Iberian Moorings

"Iberian Moorings is a truly illuminating journey through the history of a cultural construct whose ramifications reach well beyond the scope of either Medieval, or Near Eastern Studies. Through his erudite and highly readable text, Professor Ross Brann portrays the medieval Islamic world of the Mediterranean basin as a fascinating landscape of cultural intersections, economic cooperation and competing ideological and political discourses, which reverberate in diverse identity-building narratives to this day."—Bulletin of Spanish Studies

"The conclusion, a masterful converging of two centuries of scrutinizing al-Andalus and Sepharad, is a compendium that shows the breadth (and potential pitfalls) of ideological possibility in these terms alongside their capacity to embrace evolving methodological approaches amid shifting disciplinary boundaries...Iberian Moorings is much broader than the sum of its interwoven studies, and by innovating even while acknowledging the dangerous allure contained within the ideas of al-Andalus and Sepharad, Brann honors the rigorous and thoughtful approach to the study of these ideas."—AJS Reviews

"[A]n enticing contribution to the understanding of why the Iberian Peninsula during the period of Islamic rule has become a special, even exceptional, place for different groups of people who have looked at it from different perspectives...[T]his is a book that deserves to be read by those who work on Andalusi matters, as it offers a balanced, thought-provoking, and firmly grounded approach to the roots of the enduring appeal of al-Andalus and Sefarad."—Revista Hispánica Moderna

"Iberian Moorings constitutes an original and compelling contribution to several disciplines that have woefully divided scholarship on Islamic al-Andalus from that of Hebrew Sefarad, and both from the bulk of scholarship on Christian Spain and western Europe. The study is the first of which I am aware to offer a full, diachronic and multivalenced investigation of the long-nurtured belief of Andalusi Muslim and Jewish elites in their cultural superiority and uniqueness, and the afterlife of that belief into our own times."—Susan Einbinder, University of Connecticut