TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

For a long time, colonial modernity has tried to rehabilitate Muslims with “moderate” Islam to repress the “radical” potential in their culture. Tariq Ali’s Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree problematizes this crisis in an Andalusian story. Andalusia has been revisited since its fall in 1492. Squeezed between philia and phobia, Andalusia is either de-orientalized by nostalgic counter-narrations coming from the Global South and East, or it is under the influence of re-Westernization, epitomized by recent anti-immigration sentiment in the Global North. Does it make Andalusia an impossible state, then? Against modernist “nation in becoming” or postmodernist transcendental green nationalism projects, Andalusia, nevertheless, will become a decolonized option as an intercultural plurinational state in this article. Islam has been in a defensive position against the West and modernity. It is now time to come forward with its epistemologies and stop trying to persuade the West. It is time to “write what we want” and “change the interlocutor”. Its convivencia, dhimma, ülfet, and cyclical history will decolonize modernist myths of democracy, secularism, and linear historiography, respectively.