treatise Black Skin, White Masks (1952).²² Fanon’s title was a compelling shorthand for his socio-psychological diagnosis of colonialism, wherein colonized people of color experienced their subjectivities vis-à-vis the ideals and institutions of European colonizers. Following his inspiration, I have set the images of Muslim voices and Moorish masks alongside each other to evoke an intimate, ambivalent interplay between daily experiences of Islam in Andalusia and the complex of Andalusian social discourses, cultural policies, and institutional agendas that refracted Muslim subjectivities through the region’s medieval Islamic past. I focus particularly on a special case: those moments in which Muslim musicians emerged from work, play, and prayer to voice sophisticated claims to livable space in Andalusian cities by manipulating musical codes of past and present, self and other, Islamic and Andalusian.²³

In this respect, I invoke Fanon closer to the point at which Homi Bhabha begins to read his work, cautiously following Bhabha to “the edge of things,” or into that liminal space of hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence that he saw opening up at the extremes of Fanon’s maverick thinking.²⁴ I describe the musical performances below as hybrid, in part, to place my research in dialogue with this tradition of postcolonial critique, in the process also hoping to join conversations on hybridity among scholars in Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Ethnomusicology.

In Bhabha’s well-known formulation, hybridity begins from the premise that identities are mutable and processual. It also names a condition, exemplified by the fraught cultural encounters of colonialism and globalization, in which identities emerge through tandem, entangled articulations of difference—difference produced in its very articulation, so that subjects mutually constitute and indefinitely defer one another in “a complex, on-going negotiation.”²⁵ In this respect, hybridity usefully describes the condition in which Muslim musicians expressed and experienced their subjectivities in contemporary urban Andalusia. Muslim difference, as an agglomeration of religious, racial, and cultural valences, was constantly articulated in moments of contact between Muslim economic migrants, religious converts, and Catholic or secular Andalusians who gathered around the region’s medieval Moorish past. Muslim subjectivity was hybrid, that is, in the sense of being generated through an endless series of tandem, entangled articulations of difference within a liminal space between Islamic and Andalusian. I also suggest that this liminal space—crowded, contested, and deeply ambivalent—constituted a “third” space within which my field contacts fractured Andalusian civic discourse and outlined alternative models of Muslim subjectivity, just as Bhabha suggests that minoritarian subjects might forge alternative, potentially subversive identities in those provocative moments between self and other that inspire his political project.²⁶

Moroccan migrant musicians, for their part, emerged as Muslim others in the process of performing musical repertoires that indexed genealogical descendancy from the Moriscos, or those medieval Iberian Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism and then expelled en masse following the Christian Reconquest.²⁷ Significant numbers of Moriscos fled to northern Morocco in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, establishing distinctive “Andalusian” communities there.²⁸ Many of my Moroccan field contacts invoked this Morisco genealogy by way of reframing their migration into contemporary Andalusia as, effectively, repatriation into Moorish al-Andalus.  

Usama, a Moroccan musician, luthier, educator, and entrepreneur, explained over tea in his workshop that the lower Albaicín, or that section of Granada’s historical Moorish Quarter evoking the North African souq, seemed familiar to him upon his arrival from Tétouan two decades prior. He began by citing the architecture, the climate, and eventually the music, noting that Moroccan classical repertoires (often the “Arab” component of flamenco-Arab fusion projects) had their origins in the resplendent courts of medieval al-Andalus—the sonorous legacy of Granada’s Moorish past, preserved in exile across the Strait of Gibraltar following the expulsions of the Reconquest.²⁹

Explaining that his ancestry was “of al-Andalus” on his mother’s side, Usama concluded our visit by telling the story of meeting his wife in Granada: a story of “two loves,” as he put it, since he discovered her precisely “in these surroundings, enchanted by the Alhambra and the Albaicín.”³⁰ Framed in this way, Usama’s musical activities generated a liminal, livable space between past and present, Andalusian self and Islamic other by performing narratives of affective attachment to particular Andalusian locales, genealogical attachment to historical Andalusian communities, and aesthetic attachment to Moroccan musical repertoires believed to originate in Andalusia’s medieval Islamic past.

Religious converts inhabited this space as well. In fact, many convert musicians outlined ardent connections to Morisco communities, in particular, though they reformulated these connections in a narrative of social and spiritual affinities rather than genealogical descendancy. When I met British convert Ahmed in a tearoom near the Grand Mosque of Granada, he was composing a song inspired by an Islamic devotional poem discovered within the walls of an old Morisco home. Typical of Morisco manuscripts, which hailed from a time of Reconquest and Inquisition, the poem’s reverent praise of the Prophet appeared in the covert language of Aljamiado, a blend of Spanish and Arabic transliterated in Arabic script. Introducing a performance with his Sufi fusion ensemble on a spring evening in 2014, seated in the gardens of the Grand Mosque of Granada, Ahmed dedicated the song to “all those Moriscos who suffered here and could not practice their religion in public.”³¹

A music video produced later that year begins by showing Ahmed in the Alhambra and the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba as the Morisco poem is sung to a plaintive melody, yet following a pause in the music and time-lapse imagery of sunrise in Granada, the video concludes with al-Fiyachiya: a devotional poem of the same historical period as the Morisco manuscript, but penned by a Sufi mystic of Tétouan and immensely popular in contemporary Morocco. The ensemble having expanded at this point to include flamenco guitar and flute, Ahmed abandons the shadowed corridors of historical monuments for the sunlit streets of the Moorish Quarter, where he embraces fellow converts, speaks with vendors at the outdoor market, and teaches children to play music in a local tearoom. Exchanging the tattered garb of the clandestine, persecuted Morisco for that of the vital, sociable Muslim convert—and subtly intercalating this convert presence into Moroccan genealogical discourse via hybrid, highly intertextual aesthetics—Ahmed, too, claimed livable space in Andalusia through musical performance of the region’s Moorish past.

In a phone conversation some years later, reflecting on Lights of Ancient Light in retrospect, Senegalese musician Moussa marked out yet another route of affiliation with the Moorish legacy. He once again invoked the Morisco narrative, though not by naming the Moriscos explicitly. Prompted to discuss the Moorish legacy, Moussa instead suggested that the musical practices of Gitanos, or Spanish Roma, “are very similar to Senegalese music.” Citing the jaleo, or the verbal exclamations of ¡olé! and such that characterize flamenco, he remembered at length the flamenco styles that appeared alongside Hispano-Arab repertoires in Lights of Ancient Light and explained how they reminded him of Senegalese music. He concluded this extensive answer to my question about the Moorish legacy by dwelling on the West African percussion instruments that he performed with Roots Africa Percussion, beyond the scope of flamenco-Arab fusion projects, assuring me: “I have them with me. I have them in my house.”³²

In effect, Moussa shifted focus from the Moorish legacy’s Arab and Mediterranean valences, emphasizing flamenco over Moroccan classical components of flamenco-Arab fusion and, in the process, outlining affiliations between Senegalese migrants and the disenfranchised Romani community so often credited with flamenco’s early development. Connecting with the Moorish legacy in this way, Moussa was subtly intercalating his Senegalese experience of music, migration, and Islam into a narrative of racial and musical hybridity that has structured Andalusian discourse on flamenco since the early twentieth century and which continued to shape the practice of flamenco-Arab fusion in the early twenty-first. Circulating among Muslim and non-Muslim field contacts alike, as well as in the Millennial’s promotional materials, this narrative posited that a significant number of Moriscos evaded mass expulsion, fleeing not across the Strait of Gibraltar but rather into the marginalized Gitano communities of rural Andalusia, where their sustained, clandestine influence on Gitano musical practices left traces of Moorish aesthetics in the incipient repertoire of flamenco.³³

One could argue that hybrid musical performances like Lights of Ancient Light, setting the Moorish legacy into play, enabled Muslim musicians to formulate subtle, intersecting critiques of Andalusian social and political histories while claiming livable zones within contemporary Andalusian territory. I also suggest, however, that economic migrants and religious converts alike performed Muslim subjectivities within the framework of a Moorish legacy that continually deferred their presence. That Andalusian civic discourse explicitly constructed the Andalusian self as shaped by Islam; and that the Moorish legacy cast Muslim difference into the very heart of Andalusian civic identity as a matter of institutional agendas, cultural policies, and Hispano-Moroccan diplomatic relations, makes the case of Muslim subjectivity in Andalusia especially apt for posing difficult theoretical questions around hybridity.

Morisco narratives circulated alongside historicizing slurs such as moro (Sp. “Moor”), which also tactically conflated past and present in order to invest contemporary Muslims with Moorishness. Over coffee with María, a non-Muslim field contact from one of my language classes who regularly traveled to Morocco on business, I mentioned my fieldwork with Moroccan migrants and a concert of Hispano-Arab music that I had attended at the University of Granada the night before—at which point María lowered her voice to inform me that los moros were quietly bringing Islam back to the city.³⁴ Performances of affective, aesthetic, and genealogical attachment to Andalusian territory among Muslim musicians, signifying within the ambivalent discursive space of the Moorish legacy, were easily resemanticized as aggressive claims to the region’s vast Islamic inheritance.³⁵

Recourse to the Moorish legacy, particularly among Moroccan musicians, was further complicated by the history of Spanish colonialism in Morocco: for economic migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, their grandparents had been colonial subjects under Spanish (and French) rule in the early twentieth, living in a Protectorate that lasted from 1912 to 1956.³⁶ As Eric Calderwood and Susan Martin-Márquez have shown, the Spanish colonial project thrived on claims of cultural affinity between Spain and Morocco, often articulated by invoking the Moorish legacy.³⁷ Andalusia’s regional heritage effectively sustained these claims, not least in the impassioned regionalist manifestos of the early twentieth century, where intellectuals like Blas Infante (1885–1936) affirmed deep-seated historical, genealogical, and cultural connections between southern Spain and Morocco even as they decried Andalusia’s political disenfranchisement by the central Spanish government. Addressing a notoriously restless Andalusian proletariat as latter-day Moriscos, Infante and others conjured the racial hybridity, religious difference, and historical oppression of the region’s Moorish past in order to invigorate Andalusian demands for independence from Spain.³⁸

Suppressing Andalusian regionalism, framers of Spanish foreign policy would nevertheless rationalize the colonial project in Morocco with citations of this shared Hispano-Moroccan cultural heritage, in the process converting Andalusian cultural discourse into an intermediary between the two territories.³⁹ Both flamenco and Moroccan classical music were implicated in this circuitous colonial gesture. Infante, for his part, had devoted an entire treatise to Andalusian music, arguing that flamenco and Moroccan classical music derived from the same source—Moorish Andalusia—and had developed in parallel on either side of the Strait over the ensuing centuries: flamenco among those Moriscos who took refuge with Andalusian Gitanos, and Moroccan classical music among those Moriscos who fled to North Africa.⁴⁰ As Calderwood has shown, Spanish officials proposed to revive Moroccan classical music within the Protectorate on similar grounds, tracing the repertoire to medieval Andalusia and mobilizing the notion of “a unique, hereditary claim” to this musical heritage—shared by Spaniards and Moroccans, if supposedly neglected by Moroccans prior to the Protectorate—as a platform for intervening in Moroccan musical life: educating and inculcating Moroccan musicians and listeners alike, and ultimately installing an ambivalent reverence for Andalusian culture into the core of modern Moroccan identity.⁴¹

Following Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s, nearly two decades after the Protectorate’s dissolution, an incipient Andalusian government would incorporate language and ideology from these Protectorate-era initiatives into its own cultural policy, and it was precisely at this time that Andalusian flamenco musicians began to collaborate with Moroccan conservatory ensembles on flamenco-Arab fusion projects—generally with zealous institutional patronage from both sides of the Strait.⁴² Indeed, the complex complicity between the Moorish-themed cultural discourses of Andalusian regionalism and Spanish colonialism continued to reverberate at Andalusian heritage festivals and cultural tourism events as of my fieldwork.

Before leaving the Moorish Legacy Foundation’s headquarters, I was referred to a special issue of the foundation’s quarterly magazine, in this case devoted to the Millennial of the Kingdom of Granada. In her Introduction, the foundation’s Director celebrated flamenco-Arab fusion in resonant terms, identifying the aims of both the Millennial generally and of its fusion concerts particularly as that of “setting our common history with Morocco to music.”⁴³ Anticipating that the Millennial’s musical programming would enjoy the same enthusiastic reception as previous foundation concerts, Martín Jiménez described a 1997 collaboration between the Andalusian Orchestra of Tétouan and unidentified flamenco musicians that had taken place in Marrakesh, proclaiming: “This music was understood immediately and naturally by the multitude that congregated there, as though they were children of the same mother. Andalusians and Moroccans spoke a common language that evening.”⁴⁴

On one hand, musical performances of Moorishness enabled Muslim migrants to reframe their migration as repatriation and to claim livable space in Andalusia, while on the other it potentially incorporated them into narratives of cultural hybridity that Spanish foreign policy had woven into the fabric of colonial oppression and which the foundational texts of Andalusian regionalism had bequeathed to Andalusian civic discourse. In that light, it is worth considering that Bhabha’s formulation of hybridity has been subjected to intense contestation in diverse disciplinary contexts, often on the grounds of its potential to reinscribe hybrid subjects within hegemonic frameworks of cultural difference.⁴⁵

Robert Young has noted that hybridity bears traces of nineteenth-century social science, which adapted the term from biological contexts and pressed it into the service of problematic racial discourses that were developing along the lines of social Darwinism. Young argues that contemporary formulations of hybridity have failed to outrun this dubious discursive legacy—this “mantle of the past”—and cautions that “without the emphasis on the active, disjunctive moments or movements of homogenization and diasporization, it can easily be objected that hybridization assumes, as was often the case with the nineteenth-century theorists of race, the prior existence of pure, fixed, and separate antecedents.”⁴⁶

Ethnomusicologists have grappled with similar concerns about hybridity, in this case arising from the valences of mixture and multiplicity that often appear under hybridity’s name in the World Music recording industry and in cultural heritage management around non-Western musical practices. Discussing the concept’s circulation in the administrative strategies of the Western metropolis, Martin Stokes has argued that celebrations of musical hybridity convert the cultural difference of migrants and minorities into an index of the city’s capacity to foster, regulate, and assimilate the sounds of minoritarian cultural encounter. Incorporated into stable multicultural regimes, the diverse musical styles and fluctuating cultural identities that reverberate in crowded, contested urban spaces thus become the soundtrack to quaint “ethnic neighborhoods” that sustain “the marketing of ‘global cities.’”⁴⁷

Subjecting civic celebrations of musical hybridity to critique, Stokes and others have demonstrated how the concept’s subversive theoretical potential can succumb to the economic imperatives, political blindspots, and rhetorical misfires of neoliberal regimes that operate under the sign of the mixed, the multiple, and the multicultural.⁴⁸ This offers a certain critical perspective on the performance of Muslim subjectivities at Andalusian heritage festivals, insofar as it prompts us to consider whether flamenco-Arab fusion’s maverick musical play on Islamic and Andalusian, past and present, self and other was subject to stabilization by an Andalusian civic discourse that appeared more concerned with celebrating the fabled figure of the multicultural Moor than with hearing the political claims of contemporary migrants and religious converts. Yet Andalusian civic discourse was itself unstable, strategically deferring regional identity through invocations of racial, religious, and cultural difference in Andalusia’s own medieval past, so that critiques of hybridity formulated in this way, applied in this case, would blur the supple ethnographic contours and diffuse political consequences that characterized Muslim musical performance in the field.

Critiquing hybridity in a different key, scholars like Catherine Appert have shifted the critical terrain from discourse analysis to ethnographic case studies that appear to exhaust the concept’s descriptive potential as well. Referring to one network of hip-hop musicians in Senegal, for example, Appert explains that “international rappers understand hip hop as always already indigenous,” framing it as African diasporic music so that hip-hop codes as “a musical returnee, an encounter with sameness.”⁴⁹ In that case, Appert argues, hybridity “reinscribes the limitations of western-centric models of cultural globalization that don’t necessarily account for how music makers understand themselves in relation to a globally interconnected world.”⁵⁰ Appert’s provocative case study, pointing beyond the descriptive bounds of hybridity, offers an instructive counterpoint to the case of Muslim musical performance in Andalusia.

At first glance, in fact, the language of international hip-hop musicians in Senegal seems to resonate with a narrative that has characterized flamenco-Arab fusion since its inception: discussing the early fusion project Macama Jonda (“Deep Encounter,” 1983), which served as a reference for many of my field contacts, an anonymous member of the Orchestra of the Tétouan Conservatory explained that “for the first time in five hundred years [i.e. since the Christian Reconquest], we are working to connect what was already connected.”⁵¹ This Moroccan musician appeared to describe their musical practice as reinstantiating a sameness that time and politics had disrupted, rather than proposing a hybrid of two musical styles. In the same interview, however, the project’s director described Macama Jonda as demonstrating “the possibility of encounter between people and between communities, may it last forever and serve as an inspiration to all.”⁵²

Through this language of historical connections and cultural encounter, the musicians were articulating a localized and deeply ambivalent conception of Hispano-Arab music, culture, and history that continued to shape flamenco-Arab fusion three decades later. While Appert’s field contacts were effectively “doing away with hybridity’s requisite difference to emphasize sameness and historicity,”⁵³ it was important to my field contacts that their musical manipulations of sameness and historicity were, in fact, facilitating cultural encounters—“deep” encounters marked by common origins and prior contact. These musicians were indeed bringing two things together, even if producing them in the process: two styles, two cultures, two communities—described by musicians and institutional spokespersons alike as emanating from las dos orillas (“the two shores”) of the Mediterranean Sea—within the framework of a Moorish legacy that described these cultural formations as historically, philologically, and genealogically related. It was in this liminal space between cultural difference and historical sameness that the musicians artfully conflated the origins of flamenco and Moroccan classical music; of migrants, converts, and Moriscos; of Islamic and Andalusian, self and other without however losing the political potency of their identification as Muslims, as migrants, as converts, or as minorities.

Performing Muslim subjectivity as open yet intelligible, always in process and yet always in play, musicians created fissures within Andalusian civic discourse around the Moorish legacy, which in turn opened possibilities for revision, realignment, and resistance such as the performance of Moroccan migration as Moorish repatriation. This also posed the risk that Muslim subjectivities would be incorporated into Andalusian discourses of cultural difference that maintained unequal distributions of social, economic, and political power among stable formations of Muslims and non-Muslims, migrants and citizens, leaving the musicians vulnerable to exclusion, surveillance, and disenfranchisement offstage. Or perhaps, tracing the ethnographic contours more closely, the risk was that musicians would sustain a discourse of Andalusian regional identity that thrived on the maverick interweavings of Islamic and Andalusian, past and present, self and other which their hybrid musical performances enacted. In fact, this volatile field of diffuse and multifarious outcomes is precisely what an agile, situational application of hybridity should allow us to name and to interrogate. Ultimately, I propose applying the framework of hybridity to Muslim musical performance in Andalusia because it performs useful descriptive and theoretical work, approximating the condition of intimate, ambivalent entanglement with Andalusian regional identity that my Muslim field contacts continually held open by invoking the Moorish legacy. In the following section, I suggest that the study of music and Islam in Andalusia requires further exploration of hybridity’s temporal aspects as well.

Hauntology in Moorish Musical Performance

It will be clear by now that Lights of Ancient Light and the Muslim subjectivities that it generated were performative of a time other than the present; other, for that matter, than the past. They emerged in the fabled, festivalized time of the Moorish legacy: neither past nor present, haunted by figures of medieval Berber chieftains, multicultural Moors, and persecuted Moriscos. The absence of these figures from contemporary Granada suffused the performance as a lavish, living presence—producing subjectivities, indexing anxieties, embodying claims to viable space, and realigning identities across social, historical, and geopolitical borders.

With this distinctive Moorish temporality in mind, I argue that scenes of Moorishness invite us to reconsider the disjunctive moment that Bhabha identified as interrupting the ostensibly seamless flow of Western modernity over time, and in the process, opening additional possibilities for resistance—or reinscription.⁵⁴ If the opening of fissures within Andalusian civic discourse involves the resurgence of figures from a troubled, unresolved Moorish past, and if these figures from the past shape expressions and experiences of Muslim subjectivity in the present—with urgent ethical implications for economic migrants and religious converts—then the study of music and Islam in Andalusia constitutes a compelling case for joining hauntology and hybridity around ethnographic fieldwork through a localized, situational reading of the postcolonial caesura.

In the process, I offer an alternative perspective on hauntology in Hispanic Studies and Spanish Cultural Studies, where scholars have long recognized that we cannot effectively describe Muslim subjectivities in Andalusia particularly, or in Spain generally, within traditional ontological frameworks of past and present, presence and absence, being and non-being. While these previous studies of Islam in Spain have invoked hauntology, I suggest that sustained considerations of embodiment and performativity allow us to weave hauntological thinking more deeply into the fabric of hybridity—ultimately, with the aim of more fully engaging the interpretive and political potential of both concepts.⁵⁵

In research on Moroccan migration in Spain, Daniela Flesler has applied hauntology to interrogate the Moorish legacy’s dubious social and political consequences.⁵⁶ Writing from a largely psychoanalytic perspective, Flesler diagnoses a complex of socio-psychological anxieties among Spaniards—indexed by recurring discursive slippages between “Moor” and “Moroccan” in a variety of “fictional and social texts”—arguing that they fuel the distinctive, historically-inflected forms of racism that characterize Spanish responses to Moroccan migrants. Flesler argues that such anxious iterations of the Moorish legacy should be interpreted as ghostly, insofar as they populate contemporary Hispano-Moroccan social experience with figures of a troubled, unresolved Moorish past:

As in the case of Marx’s ghosts analyzed by Derrida, in which no disavowal has been able to make them completely disappear, Spaniards’ difficulties with Moroccan immigrants, and their perception of them as ‘Moors,’ becomes a symptom of the ghostly slippage between the present and past they produce, and the unsolved historical trauma they awake.⁵⁷

It is also within this hauntological framework, however, that Flesler offers a more hopeful reading of the situation, proposing that encounters between Spaniards and Moroccan migrants, filtered through the Moorish legacy and recurring over time, will function like the Freudian dream that recurs with a purpose:

Contemporary Spanish responses to Moroccan immigration can be read . . . as elements in a transitional working through process, where we can see symptomatic traces not only of an unresolved trauma but also of a nation’s effort at trying to come to terms with its ghosts; attempting, not always successfully, to differentiate past and present, to get past its past in order to inhabit its present.⁵⁸

I suggest several ways in which Muslim musical performance in Andalusia, as exemplified by Lights of Ancient Light, might provide fresh perspectives on Flesler’s important contributions. While she recognizes, for example, the diverse histories of migration and the complex negotiations of Spanish nationalism that occur at the level of regional autonomy, the thrust of Flesler’s arguments ultimately subsumes regional differences under the rubric of Spaniards, the Spanish nation, and a Spanish historical consciousness that anxiously disavows Moroccan migrants in order to quell an Islamophobic “fear of invasion.” This is, Flesler argues, an impulse “to protect a presumably uncontaminated identity from immigrants,” which regions as diverse as Catalonia, Galicia, Valencia, and the Basque Country have inherited from a conservative, militantly Catholic tradition of Spanish historiography.⁵⁹ Andalusian regional discourse on the Moorish legacy, in contrast, appeared very often to interpellate migrants, Muslims, and other minorities as indices of an Islamic past that coded not as an historical trauma to be contained or dispelled, but rather as an invaluable source of cultural capital to be celebrated, assimilated, and exploited.

In addition, while Flesler interprets the Moorish legacy as constituting a disruption of the “dominant national fiction” that shapes majoritarian discourse among non-Muslim Spaniards—a fiction of “pure and uncontaminated ‘Spanish’ origin”⁶⁰—Lights of Ancient Light confirms that Andalusian responses to Islam and migration were complicated by intimate, intersubjective negotiations of the Moorish legacy among economic migrants, religious converts, and non-Muslim Andalusians as they invoked Andalusia’s Islamic heritage in tandem. Rather than proposing to examine how the Spanish nation works through historical anxieties vis-à-vis Moroccan migrants, we might wonder how individuals, communities, and institutions, performing an agglomeration of racial, ethnic, and religious identities at the intersections of Spanish national and autonomous regional discourse, tend to mutually interpellate one another through entangled citations of the Moorish legacy.

In doing so, we would find ourselves once again considering the concept of hybridity, which Flesler also invokes. Describing the Festival of Moors and Christians in Alcoy, one of many annual reenactments of the Christian Reconquest in Spain, Flesler interprets rhetorical and performative excesses in the festival’s activities as “attempts to reinforce a division between Moors and Christians into mutually exclusive categories.” Of course, these anxious attempts to delineate self and other inevitably fail, in which case “the overwhelming presence of this excess becomes an index of an underlying doubt.”⁶¹ For Flesler, hybridity names a discursive and socio-psychological mechanism that reveals a structural ambivalence: “Moorish and Christian identities coexist . . . in that ‘third space’ theorized by Bhabha, an ‘in-betweenness’ which consists of neither the simple separation of the two groups as strangers and opposites, nor of their homogenization.”⁶² Capturing the distinctive, historicizing ambivalence that characterizes a wide range of public Spanish responses to Moroccan migration, this conception of hybridity nevertheless cancels out the noise, as it were, that musical examples like Lights of Ancient Light might help us to recover.

If flamenco-Arab fusion inspires us to consider the Moorish legacy as generating scenes of interaction and interpellation; and if it compels us to consider the Moorish legacy’s social and political consequences as refracted through simultaneous, entangled articulations of this medieval Islamic heritage among Andalusian civic institutions, economic migrants, and religious converts, then we should seek to interrogate not only those slippages and excesses that reveal an ambivalent discursive field in which Muslim subjectivities are invoked and dispelled, but also those hybrid, haunted temporalities that generate ambivalent performative moments in which Muslim subjectivities might be revised, realigned, or reinscribed.

In the conclusion to The Location of Culture, dwelling on temporal aspects of hybridity, Bhabha deconstructs the ideal of seamless, progressive self-reinvention over time which constitutes an “essential gesture of Western modernity,” locating within it a mutual and indefinite deferral of subjectivity between self and other.⁶³ It is in this alternative, belated temporality that Bhabha locates hybridity’s potential for resistance, as it “opens up an interruptive time-lag in the ‘progressive’ myth of modernity, and enables the diasporic and the postcolonial to be represented.”⁶⁴ I suggest provisionally that in scenes of Moorishness, Andalusian civic discourse invoked the Moorish legacy within the framework of modern Western temporality—tactically inflected with historicizing citations of the Moorish legacy. This was, in effect, an attempt to weave the region’s medieval Islamic past seamlessly and progressively into the economic imperatives, institutional agendas, and diplomatic platforms of its neoliberal present, all of which required Andalusian regionalism to code as interreligious yet intelligible, pluralistic yet self-same. In the process, this celebratory Moorish multiculturalism folded the Muslim present inhabited by economic migrants and religious converts into Andalusian historical consciousness, divesting Muslims of their contemporaneity and reinscribing their political claims. As for non-Muslim Andalusians and Andalusian civic institutions, it is also worth considering that scenes of Moorishness obscured ethical considerations of the other with historical introspections on the self.

Muslim musical performances, however, invoked the Moorish legacy as well, effectively repeating these narratives of a pluralistic Andalusian modernity at a distance and redistributing their meaning among the musicians, in the process creating a caesura within the time of Andalusian regional identity. In this way, musicians entered into a haunted, hybrid space in which the boundaries between past and present, Islamic and Andalusian, self and other were breached, allowing for realignments of people and practices across Andalusian time and space. Performing embodied connections to the Moriscos, in particular, whose presence in Andalusian territory was interrupted by forced conversion and mass expulsion, economic migrants and religious converts invested the social, spiritual, and aesthetic practices of their communities with the authenticating allure of the Moorish legacy—or that curious corner of the Moorish legacy in which the Moriscos indexed Muslim difference as structured precisely by their absence, an absence that rendered Islam covertly present within their erstwhile spaces of work, play, and prayer. Still, the caesura was incomplete. Or rather, the curious quasi-caesura of the Moorish legacy sustained Andalusian civic discourse precisely by interrupting it.

Conclusion

Hispanists tend to agree that the Moorish legacy exerts significant influence on expressions and experiences of Islam in Southern Spain; scholars in Mediterranean Studies, and Middle East & North African Studies also seem to agree that the Moorish legacy exerts influence on expressions and experiences of Islam in the Mediterranean more broadly. In the case of Andalusia, this followed not only from the frequent articulation of the Moorish legacy’s narrative contents in festivalized contexts like the Millennial, but also from the multifarious ways in which this historical narrative permeated everyday time, space, and experience—a phenomenon that Barbara Fuchs has interpreted, in the context of Golden Age literature and Early Modern formations of Spanish national identity, as constituting a “Moorish habitus.”⁶⁵

Musical performances of Moorishness in contemporary urban Andalusia, as exemplified by Lights of Ancient Light, revealed Muslim subjectivities to be hybrid, haunted, and indeed phenomenally citational of a Moorish habitus that preceded and outran the musicians themselves. This habitus was a quotidian prehistory of Moorish experience which, in this case, sustained the distinctive social, cultural, and diplomatic discourses of Andalusian regional autonomy, and within which economic migrants and religious converts continually opened fissures through the heightened facticity of bodies in motion and voices raised in song. Muslim subjectivities therefore emerged not only in moments, but in scenes of Moorishness. These living, breathing scenes gathered the sights and sounds emanating from musicians’ bodies into a dynamic intersubjective relationship with those of embodied participants, who themselves gathered previous encounters with the Moorish legacy into assemblages of looking, listening, clapping, dancing bodies to populate the “thither” side of performativity, as Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick have it in their discussion of the topic.⁶⁶

Parker and Sedgwick propose that analysis of the speech act, especially in the wake of work by Derrida and Judith Butler, requires a serious exploration of the “populous and contested scene in which the role of silent or implied witnesses . . . or the quality and structuration of the bonds that unite auditors or link them to speakers, bears as much weight as do the particular speech acts of supposed individual speech agents.”⁶⁷ Applying this analytical imperative to Muslim musical performance in Andalusia, we might also consider that the Andalusian regional government has inscribed the Moorish legacy into architectural monuments, historical neighborhoods, horticultural practices, and the like, often with the sanction of international bodies such as UNESCO. Thus one could argue that the bonds uniting musicians, festivalgoers, and festival organizers were robustly and effusively physical. In addition to distributing their iterability through embodied performers and witnesses, I suggest that musical performances of Moorishness accrued their iterability from the built structures and physical environments within which they occurred.

Far from complete, I hope that this theoretical outline will nevertheless inspire further conversation around the Moorish legacy and its phenomenal impact on race, religion, heritage, and mobility both within and beyond Andalusia. Ultimately, the musical performances of Muslim subjectivity that I witnessed—intersectional, intersubjective, and deeply ambivalent—were orbiting around the Moorish legacy as moons around a planet, exerting and receiving diffuse but undeniable influence. The musicians, festivalgoers, and festival organizers participating in these maverick scenes of Moorishness were trafficking in time, difference, and desire, performing the Moorish past as they positioned themselves and those around them in the present. All the while, they were marking unknown lines of flight into the future.